Los Spurs

Spurs rule.

Los Spurs don't.

Today is March 6, the anniversary of the Battle of the Alamo. One hundred seventy-two years ago Santa Anna and Co. topped off a 13 day siege of the Alamo with a final assault of hand-to-hand combat. It took three hours to polish off most of the Texas soldiers at the Alamo. But Texans got the last laugh a month later when they surprised Santa Anna's forces at San Jacinto, and The Republic of Texas was born.

So even though Mexico won the Battle of the Alamo, the battle is regarded as an integral battle in what ultimately lead to Texas Independence. And white boys have been running the show in Texas ever since.

So doesn't it seem like an odd day for the Spurs to celebrate their Latin American fan base by wearing uniforms that say Los Spurs?

Don't get me wrong. I get why they went with a Spanish-themed jersey. Two of the Spurs' players are Argentinian and one of them, Manu Ginobli, is wildly popular. And San Antonio prides itself on its Mexican heritage. So a Spanish-based Spurs jersey makes sense. But maybe having the Spurs market and wear these jerseys in December rather than March 6 makes even more sense.

But that's not what really seems odd to me. My issue is that phrase "Los Spurs" makes even less sense.

First of all, it's not as if their regular uniforms say "THE SPURS" on the front. They just say "SPURS." So the "Los" makes no sense.

Instead, if they wanted a true Spanish version of the uniform it should just say "Spurs" in Spanish. I should look it up, but isn't espuela how you spur in Spanish? Maybe el patron de Los Spurs (Peter Holt, I mean Senor Pedro Holt) didn't want to do that because "Los Spurs" would have to be "Las Espuelas."

A team of 12 tough guys with a feminine ending? I don't think so.

As it stands, I know of no language where "Los Spurs" means anything.

Jucy E-Mail

I am a fan of...
1. The San Antonio Spurs
2. The Nook in St. Paul.
3. La Tuna in San Antonio
4. Jones, my friend in San Antonio, TX.
5. The Anginator, my friend here in Minneapolis.

So what happens when these five forces of goodness mesh in one evening?

This is what happens. Maybe a little context will help.

About five weeks ago, Emily and I went out to The Nook for Jucy Lucys with The Anginator and her husband. Summit Winter Ale was on tap, I had a Matt Birk burger, and the company was good. I was still a little homesick from my last trip home, so I got to thinking, what would be the eqivalent in San Antonio of going to The Nook, where I can get that warm glow of being content?

Well, La Tuna in San Antonio comes close, but the warmth may be lacking when you go in December, since the place has no walls beyond the bar where you get your drink.

But back to Minneapolis five weeks ago. As the Anginator was driving Emily and I home, I had a few rants. In between rants, I remembered my last trip to La Tuna was with Emily and Jones. After Anginator dropped us off, as I was getting ready for bed, I remembered the Spurs were playing that night. I checked the score on-line and was horrified to see they losing by over 20 points. At home! It just seemed logical to e-mail Jones and e-rant against the Spurs.


With Jones at La Tuna. Find the real south Texas blogger and find the south Texas poser.

Little did I know I my letter would make its way into blognation. If I did, I may have cleaned up the language a little and maybe proof-read it so the former vs. latter agreement at the end of the letter didn't get crossed. Actually, I would have done neither. Fuck it.

Click here to read the entry.

His whole post is worth reading, because as I was getting ready for bed, he was at the game. Oddly, I think we both would agree, even though he had great seats, I had the better experience.

Reading his description of the SBC Center experience makes me nostalgic for the old HemisFair Arena where the Spurs played when I was a kid. I wonder if, decaeds from now, people will yearn for the Metrodome the same way we old Spurs fan yearn for The Arena, as we called it. In retrospect, it was a pretty crappy place to watch a game. But there wasn't one damn corporate thing about the place. And that is one reason it is missed.

Keeping San Antonio Lame, One Blogger At A Time

Most of us are aware of the Keep Austin Weird bumper stickers and t-shirts (dare I say movement?) that have been around for awhile. Fewer people are aware of the Keep San Antonio Lame bumper sticker/movement scene.

A friend of mine from high school, Jones, is doing his part to keep San Antonio lame. And I mean that as a good thing. San Antonio has a lot to offer, if you know where and how and where to look. And you need to know a diamond in the rough when you see one.

The lameness to celebrate stems from the fact that it is a quiet, slow, humble lamness. Compare that to the arrogance and glitz of Dallas. I'll take San Antonio any day over that.

