Another 700-foot smash home run!
Now that we're all sufficiently shocked -- shocked! -- that Our Baseball Heroes would ever dream of taking steroids or any other performance-enhancing drug (or, in some cases, non-performance enhancing drugs), let's temper our outrage by noting a couple of things:

Do you really think this hasn't been going on for years?

And, more importantly, what matters more to you: That Mark McGwire can jack 70 home runs or that he might be impotent -- or dead -- at 45?

I'm guessing, unless you're his new wife or that cute kid that he lugged around all of the 1998 season, you're a lot more interested in McGwire's homers than his future, or any athlete's future. My guess is that your life isn't diminished all the much by the fact that Lyle Alzado's not around to provide color commentary on WCW telecasts.

So, I have a hard time taking a position on this steroid issue. Is it wrong? Probably, because they're a controlled substance in the United States. But Uncle Sam has nothing to say about what anybody does in Mexico or the Caribbean. Is it cheating? Probably, except everybody else does it too. Is it going to ruin their health? Probably, even though semi-literate ballplayers think they know more than the nation's best medical minds. Do I have a personal feeling about it? Yeah, I think it sucks, but my first front-page story was about a college football player who died of a heart attack at 20. Think he was using anything? I asked. I didn't get an answer. I didn't ask again.

Steroids wouldn't have done much for my athletic life. I was a cross-country runner in high school. When I graduated, I was 5-7 and weighed 100 pounds. If I was on steroids, people probably wouldn't have noticed.

But the needle was rampant in my high school in the mid-1980s. One story comes to mind:

My junior year, our football team earned its first state playoff berth in nearly 14 years behind a swift, but somewhat undersized junior running back. He was about 5-8 and 140, and he ran the 100-meter dash in about 10.8 seconds, and was practically uncatchable, at least in our area. His senior year, he was a plodding AND somewhat undersized defensive end. He was 5-8 and 190, and couldn't break 12 in the 100. All the 'roids did was make him meaner, which was something he didn't really need. It's not like he was going to go on to athletic greatness anyway, but it sure as hell ruined his senior season.

So we as a society will say to baseball, "Hey, you guys shouldn't take drugs," while still clamoring for guys to hit 70 home runs and throw 101. Which means what we're really saying is this: "Whether you're dead at 45 doesn't really matter to us."

A quick update on the Freelance Gig
If you're looking at it in Netscape 4, I have two tips:
1/for Pete's sake, upgrade to Netscape 6. Or Mozilla (which I was able to download on my 56k modem in less than 30 minutes). Or anything but Netscape 4.
2/Take another look -- even in your old, deprecated browser if you must. Extensive testing revealed that the site was less than attractive -- and less than readable -- in Netscape 4, especially on the Mac. I think I've fixed most of it. I know I haven't fixed all of it, but I'm getting what I can.

In our "soft launch" period -- which means we're showing it to friends, family and you -- we've had about 200 visitors. Only six have come with Netscape 4. But, this being my first dip into web design, it means a lot to me to have 1/reasonably fast downloads, not an easy feat for a photography site and 2/accessibility across all browsers. I tested this thing in Opera. I tested it in Netscape (although, obviously not enough in version 4; I have version 6 on my main machine.) But still, 96% of our first 200 visitors are using some version of Internet Explorer. And we wonder if Mr. Gates is running a monopoly.

Please pardon my absence from this neck of the Internet. Chasing Netscape 4 bugs has taken up a good deal of my free time and creative energy. Plenty has been on my mind; I just need to take a few minutes to put it into actual words. I will, soon.

Time for a brief commercial message
The Freelance Gig is up and running for all to see. Click around, take a look, tell me what you think. Especially if you see a broken link or some such.

Burned the midnight oil tonight to get the site launched. It's a pretty good feeling. It has provided the creative outlet that work hasn't, and the money doesn't suck, either. I'm years away from thinking I'd want to do it full-time, but it's a fun thing to do in the free time.

Anyhoo, here it is. Some pretty damn good pictures to look at, too. Enjoy.

