A Closed Door...

All last week I did all I could to score a cheap pair of tickets to see Rush at the Concord Pavilion. I'm a huge Rush fan. I remember hearing my friend's older brother play albums like Exit...Stage Left and 2112 during Dungeons and Dragons marathons in the early 1980s and when I caught them for the first time in 1990. Rush goes back, one of those bands like U2 or Pink Floyd. Even though I'd distanced myself from their last couple of studio albums, I've held the band close to my heart (pun intended, I guess). Anyway, as the band rolled through, I was determined to see them without paying the exhorbitant face values on the tickets ($35 lawn seats? c'mon...) I scoured craigslist and eBay, nearly scoring several times. Thursday night at eleven pm, someone in my hometown posted two tickets for nearly the price of one. I e-mailed the seller and asked to be e-mailed. Woke up the next morning and nothing. Called my wife from work and nothing. E-mailed later in the day and nothing. And then something awesome happened - a co-worker offloaded a pair of tickets to see the A's play the Angels at the Oakland Coliseum. Only after accepting those seats did I find out that the seller had contacted me twice and my wife had not checked our second e-mail file. So, I missed Rush. Thought about them a lot during the game, too. It did help that the next morning, I checked the tour's setlist (it does not change an iota) and I saw that the band really played several second-tier songs from their back catalogue and nearly the entire new album. The only highlight would have been 1978's Circumstances from the Hemispheres album. How many times must we hear Tom Sawyer?
With that door shut, of course, another did open and I spent the best time of the summer watching my team rally in the bottom of the 8th inning with five runs to beat the first-place Angels. I love the A's. I love baseball. I haven't always. I loved baseball as a little boy through high school as I played and followed the two Bay Area teams during peak eras. Moving to college, I found baseball boring and not very relevant to a life of studying, beach coming nor very intellectually stimulating as what I read or who I spent time with. Basketball and football became the pasttimes of the philistines, especially with the chest-thumping warrior caste attitude that made the NFL and the WWE difficult to distinguish. However, it was the building of the downtown Fresno ballpark that renewed my interest in baseball, not to mention the length of the games and my ADD to not need focussing on a television for three-plus hours. After returning to my hometown, I came to follow the A's and the MLB, first just as a Sports page reader but then a game watcher and a fan. This year, with much time on my hands with paternity leave and a desire to teach my oldest son sportsmanship and the love of the game, I've found that not too much has been between me and following the A's. I'm not one to follow players' histories and personal life stories but I've really come to love this team. Seeing them win a lot and lose more has made me root like a fan as well. I had wanted to catch a game this season but it wasn't in the cards until this last weekend. It didn't help that I sat ten rows directly behind home plate, ate terrible ballpark food and drank overpriced beer. So, it's root root root for my hometeam but it's not too shameful that the season has us about twelve out of first. What I can't wait for is October, with a two-week school holiday and the chance to watch all of the playoffs and hopefully a Mets-Tigers World Series. That is, until Bruce hits the Bay Area and I need to take a couple of nights off from Mudville.