tammytoes

Dear Friends,

You might notice a few new sites listed in the blog-o-verse on this page. Check ‘em out. They’re worth your time. Also wanted to give an extra special nod to Zach’s latest culinary/literary adventure: chispastories.com. He’s traveling across Central America, eating as much delicious food as possible and learning about the tastes, kitchens, customs and history of the cuisines of Central America. If that doesn’t sound fascinating, I don’t know what is.

He just got back from a long trip to Cuba, and he’s blogging about his visit right now.

Dang. Just writing about it is making me hungry.

Love,
Tammytoes

Spring has brought kickball into my life. It’s hipster gym class, but I love it. It’s everything that I believed derby would be in my life, before that evolved into a second full-time job: unbelievably crazy people, lots and lots and lots of beer, ridiculous outfits, surprisingly competitive and a fuckton of fun.

Denver kickball neophyte? Well, here’s the breakdown:

Denver Kickball Coalition (DKBC – I know the acronym isn’t technically correct, so that’s kinda all you need to know) consists of 12 teams and 2 conferences: sack lunch vs. hot lunch. Team rosters this year only consisted of returning players; all new players went into the draft. Which consisted of us standing around half-drunk on the stage of the Hi-Dive while team captains pointed at people they wanted on their team and asked for names later. Games on Sundays, loosely (and I mean loosely) organized and umped on a set of softball fields that we’ve never officially reserved through the Parks and Rec department. The league has simply intimidated every other sports group from using the fields.

The Clayton Manor is thoroughly embroiled in kickball. To a degree I can’t rightly describe. After an aborted attempt to develop a new team, we all went into the draft. And ended up on different teams in the same conference. Our extended Clayton Manor family and the corresponding teams who drafted us:

Me – Shitkickers
Rick – The Convicted
Margi – Catscans
Julie – Team Hi Dive
Garrett – Always Drunk

When I get some new batteries for my camera, I’ll post some photos because it’s a gotta-see-to-believe thing. But in the meantime, I’ll simply reflect on the strange nature of being drafted and playing for the Shitkickers.

The Shitkickers are one of the most competitive teams in the league. On top of that, they’re mostly a bunch of macho, swaggering, jerkface asshats who love to win at all costs. They play the minimum number of women on the field (so only four women play for them), taunt the other teams relentlessly, and are other otherwise pretty offensive. And they drafted ME. And here’s the thing: I kinda love ‘em. One of my captains took the field last week wearing a nicotine patch while smoking a cigarette and alternated between drinking a red bull and a PBR during the first inning. We then went on to beat our opposing team 51-4. The Shitkickers don’t rely on me a whit to win the game, but they’ve accorded me the dubious honor of drafting me because they think I’m a girl worth having (if they must have them) and we’ve developed a weird, authentic sort of camaraderie as a result. I guess the bottom line for me is that if any of them cross a line I truly care about, I could punch them in the face – and they would appreciate it. Oh, and have I mentioned that my captain’s girlfriend also plays for the team and two of them regularly proposition me after the games on Sunday?

The downside to all of this kickball madness is that Margi ruptured her achilles tendon in a freak fall while playing a game two weeks ago and has to have surgery on Monday to re-attach it. If that sentence didn’t give you the willies, I don’t know what will. She’s looking at a summer on crutches. Send her some love. And let’s hope that all of the rest of us idiot weekend warriors don’t hurt ourselves as well.

I get to wear cleats.

With the move to New York City rapidly approaching and a hankering for summertime adventures tugging at my attention span, I hung up my skates after the final home game of the season last Friday. No more skating in Denver for me. Four days retired and life without derby is already a degree of magnitude more relaxed, alternatingly awesome and super sad. Mostly: completely different. Unscheduled time? I’m delirious.

Not much to write, just enough words to mark the occasion. Now I just have to heal the crater in my knee and the 4-inch welt on my ass. And winter is chasing me all the way into summertime, as it appears. Life. Yes.

“Have you seen those Kansas plains? Have you seen the grass stretch away from you to the horizon? Grass and nothing but grass except for flowers here and there and maybe the white of buffalo bones, but grass moving gentle under the long wind, moving like a restless sea with the hand of God upon it.”
- Louis L’Amour, The Daybreakers

Readers, please join me at Amor L’Amour (you might notice it over –> there on the sidebar) to read and discuss Louis L’Amour novels. A joint tammytoes/vegetable serving venture.

Hit me up with an email at tammy AT schmerd DOT com if you decide to play along, so that way I can brag about how we’re starting the L’Amour revival and all (and I can let you know when the official Daybreakers discussion gets started).

“There would be trouble enough, but man is born to trouble, and it is best to meet it when it comes and not lose sleep until it does. Only there was more than trouble, for beyond the long grass plains were the mountains, the high and lonely mountains where someday I would ride, and where someday, the Good Lord willing, I would find a home.
How many trails? How much dust and loneliness? How long a time until then?”

Bent Orbit
by Elaine Equi

I wind my way across a black donut hole
and space that clunks.
Once I saw on a stage,
as if at the bottom of a mineshaft,
the precise footwork
of some mechanical ballet.
It was like looking into the brain
of a cuckoo clock and it carried
some part of me away forever.
No one knows when they first see a thing,
how long its after image will last.
Proust could stare at the symptom of a face
for years, while Frank O’Hara, like anyone with a job,
was always looking at his watch.
My favorite way of remembering is to forget.
Please start the record of the sea over again.
Call up a shadow below the pendulum of a gull’s wing.
In a city of eight million sundials, nobody has any idea
how long a minute really is.

In Kansas right now, a state away from home that also kind of feels like home to me: my parents always put the Star Wars sheets on the guest bed for my visits. 500 miles and a few short hours and I’m already thinking about this poem, about the signposts of this past year, of how to measure this Denver time, this Colorado time, this most recent geographic chapter of my life that I’m closing for the last time in a few short months. I am excited almost beyond words to move on, to move to a bigger place, to galvanize all the potential energy I’ve been building. But – still – I am very sad about leaving this place, too.

I moved back to Colorado in 2000, after the biggest New Year’s celebration I gather I will ever see, on the banks of the San Francisco Bay. Has it truly only been seven years? Has it already been seven years?