Salty feelings

Do any of you guys ever get the feeling like either too much of the world is into all the same things you’re interested in, or perhaps you yourself are too much like the rest of the world, and are more or less falling in line with a parade of similarly behavioral people?   I’ve been feeling like this recently.

When I was a broody moody teenager, I recall taking great lengths in deliberately going in directions that “everyone else” went.  Whether it was class selection, choice in artistic expressions, to simply things like routes I drove, and the things I decided to do.  I was trying to differentiate from the crowd, and it required effort.

Eventually, and it’s probably closest to my current state of being, I simply stopped trying, and kind of let life dictate itself as if it were water flowing, moving constantly, but at a default motion.  However, by doing such, lately I feel like in spite of my past efforts, when the day is over, I’m not quite the unique butterfly that I like to think everyone likes to think they are sometimes.

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Photos: Minor League Baseball in Kodak, Tennessee

I chose to visit Kodak kind of on a whim.  Initially, I was planning on making Asheville a day trip, where I’d go straight back to Atlanta in the wee hours of the night, but when I found out that the Mississippi Braves were playing against the Smokies, I decided to make my one day trip into a two day one, because Kodak is just 90 miles from Asheville, as opposed to driving the 290 miles back to Atlanta.

Despite the fact that Kodak is a small town seemingly in the middle of nowhere, I was still really excited by the idea of going there.  There’s something ironically amusing to me about small towns in the middle of nowhere that I look forward to.  I guess I like the experience of seeing what those deep out into the country are like, and if they can handle when an English-speaking Asian guy comes romping into their towns, trying to see what’s up.

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Photos: Minor League Baseball in Asheville, North Carolina

So, Asheville.  I was looking forward to visiting this place more than about any other place I had thought about visiting throughout the 2014 baseball season, because to my understanding Asheville was a town known for interesting dining, lots of local breweries, and it happened to be a place within reasonable driving distance that had a minor league ballpark I’ve never visited, AND they just so happened to be giving out a bobblehead, AND they were also playing against an Atlanta Braves affiliate.  Needless to say, it was the no-brainer of no-brainers that I would be looking forward to this particular trip.

Much to my expectations, Asheville was a lovely place that I enjoyed a great deal.  The drive to get there wasn’t the least bit difficult, and it frankly just felt good to get in my own car and drive somewhere I’d never really been to before.

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The weekend I’d been looking for

Prior to the start of the baseball season, this past weekend was one particular weekend that I had mentally earmarked as one of weekends that I was looking forward to the most.  Sure, I have ambitions and plans of grandeur when the summer arrives, and in a perfect world, I make every flight, the weather is never an issue, and I’m able to tackle four new MLB and six new MiLB ballparks before the start of July.  However, things haven’t worked out so kindly throughout the span of the last few weeks, and be it poor weather, unlucky flight conditions or both, a lot of my trips have been derailed and ultimately cancelled, leaving me kind of distraught, and with more time to brood and go crazy.

But this past weekend was undoubtedly the one weekend I was looking forward to immensely, because it combined several things going for it that if they all worked out, would lead to a successful good time.

Fortunately for me, with the weekend now a time frame in the past, I can say that basically everything did work out, and it was a successful good time, and I’m quite pleased with it, to the extent that it’s worth writing about, because frankly, I think a lot of my posts throughout the last few weeks have kind of had an undertone of disappointment or an unhappy sentiment to some of them.

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The bacon cap saga: fin

In case any of my six readers have forgotten the back story, I was displeased with the bacon cap I enthusiastically ordered, because the fit was odd, and the shape of the hat was kind of bulbous.

As much as I tried to really love the cap, I just couldn’t get around the fact that it made my head look like The Head, and the rim of the cap would dig into my ears. Upon some research about NewEra caps, I discovered that the reasoning behind such a shoddy product was the fact that the bacon cap, like the vast majority of minor league baseball caps, were manufactured in China, where the results have been notorious for being inconsistent and misshapen.

Long story short, I discovered that the bacon cap was offered from MLB.com directly, where they clearly state that it is made in the USA, so I ended up ordering it again, with hopes that the claims would be true, and I would get a bacon cap that fit and looked right. Otherwise, I was ready to wage war with MLB.com if they dared send me another shoddy Chinese-made bacon cap.

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Francoeu’wned

Long story short: baseball player Jeff Francoeur is fooled by his teammates into believing that a fellow teammate was deaf.  For an entire month.

Now I doubt any who follows my brog is really aware of this, but when I used to be a writer for Talking Chop, and an active member of the community, I had a 15-second glimpse of internet notoriety when I had made a t-shirt in “honor” of Jeff Francoeur, where I took the generic composition of a player jersey t-shirt (aka “the shirsey”) and replaced “Francoeur” with “Failcoeur.”  I was dumb(er) and immature (then), and let the nerdy, results-driven frustration of an overly passionate baseball fan take the driver’s seat in that period of time which gave birth to the concept and execution of the design, despite the fact that it was coming at someone else’s expense.

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