brainsplotch

In honor of the beginning of baseball season, and marking the 50th anniversary of my baseball fandom, it's time for me to finally write a post that I've been thinking of writing for a few years. I've avoided it all this time due to a level of embarrassment I've had about the subject. In 1976, when I was eight years old, I created an imaginary baseball team called the Deto Bobcats. (Deto pronounced "DEE-to"). I imagined Deto as an imaginary city, and it's name was inspired by Detroit, the city I lived in between 1973 and 1979. I probably don't need to explain that "Bobcats" was a feline spinoff of "Tigers." In the Bobcats' earliest incarnation, the "team" (i.e., ME, with a whiffle ball and plastic bat) played its games in my backyard. The way our backyard was configured, it loosely resembled a tiny baseball field. The "homeplate" area was a strip of lawn that was bordered on the left by a concrete walking path...

Way back on December 22, 2022, I wrote a nostalgic post about becoming a full-blown Jimi Hendrix convert via the 1984 compilation, Kiss the Sky . I lamented jettisoning my cassette of the album decades ago. Well, guess what? I found the comp on CD at my local record shop and, after some wavering and hemming and hawing, I bought it. The icing on the cake is that it's what is known in CD collector geekitude as a "target CD," as in the design of the CD surface resembles a target. I can't tell you how exciting it was to pop that CD in my car's disc player and hear that Hendrix collection for the first time in at least 24 years (probably longer than that). It's not as if Kiss the Sky is that earth-shattering--with the exception of the live "I Don't Live Today," I have all of these songs on other albums--but listening to those songs in that order was like taking the Wayback Machine to 1987, when I was playing the hell out of t...