So Jones writes for The San Antonio Current which is that city's equivalent of The City Pages. He rides his bike around the city, takes lots of pictures on these rides, and goes to music and art shows. What he does is uncover all those diamonds in the rough that keep San Antonio so beautifully lame.

Maybe I find the lameness so wonderful because as much as the city is getting bulldozed and developed, there are still pockets of it here and there, that will never change. They will stay frozen as I remember them being from 1976 to 1990.

Click here for his latest entry. Even all you non-San Antonionians should check it out. He has a pretty interesting take on MLK Day.

Another reason to check out his post: he got a pretty cool picture of The Pancho Villa Lounge. If you scroll to the pictures at the bottom of the blog, it is the third from the last picture. I swear I've driven by that building about a hundred times on my way out to my sister's place in St. Hedwig. If that is indeed the building (it has to be), I will say this: no other building has ever held such intrigue to me the way that one has. What the hell was that place like before it closed?

A smaller, rural version of (a great San Antonio bar) La Tuna?



I guess my challenge to Jones is to find another Pancho Villa place that is still open. If there is one left in this country, I know good and damn well it's somewhere on the outskirts of San Antonio.

If I Had A Billion Dollars, I'd Buy Back My (Neighbor's) Old Room

Since there are only about six of you who read this blog, I'll be lucky if two people get the lame reference to the song Making Fun of Bums that titles this post.

When I finished high school my mom sold the house I grew up in since I was four, and she moved to a new neighborhood. When I was in Texas last week I went for a run through my old neighborhood, past my old house, for old time's sake.

One of the nice things about running past the old house, is everything looks pretty much the same, aside from some minor lanscaping changes (a few trees have been removed, some bushes have been mercifully trimmed, things like that). The house is still the same color, and some of the very same plants are still in some of the planter boxes.



It's comforting to see something as remote and abstract as my childhood home still more or less intact.

So it was most unsettling to run past the old house, with everything looking pretty much the same, and then see that the house next door had been completely razed. Imagine my surprise when I saw this.



A red 1950s rambler used to be in that lot. That house has been burned into the folds of my memory, so it makes no sense to my eyes that it is no longer there.

The Ls were an elderly copule who used to live in that house. Mr. L had about eight dogs (no exaggeration), who enjoyed life in a heated dog house in his back yard. Our two houses alone must have dropped the property value of the other houses on our block by a good 20%. He had all those dogs, and we had five ducks and two of our own dogs.

I don't remember too much about the Ls. They had two granddaughters that my sisters and I used to play with (I can't remember their names), but I didn't see them much after I was around seven or eight years old. You know, I thought girls were gross, and I actually was gross. So that pretty much ended any friendships I had with those two girls. I also remember Mr. L often cleared his throat by hawking a big loogie and spitting it out as he walked out to check on his dogs. I know this because we could hear him from inside our house, even when our windows were closed.

I didn't see much of the Ls as I progressed through high school. One Saturday afternoon I heard an ambulance pull up on our block. I walked outside to see what was going on and the ambulance was parked in front of the Ls' house. I was going to walk over to see if everything was okay, but Mrs. L just waved "hi" to me and calmly walked in the house with the paramedics. That was the last correspondance I would have with her. A few days later my mom told me Mr. L had died.

According to my family this lot has been vacant for about a year. So the tear down part is done. I wonder what kind of house will eventually take its place. I know that neighborhoods evolve and houses get replaced, but it was still such a stark change to run by.



As the old saying goes "you can never go home again," and I don't really want to. But even so, it is unnerving to have such concrete proof right in front of your eyes.

Fat Fight

I-35 connects Minnesota to Texas. Minnesota seems to have its own rivalry with Texas, although most Texans are not aware of this.

But let's just say for a second Texans and Minnesotans had equal feelings about such a rivalry. Say a friendly, trivial rivalry like St. Paul vs. Minneapolis. For example, St. Paulites brag about the Cathedral, The Nook, and the Science Museum. Meanwhile, Minneapolitans puff their collective chest out over the Basillica, Matt's, and The Walker.

So what if St. Paul, Minneapolis, and the rest of Minnesota joined forces to take on Texas?

Minnesota could boast The Jucy Lucy. Texas would counter with deep-fried catfish.


A Jucy Lucy from The Nook in St. Paul, MN

vs.

Fried Catfish Platter from Brieztke's Cafe in New Berlin, TX

Who would win?

Southern Lights

Happy New Year everyone. Emily and I spent the week from Christmas Day to New Year's Eve in San Antonio. Part of our stay was in St. Hedwig, Texas, which I learned is the second biggest municipality in Bexar County, outside of San Antonio. Who knew? Well, my brother-in-law knew, and now I do, since he told me. Anyway, 30.1 square miles? Not bad for a town of 1,875 people.

