Oh Say Can You See

P-U! Maybe I should call you Pole Cat.

Well Pole Cat, I think the best Fifty Cents ever spent was when I purchased the CD Get Rich or Die Tryin' (2003) by 50 Cent. "In da Club" is still the hottest joint in town--helluva lot better than that "Candy Store" crap that's out now. Fitty, I'm not hatin' the playa, just hatin' the game.

You're right Cat (Pole retracted). All this highfalutin talk about Hitchcock and Coppola is just a migraine waiting to happen. Speaking of quality, amidst my piles of books by Dan Brown, John Grisham, Yann Martel, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ann Coulter and Tim Lahaye, I found a diamond in the rough--a book undeserving of its title as "subway reading" (those trains that go vroooom underground for those of you who aren't cityfolk): Jose Canseco's Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big (2005). It's detractors claim that Canseco is actually promoting the healthy use of steroids in this book, and that it was mostly penned by a ghost-writer.

This book is not just an expose on the impact of steroids on major league baseball players or a rant against the racism of baseball writers: it is a poem celebrating life.

Here is an excerpt from his memoir (p. 79)--Canseco remembers the fourth or fifth time he injected steroids into his buttocks. He could feel his body changing. Canseco recalls:

It was then that I knew. I squeezed the Louisville Slugger in my hands--my Sword of Damocles--and walked out onto the grassy field, each step more massive than the last. Each blade of the turf seemed to ring its hands to the heavens, like a pearl-drenched old woman singing "Go Down, Moses" for the ten thousandth time. The stadium's sprinkler system had just shut off; a sugar-coated, ghostly rainbow licked the grass, as the sticky devil's dew slowly dripped down to earth. I could see each earthworm slurping on chlorophyll, sucking and chomping on each bit of this lowly manna. It was then that I knew I could crush a baseball, with my sap-gilded sword, my blood-drenched weapon of the batter's box, through the heavens, through the kosmos, through each steep galactic precipice that stood in my way. It was then that I knew the bard Whitman was correct when he spoke of grass, or, of all things: "And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves."

Isn't that gorgeous? "Sugar-coated, ghostly rainbow." Precious. What a poet! As Burroughs was to junk, Canseco is the poet of anabolic steroids. Who knew?

By the way, Holly is looking for possible names for a Fantasy Baseball Team. The only requirement is that it must be 30 characters or less. Post names in the comment box if you so desire.

Before I go Cat, I am also still searching for that perfect personal ad. I was thinking Friendster ... but, just when I thought Friendster was making a comeback, they have to resort to the software problems that plagued them around the time of the so-called "MySpace Revolution." Pax. More later.