Turning the page

The last couple of weeks haven't been great here in the confines of my chemistry-addled brain, but it's a new week now and the world keeps on turning.

Last night I had an umpiring shift, one of the final ones of the year as things wind down (I may get two or three more at most) and the final one that will involve some of my favorite players in the league. Bonus, I got to chat a little bit with Stephen, a guy that had been one of my favorite players to ump until he moved away last year, but who has now returned. Welcome back, dude! Hope to see you on the field next year. Also good to see Megan, Joel, Pat, Wyatt, Ray, and the rest of those folks yesterday for one final time until we convene again after New Year's. And Megan, thank you as always for the baked good samples. (Hey, I heard that, and they're not "special" baked goods. C'mon.)

I'm going to miss umping in the fall, but there'll be plenty of chaos to keep me occupied. Which is good, because the continual meltdown of the nation will undoubtedly pummel my psyche some more.

Meanwhile, there's three weeks of baseball left before the postseason and I've got tickets for three more Seattle Mariner games with the ever-present possibility of an extra or two. Despite their crappy last three weeks or so in which the M's went 6-15, they've decided to put some effort into it here at the end and have won their last three with 18 games to go. They're somehow only two games worse off in the standings since starting that 6-15 would-be collapse, going from tied for first place to, well, two behind, and two games is plenty surmountable with 18 left, especially since three of those 18 are against the team they're chasing. I say that, but I've also been a fan of Your Seattle Mariners for long enough to know that the most likely outcome is yet another missed-it-by-that-much end to the season.

This week also will see the season finale of Strange New Worlds, which has been really uneven in this third season of the series. After I have a chance to process Wednesday night's episode, I think a season recap/analysis post will be necessary since this show has been so frustrating to me—it has been so good in prior years, has the potential to be really great, and has shortchanged itself this season in some annoying ways.

Also, I watched Thunderbolts* the other night, having skipped it in the theaters. You know what? Pretty good. Certainly by the standard of recent efforts from Marvel Studios. I'd been forewarned by Erik's review that I probably ought to be in a decent headspace when I saw it, and I was. It is an interesting way to go, making depression the actual Big Bad of the film. Wielded by The Sentry, a character I was aware of in comicdom (a would-be Superman type created on purpose by nefarious experiments but that ends up being unstable) but never paid much attention to, I appreciate the way the depression was depicted, with Sentry's victims just poofing away leaving an ashy shadow behind; later we see what happens to them post-poof, they're trapped in a mindspace of sorts, reliving their traumatic or hurtful memories over and over. It's not a perfect representation, but damned if it isn't at least in the ballpark. The solution is for our reluctant (except for gung-ho Red Star, played to perfection by David Harbour) would-be heroes to coax Sentry out of his depressive episode and then after that restores everyone to normal keep working with him to manage his moods. There's also some absolute-power-corrupts-absolutely messaging here, which is good, but it is entirely unsatisfying to have the film end with Julia Louis-Dreyfuss' character Allegra de Fontaine slither out of trouble and manipulate things to her advantage again. Maybe that's appropriate given the real world we're living in, but that's also the main reason it's so irritating. Can't these criminal asshats even face justice in our comic-book movies??

Anyway, new week, new turn of the page, life goes on.