Anyway, my sister and her family live out there. While the snow was flying in Minnesota, Emily and I were treated to warm weather and lots of sun. While we were in St. Hedwig, we also saw this sunset on Friday night.

Suck it, Aurora Borealis.

Holy Crap!

My sister sent me a link to one of the craziest football plays I have ever seen.

Click here to check it out. I promise, even if you're not a football fan, you'll be glad you did, if only to hear how excited the guy doing play-by-play gets at the end.

Only in Division III football could something like this happen.

Even if you are not a sports fan, and don't know the difference between a lateral pass and a ladder, you shoud watch this play. Case in point, my sister probably never knew what a lateral pass until she saw this play (it features 15 laterals).

And because this blog is all about me, I should add that the team featured in this play is Trinity University in San Antonio, less than two blocks from where my mom lives. It is also where my sister works (hence her knowledge of this play). And its campus was one of Shakie's favorite places to roam aimlessly.

Back to School

Leave it to someone in the education industry to actually give me a homework assignment for my blog. So Jocelyn has assigned me to write a meme. Like she said, a meme is basically a blog chain letter. I feel like I'm back in college again, trying to get a paper done at the last minute.



But I try to be a good sport, so I will do this meme that she "tagged" me with. The problem I have with this has nothing to do with the concept of a meme. The issue I have is with this particular meme's topic: Six Weird Things That Have Happened To Me. Nothing too weird has really ever happened to me.

I have a very enjoyable but stable life. I haven't hung out with the drummer from Huey Lewis and the News in an elevator. No one has ever come up to me, bleeding from the eyes and asked me if I had a map of Idaho he could borrow. So the six weird things I can think of may seem, shall we say, less than freaky.

So you can read this post standing up. You don't need to worry about having to change your underwear when your done. And there will be no cases of slackjaw at the end of this post.

Jocelyn is a writing teacher, so she should appreciate themes. Since the bulk of my posts as of late have been about Texas and running, I am going to try to confine all the weird shit that has happened to me to these two topics. And to really suck up to the teacher, I will begin with a story that took place in Duluth.

So I hope all this will prevent Jocelyn from docking me ten points for turning my meme in late. Away we go...

1. I ran my first marathon, Grandma's Marathon in Duluth, back in 1999. Until then, I was a former middle to long distance runner. I had never even raced anything longer than an 8k, much less 26.2 miles. Having taken five years off from running, I was unaware that polyester, in the form of CoolMax, had made a comeback. I figured if a cotton t-shirt worked for me back in college, it would certainly work for me now.

It turns out I was wrong. Cotton may work for an eight mile run. It does not work in a marathon.

One of the things that truly disgusts me about marathons is the bloody nipples that so many men get. And it turns out there are products like performance gear and body glide that help prevent nipples from bleeding.

Open letter to Lord: May all future men who run a marathon, including me, be aware of these products. Amen.

So back to 1999. I finished Grandma's in a t-shirt that happened to have the University of Wisconsin logo on it. Rookie error. I did not go to Wisconsin. I can't tell you anything about Wisconsin sports, other than they're pretty good. And I have never been to Madison for more than a few hours, where the university is. But for 26.2 miles, crazed spectators shouted "GO WISCONSIN!" at me. One woman even broke into the Wisconsin fight song as I went by.

So clearly this shirt was a poor choice. After I finished the race, I loitered about the post-race area. I was in a bad mood because, well, running 26.2 miles will do that to you. So I was getting more and more pissed off at all the guys walking around with their shirts still on, stained with nipple blood. I wanted to grab each guy and yell, "HAVE SOME FREAKING PRIDE WILL YOU??? CHANGE YOUR SHIRT!! YOU ARE GROSSING EVERYONE OUT!!!"

About thirty minutes after the race, I was sitting with Emily and some other friends, when I said I was going to get some ice cream. A friend of mine said, "Don't you want to change your shirt first?" And everyone laughed.

I assumed this was because of the damn Wisconsin logo, but you, gentle reader know better. Sure enough, when I looked down, I saw it. Two gushot wounds to the chest.

There I was, one of those disgisting male marathoners with a white shirt and bloody nipples. Have some pride.

It is a very weird feeling to look at your own shirt and realize you have become what you despise.

