DISCLAIMER: Similar events did take place. However, this author makes no guarantee as to the accuracy of the depiction of events presented below. Some parts of this harrowing account may have been exaggerated for dramatic effect. Images have been included for your reading benefit.
Reader discretion is advised.
I feel like I’m writing these later and later every day. Day 4 was Tuesday which was yesterday. On Tuesday I had to get up early and write the Day 3 entry for about an hour. Maybe not literally an hour but it felt like a whole our. Today it’s Wednesday (Day 5) and I’m writing this a couple hours after lunch. This is fine.
Pretty much two interesting things happened all day so maybe that should make my job easier. Our parents told us all to get ready to go swimming at “the pool”, which was a little exciting because swimming is fun and I haven’t gone swimming in a long time for… a number of reasons. First and foremost my swamp is a pool, I mean my pool is a swamp.
So I was looking forward to swimming with the rest of the family… until it turns out that “pool” was a complete misnomer. “Hot tub” would be more accurate, or perhaps “overgrown bathtub”. I had to get in there and stand there for like an hour and look like I was amused. I was not amused.
I’m not even kidding, if I laid out on my stomach in the water, I could push off from one wall of the pool, and then, two seconds later, I would hit the other wall. Were I to stand in the centre, hold out my arms, and lean one way or the other, I could touch both walls easily. This pool is not sized for me. I am a giant in the land of ants. My nephews and niece and siblings are having fun around me. I cannot have fun. I am too big to have fun. I just stand there in the uncomfortably warm water.
I figure out that if you take a bucket and stick it underwater the right way, there’s going to be an air bubble under it. And even if you don’t do that right, you can still pull the bucket a little bit above the water line and something something physics the water inside will still be there. This is the most interesting thing I do all day in the pool. Otherwise I just sit there.
The other thing is that I went to a Giants game. They’re in town to play a two game set against the Angels. So for the first time in a year and a bit my dad and I head off to Angel Stadium to see the Giants. We’re told the concession lines at the stadium are really long, so we stop for some burgers on the way. They’re pretty good. I will eat nearly anything that has barbecue sauce in it without complaint and today was no different. We might go back with the rest of the family for kicks later.
There’s a 7-11 across the street and another down the road. For some inexplicable reason I take a photo of them both:
Just outside the stadium, we take a wrong turn into the wrong parking lot. We are told to turn around and go to the right parking lot. We are not the only ones who have made this mistake – the road before us is absolutely packed with cars who are making the same course correction. Sitting in traffic we see a guy with this beautiful license plate:
I try to track Pony’s Tacoma through the traffic. I see them try to get fancy with navigation to get to the stadium first. My dad saves about three minutes of waiting in traffic because he actually read a street sign or something that said there were two lanes to turn. We beat Pony to the stadium. Sorry Pony.
As we pull into the right parking lot, we see the cashier greet the car in front of us very affably. Nice, I think to myself. A man who enjoys his job. And then we pull up to the guy and he just gruffly takes our cash and tells us where to go. Why? The other car was filled with Angels fans. My dad and I aren’t exactly in full Giants gear, but it’s close.
Unlike the Dodgers, I don’t actually have much of a problem with the Angels. They’re cool. One of my cousins (like, another cousin that’s entirely separate from the ones I’m visiting right now, insofar as cousins can be separate from one another) comes from around here, she’s an Angels fans. The Angels have Mike Trout, the best player in all baseball, and Shohei Ohtani, somehow able to be a superstar both pitching and hitting. No one does that, not since Babe Ruth, not in any sort of regular capacity. Ohtani does. Despite this the Angels are at best painfully average. They have no pitching staff aside from Ohtani. They have wasted the first ten years of Mike Trout’s career and are on track to waste the next ten. The protagonist of my (first) book is canonically an Angels fan. I have no problem with the Angels.
Their stadium’s not bad either. At this point I’m going to let the photos take over because I’m sure no one wants to hear me break down the game last night.
I snapped this right around the second inning. Funny story, before my dad and I left the house to go to the stadium we had to spend ten minutes looking for my phone. I knew I’d left it in a certain place but it wasn’t there, and it wasn’t in any of the usual places either. Turns out my mother had inexplicably taken it and put it in her sister’s drawer. I have no idea why, but that’s what she did, and that cost us 10 minutes. We missed the first inning because of that. Spoiler alert, the Giants won 5-0. Four of their five runs were scored in the first inning.
Anyways, the sky was so nice:
I photographed it twice. This was a couple innings later. The moon was really nice last night and it was framed pretty well by the clouds right here.
I saw the Giants taking the field in the bottom of the sixth and for some reason I felt compelled to capture Giants left fielder Austin Slater taking up his position. Guy’s surrounded by nothing but grass. His closest teammate is a hundred feet away. He stands there and waits for a ball to be hit his way, in which case he will attempt to catch it or throw it towards another friend of his who is also hundreds of feet away. If he gets the chance he could look really, really cool, but most of the time he just stands and waits, maybe moves around a couple feet depending on who’s at bat. This is fifty percent of his job. He gets paid millions of dollars to do this.
Around the eighth inning I see the Angels play a video of a beaver lip syncing to Freddie Mercury vocalizing. I am not aware of any connection between the Angels and beavers, except perhaps that the Anaheim Ducks play across the street from the Angels and ducks and beavers are both like aquatic animals or something. It is funny.
I think this was back in the fifth inning. One of the Angels cameramen walked down to our row, filmed a sweeping angle of the stadium, then thanked us and left. That’s never happened to me before. I doubt it will happen again.
I got this picture of the Anaheim skyline as we were leaving the stadium. I like sunsets.
The last thing I haven’t mentioned yet is the heckler that was sitting three rows up from me. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with hecklers, but just think Statler and Waldorf from the Muppets. Yeah. That was the guy. The first thing I heard him shouting was “HIT A DOUBLE TAYLOR [Ward, one of the Angels’ outfielders]”. Taylor did not hit a double. Taylor struck out, because the Giants’ pitcher, Anthony Desclafani, was absolutely dealing last night. This was followed by hits such as “YOU’RE OUT MIKE [Yastrzemski, one of the Giants’ outfielders, who almost beat out a close play at first] AND YOU KNOW IT”, “HOW DARE YOU INSULT DAVID FLETCHER [the Angels’ second baseman, who had almost made a similar but entirely separate close play at first, only to be ruled against]”, “CHALLENGE THAT PLAY MADDON [the Angels’ head coach] YOU COWARD”, and, shortly, after the umpire’s final ruling had been made against the Angels, “IT’S OK FLETCH WE KNOW YOU MADE THAT ONE”.
What a character.
Anyways, fun game at the ballpark. I didn’t know how much I missed it until I was there. The ubiquitous din of the crowd, the long concession lines (i wasn’t kidding when I said the lines were long, it was twenty minutes to get some overpriced nachos), the bright lights, the kindly old ushers, the idea that the stars you’ve watched so long are right there… and of course the way the stadium pretty much shakes during the seventh inning stretch when they sing, “let’s root, root, root for the A N G E L S“. It’s crazy good, I’m telling you.
…day four survived.
