Information Blues.

My mom recently noted that I don’t blog much about baseball anymore. It’s true, because I’ve realized my fascination with major league baseball is difficult to describe.

When I became a baseball fan it hit me out of the blue: it was 2001 the A’s were in the playoffs. I tuned in as an issue of civic pride. It was underdog Oakland versus the hulking New York Yankees, owners of the biggest budget in baseball. My town was fighting a juggernaut; what could be juicier than that? The teams were well matched yet possessed completely different styles, the games were tightrope rollercoaster rides, and I became hooked on the drama, the stories and the spectacle. It truly is a game of inches, where an inch’s variation on a single event can transform everything.

I spent a few years straddling the sides, maintaining the connection to my old skeptical self while nourishing my new fandom. I tried to explain it to my friends, what I found beautiful and compelling about baseball, without having them condemn me as a meathead. Maybe I got across to a few people, but for the most part it didn’t really work. Nobody seemed to want to join me in my new obsession, as I watched myself pass from the tempered evangelist to the unapologetic maniac.

So the A’s enjoyed a great run of extremely successful baseball from 2001 to 2006, but the problem is they’re pretty much sunk this year. They’re losing games all over the place. As a new fan I probably wouldn’t have been able to deal with this very well, but now as the old adept I find myself discovering new levels of fandom. I suppose there had always been the question–would I continue watching the A’s so much even if they didn’t win so often?–but I’d never been tested. Well this year I’m being tested extensively and making new discoveries, like today I realized that yes, without a doubt, I’d still watch the A’s a lot even if they lost a lot. And that watching them lose a lot doesn’t even change the experience all that much. Sure you have to pad yourself against intimate contact with so much defeat, but connected to all of the losing is still so much hope for the future (how will our team play the next day, next month, next year!?) Following a team without such glimmering prospects for the season actually makes it a lot more casual. If the A’s are getting slaughtered I can easily walk away, pour a cerveza and go play guitar on the roof.

Sure, being tied to the mast of the ship, hanging on every playoff pitch is fun too, but maybe it’s fun no matter what.

is The Bootleg Series Volume 4, Live 1966 at The Royal Albert Hall, disc two.

It captures his famous concert in London when he “went electric”, backed by The Hawks who later became The Band. Disc one is the first set of the show where he performed as expected, acoustic, just Bob, his guitar and neck rack harmonica. But disc two is a trainwreck, a confrontation between the performers and crowd. The atmosphere is riotous, and they feed off of it to create pure rebel music, loud rock and roll. The audience boos, they protest clap, they heckle, but Bob is at his Don’t Look Back best, a swirling, snotty shaman.

Robbie Robertson’s telecaster is in the treble position the entire time, interjecting ice pick leads. Along with Let’s Hide Away and Dance Away with Freddy King it documents perfectly how I try (wish) to play guitar, digging into the strings and bending, getting underneath and snapping the pick as the amp overdrives and comes alive, starts to breathe and sing with you. Robbie creates a storm of guitar around Bob and he messes up—-a lot!!—-but the mistakes only add to the grandeur, adding tension and organic feeling. Each song and solo is an impassioned tightrope walk before a hostile audience as you wonder if they’re going to make it through.

They play a smoking version of Baby Let me Follow You Down, a wall of sound Tell Me Momma, and an extra insolent Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat, one of my favorite songs, a greasy piece of cryptic chameleon blues. Oh to be a rockstar in a skinny suit and a pair of Wayfarers. The climax of the album occurs as they’re tuning up before Like a Rolling Stone, when a heckler yells “JUDAS!” and the crowd chuckles; you can so easily imagine him getting extra shadowy, craning his neck, swirling as if in a trance as he responds in signature Dylan cadence, “I don’t belieeeve you… you’re a LIAR!!” Then you can barely hear him tell the band “Play it fucking loud” as they start the song and from the first note things are extra crunchy and bombastic. I’m pretty sure that heckler must have dropped dead immediately, to face off against your fallen idol and have him bare his teeth and hiss back.

Whistler, Canada is a resort town. It feels vaguely uncomfortable, with malls of stucco made to feel alpine and teens on vacation wearing mesh caps and mini skirts. I don’t know quite where I fit here, but I’m on tour in one of the Disneylands of mountain biking.

You ride the lifts to the top, it feels like a rollercoaster ratcheting up the first plunge, and then you choose your route down. Whether you’d like to become an airborn blur running down A-Line, a tobaggan sort of run with 30 tabletop jumps, or a kamikaze freerider on Joyride or Schleyer, tracing ladder bridges and rolling into steep rock faces.

There’s a second lift, to the top of the mountain: the whistling pass, garbanzo peak. But up there things are more untamed, the trails involve tangles of stair step roots strewn about like railroad ties. What can your bike roll over, and do you have the courage to find out?

So much of mountain biking is really a mind game. After a point (when you have the right bike) it’s not so much what your bike can roll over, but what your mind will let it. It’s a feat of management: taming fear, holding conviction, trusting your bike and your instincts and even the trail: just trusting that this mess is actually rideable and somebody has pulled it once before. The conviction piece may be the most important: speed is your savior, and if you flinch and grab too much brake you will fall. You need speed to make it over the jump or root or rock, but of course speed also punishes: your forearms as you fly through that rocky slush section for the nth time, your safety as you hesitate just a little on that stunt and your front wheel sticks or slides and you find yourself catapulted over the bars.

Oh well, I tend to go pretty small, a calculated medium. I’ve come a long way, but as you start to travel the road you begin to understand how long it is. It’s possible to get a head start on attitude alone. But I’ve started at an attitude disadvantage and worked my way up out of the hole. I think I have okay skills but too much paranoia. The self-preservation alarms begin to sound, even though most of the time if you fall you don’t even get hurt, even though this is fun and beautiful and adrenalizing, an incredible celebration of life, in the moment, drenched in speed and nature.

A-line is my favorite trail up here, but after five days straight of riding, from Shasta to Bellingham to Canada, I feel like I’m out of adrenaline, that I’ve faced too much fear and now all I want to do is rest. I’m sick of the bike park yet I feel guilty that I didn’t ride with my amigos today, because they wanted me to come, they’ve expected explosive growth, but instead I’ve crept forward and remain one of the sketchiest riders in the group. But I’ve also been riding the shortest amount of time. More proof that mountain biking is a mind game! They left the condo this morning to jokes that Scott had given up mountain biking.