UConn @ Loovll

HOLLY, IRRATIONAL: Connecticut, based on absolutely nothing but fresh affection for the Huskies, owed entirely to this. Let this be the first of a trend. Let player blogs sprout across the land. (Let Jonathan Crompton’s be titled “Alone (in the pocket) Again, Naturally.”)

ORSON, IRRATIONAL. When Baylor almost pantses you, you deserve to lose said pants to someone in need of a fine pair of pants. Like Steve Kragthorpe, who wandered sad and pantsless through most of 2007 and for the first game of 2008, but lo! Kragthorpe and competence are not speaking, but they’re texting, keeping tabs on each other on IM, you know…just feeling each other out. And in search of pants. [/noideajustguessing.]

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The evening’s agenda:

SWINDLE:  Atlanta, watching Jacksonville State @ Georgia Tech live and NC State @ South Carolina via ESPN360.

HOLLY: Los Angeles, watching Troy @ Middle Tennessee State via GamePlan and NC State @ South Carolina on ESPN.*

Neither, regrettably, will be in Denver wooing Ana Marie Cox…although I’m closer, Swindle.  Just saying.

Were we That Sort Of Blog, this is the point at which we’d call you some sort of collective brotherhoodish nickname (”Rampant and Unapologetic SEC Bias Nation, PUTCHA HANDS IN THE AAAYYYYR!!!1!!”) and offer to race you to the comments for the commencement of geographic roll-call, drink choices du soir, and unseemly insinuations about your relationships with your mothers.  We remain, however, cool and aloof as jungle cats (and just as shiny), and will merely inform you, as any well-bred hostess would, that the open thread below is available for any and all of the above needs.  Go on, now.

*Also on the agenda: Frequent and vehement cursing of Time Warner SoCal for appalling nonexistence of ESPN360 availability in LA, denying me the Return of El Perrilloux.  Get bent, sirs.

Hard dudes. Quick deaths. Few words.

First person plural: off. Blame this on cold medicine.

I should mention that my Dad is the oddest person I’ve ever met. He is and has always been a quantum person: blip! he’s here, joking, laughing, fully engaged and charismatic in the way men who claim membership in the “Smiling Irish Bastard Hall of Fame” can be. (I have next to no idea where my family actually hails from, it’s just the phrase and the similarity that matter most here, not the documented truth.)

Then, in a minute–blip! Gone. He still stands in front of you, or next to you, but in an instant his mind has gone somewhere completely alien and unreachable to you. Someone once wrote of Dean Martin that he must be either the deepest soul on the planet, so elusive was he, or that he was the shallowest. I’m never really sure of either, but the two do share an ethos of being phenomenally elusive people as hard to hit square on as Linnie Patrick coming through the hole. Years can pass without any real, substantive information being exchanged in conversation, and I have, on occasion, written down what I know about my dad using notebook pad. I don’t get past the second page. There is not enough information to fill the pages, thus saving the world from the 3,923,918th anguished daddy-issues bildungsroman.

(You all owe him a note of thanks. I forward them on for you happily.)

Linnie Patrick is a deliberate reference here: Linnie played for Alabama and was quicksilver in cleats when Bear Bryant coached at the University of Alabama. My father met Bryant once–possibly more, but again, information here is scarce–through the equally vaguely defined relationship my grandfather claimed with Bryant. All I know is my grandfather, a horse-trainer who shuttled around the country from track to track, knew Bryant in some degree and had enough of a connection to wangle a visit and (apocryphally) a scholarship offer for my aunt. I’d love to elaborate, but I can’t. That is all I know, leading to the endless stream of qualifiers, parentheses, and limiting modifiers. I don’t know much, and like 99.9 percent of history, it has evaporated into an oblivion of forgetting, half-memory, or denial.
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