Franklin Crawford

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The thing here is you know, you know ... you have some sweet epiphanies in the you of your youth and then sheeshus you gotta live another 50 years anyway ... so there was no transcendence for the month of July. Folks tried. Some escaped this narrow plane of existence moved on to the bitter waves of vinegar seas ... others like us, went poking about and found we were running out of everything: fire escapes, shadows, flowers, rooftops, dogs, dykes, demons, farmland, trails, waterways ... all so tight and limited when it should be expansive and summerish ... sort of a pall took over ... it was the heat, we reckoned. We were just not used to it. Or it was that damned book the teacher had us reading about "Loneliness" et  Cacioppo and Patrick et al. and actually pointing it out late at night and laughing about it and getting quoted then going home and wondering "What duh? Are we laughing at our own July ... Unmerciful mirth and the firefly already snuffed?"

Of course, this is only a test. The real prose that should be here is out on the street without word or vision. And there isn't enough of it any more. There is an enormous amount of a lot of something, but it falls away and you see, really, we are running out of everything ... We ran straight out of July ... Used up the whole thing ... Imagine! Thirty-One whole frickin' days! You vile squanderers, you two-bit wanderers, you P. Diddy and Po Boy and Wannabe. You ran out of ammo, too.

Now we got to settle on what we're going to do with this little scrap that's left. You watch yourself. You watch us. We're watching you, it's only fair. 

Tiny Town, USA – Some where between hyperbole and hijinks falls the insult. As between the armpit and the ankle falls the soap and where the marimba mallet strikes the block comes the tone. 

Tiny Town's sad attempt at making fun of an authentic journalist, Dan Fost, is the soap that got away, the mallet that hit a sour note. The article about Mr. Fost's reading in San Jose was writ in haste and error. An overdose of Oxycontin or perhaps a bad clam got into C. Penbroke Handy's Six Mile Creek Chowder at lunch. 

Rarely do I step in and meddle with the magic of our writers and editors. But Mr. Fost's book, "Giants: Past and Present," is not your average scribbler-turned-sports-fan's labor of love fallen flat on its face. It is an above average, nay, let us go so far as to say Excellent, job of reporting. Clearly there were gaffs. Just as second basemen bobble grounders, Fost cannot possibly mean the Giants began as the Gollums. But the rest of Handy's "review" if one would call it that, went too far. 

The Giants did not introduce saurkraut to baseball games. Lord knows where Handy got that one. Our reviewer also was high on crack perhaps when he stated that Fost had written about the Giants starting as an Ashkenazy tribe out of Israel that migrated to Ireland. There is no such thing in Fost's book. 

This handsome coffee table history of a baseball team loved and then hated for moving itself to a gay city in California long before the homos and hippies and commies had a chance to gentrify the place, is a standout edition. 

It is available at Buffalo Street Books here in Tiny Town, courtesy of yours truly. You also may purchase it online at Amazon.com if you want to be a monkey butt about it. Mr. Fost would be happy to sell any of them with all the hard work and reporting that went into it. 

No one can account for his sick obsession with this team except that its story is rich. The writer will not be, but that is not his fault. "Giants: Past and Present" shall join that pantheon of great sports histories performed like a shoestring catch that robs the visiting team of its winning home run.

If that sounds like a backhanded compliment, read it again. Then tell us what you think.

– Franklin Crawford, editor-in-chief, TinyTownTimes.com