Technical difficulties
Please stand by

Where I was when the world stopped turning
I realized that, unlike everybody else, I hadn't yet shared my Sept. 11 story. Having learned today that another terrorist attack is almost a certainty (to which I say, at the risk of drawing td's ridicule again, "duh!"), and never wanting to miss a chance to be like everyone else, might was well share now. These memories were also jarred loose by a semi-routine cleanout of various e-mail inboxes, which still had remnants of early September e-mails. There's no larger point to this; it's simply a recounting of some of the more odd things that flashed into my mind that day.

The newspaper we gave to readers on the morning of Sept. 11 was dull, dull, dull. Our 1A centerpiece was about the woes of the local farmers' market, and that ran on Page 1 because we really had nothing else. It was the latest in a run of dull papers. We needed some news in the worst way.

Well, not long after those dull papers thudded on driveways all over Texas, we got news. In the very worst way.

I took my daughter to school that Tuesday, as usual. I was pumping gas at 7:50-something a.m. CDT when the morning radio gag-fest suddenly turned serious. The gag-fest news reporter guy said, "We have a report that a small plane has hit the World Trade Center." As the numbers clicked away on the gas pump, I flipped to the AM news mouthpiece. What I heard stunned me. I didn't understand any of the words, but the guy was screaming at the top of his voice. I had a really prescient, intelligent thought, something along the lines of Wow, this must be bad.

Still pumping gas (hey, the minivan's got a 20-gallon tank), I called home on the cell phone. I told The Wife to switch over to the news. "I have no idea what's actually happening," I said, "but it's bad."

The radio news reports were still basically confused garble when I got home. It all came into focus thanks to the Today Show: smoke pouring from one of the towers of the World Trade Center. It was about 8:10 CDT. Now they were pretty sure it wasn't a small plane at all, but a jetliner. An American flight from Boston was unaccounted for. I rushed to the computer and punched in aa.com, American Airlines' web site. I went to their flight tracker and got all the flights from Boston. The first one on the list: Flight 11, to Los Angeles.

I went into the kitchen to make the Young Daughter's breakfast. My cereal pouring was interrupted by my wife, who said, "Katie Couric just said, 'What the hell is that?' "

Katie Couric's way too cute to be using language like that. I put the cereal box down in time to see the second plane hit the second tower on live television. "Holy shit," I said quietly, so The Boy -- who really wanted me to turn back to PBS -- wouldn't pick up an addition to his vocabulary. "We're under attack."

It was 8:30 a.m. I called The Boss. I said something intelligent like, "Looks like we've got a big one here." I asked if I should come in now or wait until later; clearly it was going to be a long night. He said wait. I went back to the TV. The Young Daughter still hadn't gotten her cereal, and she was not happy about it. I backtracked to solve that problem.

The TV people were confused, but handling it incredibly well, I thought. After all, we were under attack. They could be excused for being a bit flustered. The Wife and I discussed pulling The Old Daughter out of school. She wanted to. I didn't. I thought it would scare her unnecessarily. The Wife fumed for a while, but agreed.

Then: "There's been an explosion at the Pentagon." I said it out loud again: "Holy shit." Decided that those were words my 2-year-old son probably needed to know now. My mind was 35 miles south, at the office. This is going to be 32 pages, at least; big graphics, maps, pictures, what the hell is going on? Then another flight, United 93, unaccounted for.

Just before 10 a.m., the phone rang. It was a co-worker. "The Boss says come in now." In my other ear, from a local TV reporter, I hear the words, " ... Independent School District ... " Then, The Wife. "That's it," she said, "I'm going to get her." I started to protest, then stopped. Apparently some school district in the area -- not ours -- was closing school for the day. That was the clincher for her.

Meanwhile, my mind was racing, and soon, so was my Oldsmobile Alero. I made the 33.8-mile drive to work on a Tuesday morning in 30 minutes. You do the math. I found out that my car's speed is electronically limited to 112 mph. We're either putting out an early edition, I thought, or they're locking down the building.

Turned out it was both.

I got out of the car and stood in the parking lot for a second, trying to get my pulse rate back down to normal. It hit me then that this was the Biggest Story Ever. I don't know how to do this, I thought. I don't have any idea. It was as if my brain had been wiped clean of everything I had learned over the past 16 years.