2. When I was in high school, my sister went to college in Rhode Island. I visited a few times, which was fun. One of the highlights was going to Boston and Fenway Park to watch a Boston Red Sox game. During one of our sorties to Fenway, a girl started shouting my name. "Damn yall," I thought, "I even got it on the East Coast. I'm such a lady's man the lasses even know me in Boston." But I turned around and it was some girl from my high school. "Not so cool," I thought, "That girl is kind of annoying."

About six years later, when I was in college, my friend and I went on a road trip during the summer. We went to a lot of baseball games on this trip. One of them was to Fenway Park. We drank a lot of beer before we got there. We sat in the bleachers and drank more beer. I tried to teach a kid how to keep score. He ended up correcting everything I was telling him. I drank more beer and decided it was time to go to the bathroom.

As I was washing my hands, I looked over to the guy washing his hands next to me, and it was a guy I went to high school with.

Fenway Park in Boston is clearly is the place for me to see how my high school classmates from San Antonio are doing. Maybe we should have our 20 year reunion in the men's restroom of the Fenway bleachers.

3. Speaking of San Antonio back when I was in college, I was running on a stretch of road on Vandiver. You know where I'm talking about. By the old Kroger that had the Ms. PacMan, the Little Ceasar's, and the check cashing place, just past the Austin Highway.

This was the summer of 1991. It was 5 p.m. in August. with triple digit heat and humidity. So all I had on was my running short, socks, and shoes.

A guy sitting on his bike on the shoulder of the road stopped me, addressed me as sir, and asked me if I had any cigarrettes.

Uh yeah, Lance Armstrong, I take a smoke break every mile. I stash my Marlboros in my underwear and I pull them out all sexy-like. You know like a sultry woman who keeps her driver's licence in her cleavage (I'm thinking of a movie like Cannonball Run). Only my cigarettes are drenched in ass sweat, but help yourself, Lance.

Fast forward to a week later: same time, same place, same attire, same run, same weather. As I was crossing the Vandiver/Austin Highway intersection, a guy in a Suburban honked his horn and waved to me. I thought it must have been one my friend's dad, so I waved back. Eventually he got through the light, and caught up to me, at the same spot where the guy asked me for cigarettes.

But this guy asked me if I had something else I wanted to give him. Actually, he wanted to give me something, and, um, well, it involved, well, what he offered carried the assumption that I was a) gay and b) into hooking up with random strangers I see at the fabled Austin Highway/Vandiver intersection.

Gross. Not for the "gay" part, so much as for the "asking random strangers who run across Austin Highway part for sex" part.

I declined, and realized this guy was not my friend's dad, afterall.

What the hell was up with the Austin Highway/Vandiver intersection back in the summer of 1991?

4. Speaking of running in San Antonio, we'll call this The Ballad of Israel Flores, as it takes up items 4 and 5.

Israel was a rival of mine back in high school cross country. His school, Edgewood, was in my district (Minnesotans call them conferences) and was part of The Lamest Race Ever Won In A Cross Country Meet In the History of Time. This historic event occured in I think 1987 and was won by yours truly.

I was a sophomore and had a pretty good chance to win the race. But only because the best runner in the district, my teammate Cuatro, was in the state tennis tournament. Even without Cuatro we had a good enough team to advance to the Regional Meet, so this was an ideal, no-pressure situation for a second-fiddle guy like me to actually win.

The first two miles of the course were very hilly, and on a narrow path that ran through the woods. The last mile was flat and fast and finished on the 50 yard-line of Edgewood High School football field.

My coach figured most of the other good runners would take off too fast, as they would be preoccupied about getting packed in, away from the lead. Our plan was for me to sit in the weeds, and really run aggressively for the second half. And I did just that. At about 1.5 miles, I started passing all the usual suspects.

Johnnie Black, look at the back of my shoes. Ortho Mendez, you are now in my rearview mirror. And then I surged past Luis Ruiz right as we got out of the foilage of the first two miles. With Cuatro gone making like Bjorn Borg, that was everone left in the race I had to worry about.

But as I came past my coach in the open field he started yelling, "You're in second place! Keep surging!"

Sure thing Coach, easy for you to say. Apparently you can yell without that nagging feeling of oxygen debt. Wait! Huh? Second place?

"WHAT? WHO?!?!?" I shouted back.

"I don't know. Some guy from Edgewood. Just go get him!"

Again, easy for you to say. Sure enough, now that we were out in the open, rather than the One Acre Woods, I could see a guy in a red unifrom running all by himself. Oops.

And that was my introduction to Israel Flores.

So with less than a mile to go, and a 200 yard lead, this race is Israel's to lose. And lose it he did, no thanks to me.

I chased after him, just enough to find that balance between running hard enough to keep my coach off my back, and not so hard that my heart would explode in the name of a race that was already decided.

