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Marc Mason is a freelance writer based in Tempe, AZ.



























HAPPY NONSENSE: POP CULTURE CONFIDENTIAL
 
Friday, May 28, 2004  
-30-

It isn't forever. I promise.

There are a lot of people out there who have faithfully tuned into this column, week in and week out, some since it started in October of 1999. I can't even remotely begin to tell you how much that has meant to me.

There are also plenty of people who have just occasionally dropped in here and there, and I'm grateful for them, too. Every single person who came and read. Thank you. Thank you.

Right now, I just can't do it for a while. Everything has gone horribly, horribly wrong, and I just don't have the energy, the focus, or the drive to sit here and write. I have other writing assignments that I am going to have to turn what's left of my energy and focus upon. So something has to go on hiatus. That something is Happy Nonsense.

In fact, hiatus is a good word. Give me a month. Six weeks. It might be less. I don't know. Maybe I'll even couch the return in TV terms: Happy Nonsense, season two. Who can say?

I invite you all to follow me at Movie Poop Shoot and The Comics Waiting Room in the meantime. Again, my many thanks.

Mason out.

Marc@MarcMason.com

6:49 PM

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Friday, May 21, 2004  
27

It took 30 years.

My grandfather started taking me to major league and minor league baseball games when I was around four years old. From the earliest possible age, I fell in love with the game. The history of it, the greatness of its players from generation to generation, the purity of the sport. Baseball was my very first love affair.

I played. In fact, I played really well. In the ten or eleven seasons that I put on a uniform and went out on the diamond, I played in hundreds of games. And I never saw it happen.

When you love the game, there’s always ways to express that love. I subscribed to Baseball Digest for years. I collected baseball cards as an almost secondary religion. And of course, you cannot resist the lure of the crack of the bat, even when it doesn’t involve your team.

So over the years, I have been to hundreds of major and minor league games. Hundreds. That doesn’t include all the high school, Base Ruth League, or Little League games I’ve been to. And I‘d never seen it happen. Each and every season, I have also found ways to watch probably a hundred games or better on the television as well. Thousands of faceless games flashing across the screen. Occasionally, I’d see something truly great, but there continued to be one small gap in what I wanted to finally experience.

Sure, I’ve been watching one game and had the network do cut-ins to let the audience follow what was happening. I’ve seen the end, the jumping, the joy. But never start to finish, pitch one to pitch last. More often, I have seen pitch one to pitch break-up, like Reggie Jackson snatching one away from Nolan Ryan after eight and two-thirds back in 1979. Ben Davis chicken-shit bunting to take one away from Curt Schilling in 2002, violating one of the oldest “off the books” codes in the history of the game. Each tantalizing time, I’d wonder if I would ever get lucky enough to see it happen.

Tuesday, I came home from work feeling more than a bit lost and stranded. Many crises had beset me, and would continue to through the week. But I remembered to turn on the TV and watch the Diamondbacks game. Randy Johnson was scheduled to pitch, and he was in a dark place after his previous start, having lost a 1-0 classic. I was wondering how he’d react to the media firestorm he started when he criticized the team.

27 up, 27 down. That’s how.

Finally, after decades, I got to see a no-hitter from start to finish. Even better, I saw a perfect game, only the 15th of the modern era. It was as thrilling as I could have asked for, and even more gut-wrenching to watch late in the game as he got closer and closer to history. But Johnson did it, and it was amazing. I shed a tear of joy that I was fortunate enough to have been able to see it. I only wish my grandfather could have, as well.

Marc@MarcMason.com

1:02 PM

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Friday, May 14, 2004  
SHHHHHHH!

Silence is golden. Let's take a moment in honor of the dead.

Marc@MarcMason.com

9:13 PM

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Friday, May 07, 2004  
That's With Two "P"s

Appalling. That's the only way I can describe this week.

Gross abuse of prisoners by American soldiers. A school coach who gave one of his athletes an award named "The Crybaby" because the kid had the audacity to want to play, rather than sit on the bench. And Major League Baseball selling the right to Sony Pictures to put Spider-Man2 logos on the bases during a late June weekend.

At least the public outcry made MLB wise up and yank the promotion.

Each and every week it seems more and more like I no longer actually live on a sane and rational planet. Instead, I wake up, read the papers and the internet, and feel more certain that I have been transported to an alternate reality. A couple of teenagers on a boys volleyball team were pissed that the junior varsity kids beat them to the chance to eat first while on a trip and assaulted a JV player by whacking him in the head... with their dicks. Come on... tell me there's a portal back to the other, happier place.

Tell me that I didn't read an article today where the citizens of the town where of one of those soldiers busted for torturing Iraqi prisoners came from didn't back up her actions, refer to any person of ethnicity or color as "subhuman," and suggest that Iraw should just be eradictaed off the map because of that.

Assure me that a big-time liberal activist and writer wasn't forced to expose himself as a fraud this week when it turned out that all that motivation he took from his experiences as an Army Ranger was bullshit, considering he'd never been in the service.

Explain to me just exactly how everything is going to be "okay" when I read about a marauding pack of drag queens who, deciding that they must arrive at DQ beauty pageants in the finest style, have been stealing the finest cars from southern dealership lots en masse.

Anyone?

Anyone?

Marc@MarcMason.com

4:51 PM

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Saturday, May 01, 2004  
Normal

It's nice to be normal. This has been the most normal week Rebecca and I have had in I don't know how long.

Monday, we went out to a movie test screening. Tuesday, we went to a Diamondbacks/Cubs game. We enjoyed nights at home the past two nights. And tonight, we went to a concert and hit our favorite bar afterward.

This isn't something that we get to do frequently. It's something I am going to treasure.

And now, we're off to go to bed, to lay together as man and woman, lovers. It's the perfect way to finish.

Marc@MarcMason.com

12:05 AM

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