Ka-bump

Cliff Lee’s other shoe drops.

Still More Rangers Collapse Liveblogging

Cliff Lee got 9 runs of support in Kansas City last night.

The Rangers still lost.

The good news is that division rivals Oakland and California (I’m done trying to figure out what they call themselves every new week, from now on they’re the California Angels again) lost as well, so the Rangers still have a comfy 8.5 game lead in the AL West. But with Cliff Lee now clearly completely off his game, Texas has got some serious problems.

First of all, last night’s eruption notwithstanding, they haven’t been hitting. Much of that may be attributable to injury… Ian Kinsler is still out, Nelson Cruz had been out, I forget who else has missed games. Outside of Lee, the starting pitching has been solid enough, but the strain on the bullpen remains just as strong when no lead ever grows beyond two runs. Neftali Feliz can’t work every night.

So, question one: Can the Rangers hang on? It’s September 1, they are 8.5 games in front of the A’s, against whom they have four more games. They have seven more against the Angels, who are 10.5 back and therefore out of it according to my September 1 rule. The A’s and Angels have six more games left against each other, which may turn out to be the saving grace for Texas if things don’t turn around this month. But then what?

The fact is that if the playoffs started today, no sane manager would let Cliff Lee off the bench. Lee is a control pitcher in the mold of Greg Maddux, and when he is right, he can thread a needle with any pitch the catcher calls. But he hasn’t been right in a month, so pitches that used to paint the corners of the strike zone now either miss it entirely or glimpse it briefly before reversing direction on the way to the outfield bleachers. A month is plenty of time to turn it around, so it’s premature to panic. But we’ve also seen a month of dreadful work from the guy who was supposed to put the thing over the top, so it’s not premature to be very concerned.

The playoff rotation if I managed the Rangers: Wilson, Hunter, Lewis. Subbing an effective Cliff Lee for Colby Lewis could be the difference between another futile series with the Yankees and an early November parade around the strip shopping centers of Arlington. Lee’s pitching coach happens to be Greg Maddux’s brother, Mike. If Lee’s problems are mental and not physical, the hopes of the franchise may very well rest on that famous Maddux surname.

Depression.

I am (mildly) depressed.

When I decided to launch this blog, I knew there would be periods of inactivity when I just didn’t have the time/energy/focus to post. In fact, one of the reasons I decided to launch it was because I knew these gaps would come. I have wrestled with low-grade depression, also called dysthymia, nearly all my life. Now that I find myself in a scary moment — between jobs, very little savings — finding the discipline to focus on, well, pretty much anything is hard. I’ll probably walk away from writing this at least twenty times before I finish, and the end result will not cohere well. But it’s all I got right now, so here you go.

I was diagnosed three years ago, I think. The symptoms are so common, they’re depressing (haha, get it? i kill me): listlessness, inability to focus, irregular sleep schedules. I’ve only rarely been seriously depressed to the point of losing appetite or simply being unable to get out of bed, but I’ve long gone through life feeling like I was pulling cinder blocks around with me wherever I went. Then, I was diagnosed and prescribed small dosages of a reuptake inhibitor — a drug in the same family as Prozac, Zoloft, etc. — called Lexapro. I’ve spent most of the last three years on Lexapro. Now that I’m between jobs, I’ve quit, firstly for financial reasons — Lexapro ain’t cheap. But now that I’ve been off of it for a few weeks, I realize I’m not going back.

I don’t know enough of others’ experiences with Lexapro even to guess, but I can describe mine. First, it’s a great leveler, one of those drugs that mutes both the highs and the lows, so everything seems more manageable… but also a bit joyless. It also short-circuited much of my sex drive, not carving into desire necessarily, but making staying “in the moment” for intimacy almost impossible — my mind would somehow wander, precisely when no one wants it to. And that, maybe, summarizes everything about the drug that convinces me that I’m done with it, because for all its leveling effects, all its ability to make me feel as though the challenges in front of me aren’t insurmountable, it actually cost me dearly in my ability to meet those challenges. I never focused any better because of it — probably much worse. I just wasn’t as stressed about it.

So now, it’s a new old life, and that’s daunting. I didn’t go to a psychiatrist on a whim, after all — I presented with real issues trying to muck my way through the mundane details of life without getting distracted by the flashy. At best, those distractions would keep me from what I needed to be doing; at worst, they led me to some bad decisions that caused a lot of hurt for a lot of people. I know I’m not going back to that. But it’s going to require a serious daily commitment not to give up the advances I made under medication, and I did make several. I’m going to need to act out of character, give up some of my bohemian tendency to make every day an exercise in jazz improvisation, and create structured days for myself.