So I made an ostensible attempt to catch Isreal as we entered the stadium and did our half lap around the track before running through the field goal posts en route to the 50 yard line. I was maybe 100 yards back as he made it to the goal posts, and he had 70 yards to go.

"Well played, Israel," I thought, "This was your home course, and you knew how to run it."

Or did he? Either Israel decided to run his victory lap before actually finishing, or he didn't know his home course afterall. He made like Charlie Brown and kept running around the track, after the goal posts. Edgewood coaches and fans were screaming at him to turn around and go through the goal posts.

I saw this and found my fifth gear. Like a cat, I cheaply pounced on that dying bird. I sprinted through the goal posts ten yards ahead of Isreal, who had finally doubled back, and I sprinted to the glory that was the district title for whatever district we belonged to.

So there you have it. The Lamest Victory Ever. In fact, it's a Trinity of Lameness. I beat a guy who ran 5200 meters to my 5000. I didn't even know he existed until my coach told me with less than a mile to go. And the best runner by far wasn't even there that day.

And here is the weird part. After the awards ceremony, I walked past some guy from another school. "Man! Awesome job!" Evidently he was running the race too, and had no idea just how cheap that victory was.

5. That was my sophomore year. By the time I was a senior, Israel many opportunities to avenge his loss. With the playing field level (i.e. he doesn't spot me 200 meters), we had some pretty good races and I'd guess we were pretty even. But then I was hit with shock and devastation when I read in the paper one night that Israel Flores was shot and killed in gang related violence near Edgewood High School. This completely conflicted with the Israel I had known for over three years.

This was awful. I talked with my friend Cuatro and my coach about it. I talked to my mom about it. We decided the best thing to do was just to send flowers to the family and not do anything more grandiose. The pain was palpable.

But then my coach called me 48 hours later and told me my rival, Israel Flores the runner is alive and well. Sadly, another Israel Flores, a football player was the one who was shot and killed. It turns out Edgewood had not just these two, but three Israel Floreses. So it was with a lot of guilt that I felt relieved that one Israel Flores was okay, even if that another one's life had to end so tragically and unnecesarrily short.

And it was strange all year to race Israel, and try to beat him every time I faced him, after mourning his death, Tom Sawyer style, for 48 hours.

6. In college cross country on the Fridays before a big race, we'd go for a casual three to five mile jaunt around campus for practice. We called these Campus Loops. Sometimes we'd run through the library. Or the dining hall. Or the dorms.

One time Soul Asylum was on campus to do a Friday night show. So as part of our Campus Loop we ran through the buidling that housed the hall/lounge where they'd be playing that night. Soul Asylum happened to being doing their sound check as we ran by.

The lead singer, I want to say his name is Dave Pirner, saw us and said into his microphone, "Hey look. It's the jogging team."

So there you have it. Six weird things that have happened to me in Texas and/or while running. I hope I get a better grade on this than I did on most of my college essays. And I hope it was a little more interesting.

Snake Farm--It Just Sounds Nasty

Snake Farm--Well it pretty much is.

If you grew up in San Antonio, you spent a lot of your childhood going north on I-35 out of town. This is because this is how you get to New Braunfels, the Guadalupe River, and Austin. And this means you spent a lot of time driving past the Snake Farm outside of New Braunfels.

I went the Snake Farm once, in high school with some friends, and we all agreed that was one time too many.



And this summer Texas singer/songwriter Ray Wylie Hubbard put out an album called Snake Farm. And the lead track shares the album's name. So I asked to get this album for Christmas, and my brother-in-law Jake came through.

The first thing that popped into my mind was, "The Snake Farm has been an institution since 1967 and it took almost 40 years for someone to write a song about it? That's surprising."

Many of Ray Wylie Hubbard's song have a blues quality to them, which means these songs often get stuck in your head. The song Snake Farm is one of these songs. But the beauty is, in this case, I am not annoyed by having his songs in my head. Rather, I just want to listen to his songs more and more.

Click here for the lyrics.

So I played this song this morning at 7 a.m. as I was eating my breakfast and have been hearing the song in my head ever since.

I also like the end of the song ("And we... you know...it's a snake farm"). Ray Wylie Hubbard is very funny.

The final thing about this song is it is a pretty accurate description of the vibe and mood of the Snake Farm. I just wish Ray Wylie Hubbard had written that song back in 1989. Then I could have just listened to his song to know what the Snake Farm was like. Instead I went and checked it out for myself and just felt kind of dirty and very depressed for about three days afterwards.