As soon as I was in the building, I was herded to a computer terminal and told I was designing the cover of our Extra edition. Deadline was 2 p.m. God only knew what more would happen between now and then. I didn't worry about it. I started designing, and fast, because everybody on the newspaper's masthead -- the publisher himself, the editor, the executive editor, the managing editor, and assorted others -- was standing behind me.

I hit the button on that page at 1:58, and turned my attention to the regular paper. The final page count was 48. I don't remember a lot of specifics from that exercise. We were just hunting and gathering and trying to determine what was true and what wasn't.

Midway through the day, an e-mail from a guy in Sports: "They're saying 50,000 people might have been in that building. 58,000 were killedin the Vietnam War." Upper management was clearly grappling with the story too; they were trying to cover it like we would any other Big Story, not wanting to realize that this has transcended Big Story and gone past Life-Changing Moment.

When you're a production-side journalist, you sometimes forget that the characters in the stories are real people. The bigger the story, the less real they seem, because all you're concerned about is production. It hit us like a bucket of cold water about 11 p.m., when the pictures of the people who were on those planes began coming in. I was scrolling through them with a photo editor. Flashing on our screen was picture after picture of real people, people who had boarded an airplane on a Tuesday morning like millions of people had before them. People who were killed in an gruesome example of humans' capability to be inhumane.

I was in the office until 2 a.m. the next day, which meant I missed the most interesting and intriguing part of the day -- what normal people were doing on this most abnormal of days.

The Wife called in periodically to report on the real-world hysteria. Gas stations posting prices upwards of $3.99 a gallon. Lines forming for $3.99-a-gallon gas. She said the Extra edition I had just designed -- which we were giving away -- was going off the trucks faster than people could get there. She said some guy offered her $5 for her copy. She refused, because she didn't know if she could get her hands on another one. The surrealism was almost palpable. She said it was like being in one of those disaster movies, where all of the people who weren't actually involved in the disaster were milling about like stunned zombies, not quite sure what to do with themselves. Her most striking moment, she said, came at a stoplight. She was behind a car whose windows were already painted. On the back was a simple thought: "PRAY."

I told one of our business editors about the gas-price thing. She didn't believe me. I sent her a link to a story on a wire. She still didn't believe me. She was rather angrily not believing me by now. I delivered a printout of a photo of a guy putting "$5.99" up on his gas-station sign. She hollered over to one of her reporters, "Why haven't we been out on this gas-price thing?" I'm still waiting for her apology.

A co-worker related my favorite tale of the day. His dad is a big-wig in the state car dealer's associaion. He was scheduled to be on Capitol Hill that morning, and when hell broke loose, he intelligently decided to high-tail it out of there. Last his family heard, he was having trouble finding transportation. He called home from North Carolina. His wife asked him how the hell he had gotten there. He said: "I bought a car."

I kept all the newspapers from the first two weeks. At some point, it'll be interesting to go back and see how much we had wrong.

Quick roundup
No real thoughts (not yet, anyway), just items.
Item: The Wife's Champion Dog is now officially 1-15th of the way to being a real national champion dog. She won several ribbons at a show on Saturday. A good payoff for some hard work by both.
Item: Have missed the reader from utexas.edu. Maybe this will elicit a comment: My 7-year-old daughter has already announced her intention to go to Texas A&M.
Item: If the president had information that said explicitly that American 11 and American 77 and United 175 and United 93 were going to be hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001, I'd be pissed. In the absence of that, I don't care. Whenever you get on an airplane -- or in a car, or on a bus, or on a train, or out of your easy chair -- you're taking a risk. It's that simple.

I'm not out of items, just out of time. Stay tuned.

Shut the f--- up
One of the rules I made when I started this thing was that these posts would be unedited. I write it, I hit the button, it's there, and I leave it alone, damn the consequences.

I broke that rule just now. I wrote a long follow-up to the post below, explaining in excruciating detail exactly what it was about my job that inspires such vitriol. I read it, I shook my head and said, "Geez, RJ, you're a whiny bastard." Then, click, drag, delete. I censored myself.

I have a great wife, three fantastic kids, a very nice house and the bills are mostly paid on time. I have too much to be happy about to be wrapped up in whether my job sucks. That's indisputable.