And that, right there, may be the crux of it all. My biggest haunting fear is that I’m forgetting to do what I really should be doing, or that I’m missing out on something important that everyone else is part of. Freed from the anxiety of wondering what I’m forgetting, I wonder what I might be able to accomplish. I hope to find out. Maybe I’ll get to where I’m publishing on this blog every day, even.

For those of you still hanging with me after all this, thank you. If you have any stories to tell or advice to share, the comments are all yours.

More Texas Rangers Collapse Liveblogging

Nice 4-3 win at home tonight against the Twins on the heels of last night’s team-effort one-hitter. Colby Lewis once again pitches more than well enough to win but can’t get the support, either at bat or in the field, of the guys around him to win. With Oakland winning in Cleveland, the Rangers’ lead over the A’s remains at 8.5 games. With the Angels dropping another to Tampa Bay, however, they now fall a full 10 games back for the first time this year. That noise I hear sounds like the clock starting to tick very loudly in Anaheim… if they don’t make up some ground over the next week to start September within view of the Rangers, they’re gonna be done.

That leaves the Athletics, who just happen to be coming into Arlington for a three-game set this weekend. If the A’s can get the lead down to roughly 5 or 6 games, this thing is far from over. But if the Rangers can sweep and put 10 games between them and anyone else…

…well, they’ll still be the Texas Rangers. But it’ll be a September quite unlike any we’ve seen in these parts before, ever.

Mosqueapalooza, Summarized

So, Rupert Murdoch’s partner in News Corp decides to open a community center in downtown Manhattan. The Republican message machine, News Corp’s affiliates included, goes into full freakout mode, ostensibly against it, to drive the media narrative through the dog days of August, setting up a Republican-friendly fearmongering meme for the fall. (Pardon the redundancy.) Meanwhile, Al Qaeda is dancing with glee that the American right is doing their work for them, convincing Muslims that the US is really against all of them.

Am I crazy to think this may not be entirely coincidental?

Tax ‘em ’til their hair falls out, then tax their skin

Kevin Drum takes a look at conservative hubris regarding the Bush tax cuts, and it raises this reaction from me: Until the Democrats can produce a few politicians willing to go on the teevee and say, “Hell, yes, let’s raise taxes on the rich, let’s tax the hell out of them for what they’ve done,” the Overton window is gonna stay way the hell over on the Republican side of the issue. Dangerous as it is, only leftwing populism can put a dent into the rightwing version, and the rightwing version has got us all in this ditch in the first place.

That about sums it up

Via Steven D at the frog pond, this gem of a viral video:

Harold Baines, is that you?

Remember the joy in Rangerville when the Cliff Lee deal went down? Seems like a long time ago now, doesn’t it? A real long time. So long ago, I think it’s time to look at what the Rangers have gotten from his presence on their roster:

• Lee has gone 2-4 in 10 starts. The Rangers are 4-6 in those starts.
• His ERA has risen from 2.39 to 3.09 since the trade.
• Over his last two starts, he is 0-2 with a 9.62 ERA. You read that right. 9.62.

If the Rangers are going to make the postseason, much less do anything once they get there, Mike Maddux is gonna have to earn his pay and fix Cliff Lee. Now.

Saturday golf report

Hopefully, the first in a semi-regular series.

My buddy Jason and I answered the early bell this morning and headed over to famous Rockwood Park for my second round of 2010. Even teeing off before 9 am, it gets stupid hot in this town in August, and today was no exception. Nobody melted, though, not even me… I even played the last four holes in one under, something unheard of in the heat for me. Jason, just learning the game, started finding the sweet spot with some regularity toward the end as well.

My score: out in 46, in in 41 for a smooth 87 on a track I should be hanging 77s on in my sleep normally. But considering the rust, I’ll take it, along with the megadose of Vitamin D I’ve probably been needing.

August: The Month of Stupid in America

Remember last August when the grassroots somehow exploded out of the minority to shout down Congressmen at their town hall meetings? (Gosh, I wonder why they’re not in the streets again. Maybe the money isn’t there.)

Well now the decrepit-but-still-loud Wurlitzer of wingnut fake-outrage is playing full blast again, about that not-a-mosque that is proposed to be built at not-ground-zero in lower Manhattan. And once again, Democratic strategists are apparently taking the month off, leaving it to the likes of Harry Reid and Howard Dean to freelance extremely stupid answers that GOP strategists must be lapping up like cocaine off a David Vitter prostitute.

Maybe we should consider offshoring our education system to Finland before Carls Jr takes over the country.