I’m riven with anxiety triggered by latent agoraphobia. This situation began nearly as soon as I agreed yesterday to go to a baseball game with Caroline as part of what was organized by her company as an employee and family outing.

Tensions grew as I fell into the half-mile-long line of cars waiting to park. For a moment I relaxed, as on the walk to the entry I was nearly alone. Once in the park, I started having glimpses of panic. I’m in enemy territory.

Jocks, lunkheads, idiots, bros, angry old white men, skanks with enormous immovable blobs of plastic barely contained on their chests, muscle boys, the obese, and fanboys. They all add up to a menagerie straight out of the worst circus or theater of the absurd. Please excuse my unbearably biased generalization as I certainly am well aware that it is petulant and that many many people in the crowd do not deserve my ugly descriptions.

Instead of enjoying the show, I’m feeling that I’m being gut-punched by every Jersey Shore specimen of peculiarity that seems to be employed here as a kind of stadium mannequin just for that purpose. The display from the margins of society is conspiring to make me squirm.

Just as I get situated out in the grassy outfield resigned to my misery, an old friend drags me over the 1st row behind home plate. I’m in the belly of the beast and it threatens to consume me. I try looking at the players but my interest is running so negatively that I want to see anything else, except everywhere I look I see signs of baseball.

It’s the top of the 7th with the home team being crushed by the foe that also spends this time of year in Arizona for spring training. I collect Caroline who I’m certain was more comfortable with me out of sight as I’m not one to hide my disdain.

I do have to heap a ton of gratitude on Caroline’s employers as I believe these types of activities are great for company morale. Not only were we their guests, but they shared a generous amount of Salt River Fields Bucks good for food, drink, or merchandise. I cannot thank them enough for their effort and feel somewhat ashamed at my inner dialog of hostility. I last attended a baseball game in 2008 when I took my mother-in-law for the sole purpose of getting a photo of her at the event with a beer and hot dog. I tend to think that a large part of my anxiety was due to the fact that there’s a high likelihood that many in the park were of a particular political persuasion I’m not currently gelling with.

Rarely have we been witness to so much snow right here in our desert home of Phoenix, Arizona. As the clouds came and went yesterday we were offered glimpses of nearby mountains that had acquired a considerably heavier dusting of snow than during the few other infrequent times those mountain tops were cold enough and the desert was receiving enough rain to make this magic happen. Today every single one of those clouds has moved on and we are under clear blue skies.

I’d snapped this photo yesterday but it was heavily overcast and I never got to jot down a blog entry so I’m including this here to give an idea of just how surreal our place in the Southwest looked.

If I were a betting man I’d wager the snow will be gone by the end of the day, but for now we get to bask in the sense we had a legitimate winter that went beyond the temperature dipping into what most think is cold. Yet I’m still in shorts and my sleeves are rolled up, as it’s exquisite out here and while it’s a mere 40 degrees (about 4c) I’m enchanted by the beauty and the fact that it’s not 25 degrees out (about -4c).

Caroline is at a nearby workshop this weekend with one of her looms learning some other new technique. I dropped her off and after dinner will be picking her up. While carrying her loom into the lady’s house who is hosting the workshop I recognized more than a few of the women Caroline has gotten to know over the years since joining various guilds here in Arizona. Come Monday she’ll have three projects spread across her various looms, some yarn is developing on the spinning wheel, a pair or two of socks are on her desk, if I’m not mistaken there’s a backstrap project working somewhere, and she’s still crocheting her miniaturized version of the Canal Convergence artwork that she had worked on for the previous year.

As for me and the rest of my day? My mortar and pestle showed up last night (Amazon same-day delivery) and so I’ll be pounding some pickled green tea for making laphet thoke for Caroline and me next week (Burmese green tea salad). I need to turn my soaking sprouting almonds into almond milk. A blog entry I was editing yesterday for the fourth time still isn’t working for me so maybe I’ll turn to it. The synth is always begging to be given attention so I’ll probably allow its circuits to warm so I can torture some sounds out of it. Along the way, other things will arise to distract me, but so it goes on a Saturday.

After dropping Caroline off at her Sunday meeting on the corner of Camelback and Central I walked three miles to a coffee shop on 7^th Street, south of Thomas Avenue, called Bikini Beans. Along the way, I passed a tavern that was packed before lunch (there was no hint of brunch specials, just booze). I passed a church and a strip club and Cruisin’ 7th, claiming to have “The Best Drag Show In Town.” Of course, I came across a number of other coffee shops but I was heading to the place featuring bikinis.

So was it worth the extra miles? Well if it’s a cold day you won’t be seeing much in the way of a bikini, though I was assured they were on and it was even proven. Sadly, there is no indoor service but they do have wifi and four small tables outside so I had a spot to jot down this brief blog entry.

There are a lot of people looking to catch a glance of a bikini-clad young woman on a Sunday morning because their drive-thru stays busy. Next door is the Bible Baptist Church promising bible studies which make for the perfect contrast of Bikinis and Bibles. Across the street, the Urbancookies Bakeshop beckons, but I have an ounce of willpower left.

I wasn’t going to be here very long as I have three miles to walk back and in any case, there’s no gawking without being a creeper. This though raises the question of my dilemma by straddling a generation that was raised on titillation and having become a person who would like to be beyond the juvenile antics of copping a glance. Then again would anyone judge me for ogling some drag queens up the street or praying fervently in front of Jesus nailed to a cross?

My walk back will take me through some residential streets in order to avoid some of the homeless people I passed on the way here and to keep me a distance from the heavy traffic on the main thoroughfare. Being outside on this pleasant day while news reports talk of heavy snows in the Pacific Northwest and sporadic snow in the Northeast reminds me of how lucky we are to live in Phoenix, Arizona, where I can enjoy an iced coffee while wearing shorts and having my sleeves rolled up.

Walking through the side streets I heard drums in the distance and those could only mean one thing: the annual Heard Museum World Championship Hoop Dance Contest. I stopped in for a short while to reminisce about a previous visit and realized that Caroline and I should have made time yesterday to sit in on the competition. I couldn’t stay long as Caroline would be done with her meeting around 3:00 pm and I still had a couple of miles to walk back to our car.

We learned about No Festival Required from Lisa Takata, a local group dedicated to bringing interesting films to the Valley. Today they were showing the documentary Keep Talking about saving the Kodiak Alutiiq language spoken on a tiny island where only 40 people can still speak in their native tongue. Sadly we weren’t able to attend but hopefully, the organizers will have some other inspired titles coming up. And that’s how we spent a good portion of our Sunday.