It's also indisputable that my job is, for better or worse, a large part of my identity. Is that wrong and bad? Probably. But I have few outside interests, mostly for lack of time and money; I have no close friends within a 300-mile radius; and, in brutal honesty, I have this pathetic need to be good at something and have somebody notice. Up until recently, that particular pathetic need was fulfilled by my job. Now, not so much.

I've never hated my job, not in 16 years, 3 months and 1 week of gainful employment. That was one of the few things that separated me from everybody else in the world. Selfish as it sounds, I'd rather not join the masses in that regard.

'God, I hate my job'
I just said these words out loud for the first time in my entire life.

I find that very disturbing.

Fantasy baseball
Just completed the second leg of the Ultimate Baseball Fan Fantasy Trip. After taking my son to a game Thursday afternoon, three rows above the home team's dugout, I received a last-minute invitation from a well-connected co-worker to come back to The Ballpark at Arlington for an evening in a luxury suite.

As much as I rail about how corporations are sticking their fingers and their pocketbooks so deep into sports that the casual fan is being shut out, I must say: The view from their side looks pretty nice.

The luxury suites at the Ballpark are on the club level, just above the box seats. The one I was in last night was just a nudge to the third-base side of home plate -- a great view to watch the movement on the pitches and to follow the flight of the ball off the bat. Suite patrons have the choice of sitting outside, watching the game from real baseball stadium seats (my preference), or sitting in air-conditioned comfort with a full bar, finger foods and a fruit basket. A server comes by in about the fifth inning with a dessert menu. The best part: Each suite has its own ultra-clean restroom.

Oh, yeah, there was a ballgame, too. Detroit Tigers pitcher Jeff Weaver took a no-hitter into the sixth inning but stumbled in the eighth, as the Rangers posted a 2-0 victory. After Weaver walked speedster Calvin Murray in the eighth, back-to-back doubles from Mike Young and Alex Rodriguez sealed the deal for the Rangers. Kenny Rogers, despite not being at his sharpest, helped himself with four solid defensive plays to eke out eight shutout innings. Hideki Irabu (or, as George Steinbrenner once called him, The Fat Toad) pitched a perfect ninth for his ninth save.

Whatever it was I was complaining about earlier, I rescind it. All of a sudden, it's a pretty good time to be me.

Two posts for the price of one!
But be warned: If parental stories bore you, well, you'll be bored.

Just when I get to the point where I really hate my job, The Boss goes and does something along the lines of giving me two tickets to a baseball game. And not just any tickets. The Boy and I sat three rows up from the first-base (home team) dugout, and watched a hell of a ballgame.

The Boy is 3. He doesn't really care that Joaquin Benoit picked up his first major-league win by helping the Rangers shut down the high-scoring Chicago White Sox, 4-1. He doesn't care that Benoit was supported by his batterymate, catcher Hector Ortiz, who hit his first major-league homer to tie the game at 1 in the second inning. He doesn't care that Alex Rodriguez, he of the $252 million contract, had two hits and two tremendous defensive plays. But he was incredibly well-behaved, never acted bored during the whole game, clapped at usually appropriate times and was even polite enough to not join me in booing John Rocker (who, by the way, pitched a perfect seventh in relief of Benoit; I take back all the bad things I said about him.)

It goes without saying that our first trip to a major-league ballgame was a big father-son moment for me. My dad and I never had a chance to do anything like that; partly because he was pretty busy and partly because when I was a child, he and I shared few common interests. I don't resent him for that, or anything; that's just the way it was.

It's been a long time since I spent three hours enjoying myself as much as I did, selfish as that may sound. It helped turn around what started out as a pretty bad day for The Wife and me. We spent three hours of our morning at the local children's hospital with the Young Daughter, getting the latest on her dread disease. Despite being a perfectly well child with a few spots on her skin, she was poked and prodded by various people with initials behind their names.

As a reminder: She's not sick. She's doing just fine. She's just carrying this particular gene mutation around with her, and it's poised to strike at any time. This is one of the downsides of being a parent; you take the risk that one of your children might have to go through something like this.

