115 DEGREES, by DBHQ

115 degrees when I arrive in Phoenix.
The girls are all falling out of their tops.
The Diamondbacks have been sucking which is good in a way.
Tickets are plentiful.
A $3.95 scorecard is going for a buck.
This place is like a mall, a big shrine to the game.
I walk around with my mouth open.
There are foods I’ve never seen.

Everyone is in a daze. It’s 115 degrees but they have a roof on it, so it’s kind of weird. It’s indoors. Air-conditioned. It’s a baseball mall. The Giants pitchers are trotting in the outfield. The hitters are knocking echoing line drives into the empty seats. The game will start in a little over an hour.

I was in San Francisco for a month. I played songs once a week in a nice cool dark bar in the Mission. They got me tickets to about every Giants home game for a month, unless it was a night I was playing. Once I went to a game in the afternoon and sang songs that night. That was the bad gig. All I could think of was the Giants, and I wanted to just sing songs about the Giants. Luckily I had a few, but then I ran out of them. None of the other songs, the ones that weren’t about the Giants, seemed relevant, so then I was in trouble. I started making up songs about them. It was OK for awhile. You can always think of something to sing about Barry Bonds, and Alfonzo was going good, and Michael Tucker has a good name for rhyming. But then you’re reaching, and so it was bad after awhile. But oh well. Anyway, it was great to get all those tickets, and go to all those games, almost all of which they won. But there’s something cool, too, about being someplace where no one knows you and you’re just passing through, and you score your own ticket. Read More