Early Halloween

I know that the "holidays" are safe to send stuff to people in your distant circle - old classmates, roommates, or coworkers. And with the release of "Santa Clause: 2" on November one, maybe the season has been stretched as far as the southern California megalopolis.

Still there isn't enough space in my apartment for the bounty from seventy-five days of Christmas; there are too many golden rings, partridges or lords a leaping. However, there aren't any more baseball players a playing.

The smells from this October aren't the sweet scent of fall's foliage, but the dark stench from a car wreck world series. The 415 area code hasn't had this kind of colossal bummer, since a batch of bad acid during 1967. It was less of a "long strange trip", and far more "walking on broken glass"

We were up by five runs. Bonds was trying to one up Lou Gerhig for the best series by a player. (He didn't but he can't own *every* record).

And then came the Disney Angel's. I am not sure whether they got their name from Buffy the Vampire's ex beau, but I pretty sure that the red in their uniform comes from Dracula. Could anything kill them? Giants didn't need to bat better but could have used some wooden stakes. Garlic fries could only slow down the monster.

We were up by five runs.

Nobody calls Jason in the Friday the 13th movies scrappy. Nobody calls Goofy long suffering. Nobody should have called the Angels underdogs. This wasn't a team of jimmy crickets, but a plague of locusts.

I guess in the off-season for tri's I have been watching too much TV. (How was Sentinel?) There is a new yoga place on Fillmore between California and Bush that my hamstrings appreciate. It is a block up from where we had sushi and across the street from Argentine Ice Cream place - let me know if you want to go sometime.

I am spinning a few times a week. A former co-worker of mine is trying to land somehow after tumbling through a divorce. I suggested about healing through endorphins and she drives me to class three days a week.

I invited her and a small group of friends out drinks for my birthday. It was a tough week - I was paying for some bad karma from having worn a race jersey during an actual race. You can't cheat that kind of stuff. Most of the people there were from old TNT marathon seasons. She brought a red headed date, but he disappeared from her mind when she met my boss.

They hung out at the bar and wandered through each other stories. She hadn't met someone so interesting; he never knew someone so cute. I had a half an hour of answering machine message - reference checks from both sides. "Yes", I assured them "they were wonderful."

They grabbed dinner and movies (and thankfully not each other in my company). They saw the "Now and Zen" festival and talked about biking together.

I think the duration of magic is measured in moments. In slow motion you can see cards being shuffled, but in real time you can't guess the red queen. After an hour of guessing it stops even being precious, and starts annoying. Some relationships follow the same trajectory.

My boss had three weeks off to climb up to Everest base camp - if you outsource enough of the supplies to surpa it isn't that bad. Perhaps the hard part is coming home. After such peaks it is hard to return to the topology of everyday life. The weight is the same, but you are the only one left carrying the burden.

They are breaking up slowly. Like Livan Hernandez pitching kind of slow.

Life like baseball has more moments closer to Halloween than Christmas.