Which is why I found myself reading a medical research story last Friday in the Very Large Metropolitan Newspaper, a story I normally would skip. Researchers at a local medical school believe they are on the verge of developing a treatment for the currently untreatable disease. "If our speculation is right, in five years we'll be able to greatly change the quality of life of patients with neurofibromatosis," said Dr. Luis Parada, a molecular biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.

I don't think I have ever hoped more for somebody's speculation to be right. The Young Daughter will be almost 7 in five years. If ever there's a time you deserve to have the greatest quality of life possible, it's when you're 7.

It was good to get a chance to watch Alex Rodriguez do his thing on Thursday. But I'd sooner ask for Dr. Luis Parada's autograph.

Arriba y arriba
It's "Time Out for Diversity" day here at the Very Large Metropolitan Newspaper. A marimba band just passed my desk playing "La Bamba."

Boom
I've been trying to stay away from commentary on real-world news, because frankly, I'm losing interest. Besides, I am not an authority on anything relevant. I can tell you how big a photo should be; I can give you my opinion on the point size and typography of your lead headline; I can tell you why day-to-day consistency in your page design is important. I can't tell you why people go to the local pool hall and blow themselves up. I can't tell you why some bored pampered American college kid feels the need to take a road trip, dropping off little bomblets in mailboxes along the way. Those things I'll never understand, no matter how much I read about them or how much I hear the talk-radio assholes in their glassed-in rooms try to explain them.

So I'm not going to pretend. Partly because of my intrinsic lack of knowledge, partly because I'm losing interest. Readers who have gone deep into the archive will note that I warned you against that very thing. They tell me apathy is dangerous. I respond by saying that when you're bombarded with the same images over and over and over and over, it becomes hard to feign interest. I mean, this thing in the Middle East has been going on since, when, 1967? That's longer than I've been alive. Nobody has a solution. What little I know about the situation makes me wonder if the people in charge even want a solution. Perhaps they understand that any good story must be based around a conflict, and if there was no conflict, they would not be a story. No friggin' wonder the American media would rather chase Britney Spears.

I don't know. I used to wish that I did know. Now I'm not so sure. All I know is that I was given so many keystrokes in this life, and I just wasted a bunch of them. I'm trying to find larger meaning in something that I'm not sure has a meaning.

I shouldn't give up the search. I hope I don't. But I'm not making any promises.

Where have I been?
1. Really busy. The Freelance Gig is within a week or two of going live. Finally.
2. Sick. Left work yesterday with dread illness. Bascially feels like a late-'60s campus riot is happening inside of my head. One of the rioters is trying to escape via my left eyeball. Feel a little better today; will be able to work, as long as I'm heavily medicated.

That's all. Haven't stopped typing for lack of inspiration; on the contrary, there's a little too much swirling around in my head amid the riots. Need to sort through it all.

A quick homage to my sports hero
I'm tired, I'm a little depressed, and I've had kind of a rough day. So I'm not really up for deep thought right now.

However, I will share this: 11 years ago today, Nolan Ryan threw his seventh no-hitter.

Nolan Ryan is my favorite athlete of all time. He's the real Unrepentant Texan. On the field, he'd just as soon throw a 100-mph heater through you as say hello. Off the field, he did the things he needed to do to ensure he'd have business success after his career was over, and he trained hard enough to make sure his career wouldn't be over until he was 46. He also once beat the crap out of a guy half his age who dared to charge the mound against him.

Thanks to a fortuitous radio signal, I picked up the last two innings of Ryan's seventh no-hitter on the radio in Anytown, 400 miles from the old Arlington Stadium. I had to move the radio around our little apartment several times to keep the signal. Finally, I took it outside. I'm sure the neighbors found it odd that I was holding the antenna in one hand and holding the other hand aloft.

Earlier that night, Rickey Henderson had set the all-time stolen base record. Henderson celebrated by ripping the bag out of the ground, and screamed in post-game interviews ad nauseum about how he was The Man.

A few hours later, when the real Man struck out Roberto Alomar to seal the Rangers' 3-0 win, he celebrated by smiling big, pumping his fist and hugging his catcher. He acted like he had been there before. In post-game interviews, he said, "This one will be especially gratifying because it was in front of the Arlington Stadium crowd."

That, folks, is how you play the game.