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The big red flag [...] no other team had touched Greinke all year, basically a mismatch. So now he gets pounded around. It happens in baseball, but this seemed different. Probably a coincidence or just our paranoia, but it was odd. Nothing ever came of it. We couldn’t prove anything. When they asked me what I knew, I cracked, “If I’d had someone relaying signs while I was managing in Toronto, I might still be there.”

One player stood heads above the rest in 2009 — Zack Greinke. What a beauty. He started the season with 38 scoreless innings and went on to win the Cy Young Award as the AL’s best pitcher. And this was on a bad team that finished 65-97. Zack was credited with 16 of those wins.

That’s the beauty of managing: the decisions you make affect the game. But also in baseball everybody does things differently. You take 10 guys and every one of them will have a different opinion on things.

In this one meeting, Frank Cashen was there, helping out, as he had retired as GM. [...] Someone mentioned that a player reminded him of Axl Rose, the lead singer of Guns N’ Roses. I guess Frank had been half asleep, but he heard the name and started flipping through his organizational book. He finally says, “I can’t find Axl Rose in our book.” That gave everyone in the room a good laugh.

In 1996, I got to be a coach on the team stationed in Hilo, and DeMarlo Hale was the manager. We lived together in a condo overlooking the Pacific Ocean and became such good friends that we made a pact that if one of us got to the big leagues, we’d bring the other one along. Sure enough, I made him the bench coach when I became the Blue Jays manager my second go-round

(I see now why guys stay in baseball so long. Baseball is addicting: you fall in love with the competition and the camaraderie, and you never have to grow up. Maybe that’s part of my problem — I’ve been told to grow up a few times, mainly by my wife.)

The first ball he threw before the hitter stepped in nearly missed the cage. I was diving everywhere while he was getting loose, and I thought to myself, This is pro ball? Come to find out that Alfie had that mental block that everyone called “The Thing.” He didn’t last long.

I saw the ending coming a mile away, but damn, that was dark.

Naming children after their parents is stripping them of an identity, reminding them who they belong to.

Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was written at white heat by Robert Louis Stevenson in three days. It so horrified his wife that Stevenson burned the manuscript in his fireplace . . . and then wrote it again from scratch in another three days.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was written at white heat by Robert Louis Stevenson in three days. It so horrified his wife that Stevenson burned the manuscript in his fireplace . . . and then wrote it again from scratch in another three days.

According to the lore (and in his long novel, Stoker marshals a formidable amount of vampire lore), a vampire has the ability to command the lesser animals—cats, rats, weasels (and possibly Republicans, ha-ha). It is Dracula who has sent these rats to give our heroes a hard time.

As a kid, I cut my teeth on William M. Gaines’s horror comics—The Haunt of Fear, Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror—plus all the Gaines imitators (but like a good Elvis record, the Gaines magazines were often imitated, never duplicated).

But it’s not a hunt. It’s a dance. And sometimes they turn off the lights in this ballroom.
But we’ll dance anyway, you and I. Even in the dark. Especially in the dark.
May I have the pleasure?

Feelings of love and kindness, the ability to care and empathize, are all we know of the light. They are efforts to link and integrate; they are the emotions which bring us together, if not in fact then at least in a comforting illusion that makes the burden of mortality a little easier to bear.”

(2/2)

“I believe that we are all ultimately alone and that any deep and lasting human contact is nothing more nor less than a necessary illusion—but at least the feelings which we think of as “positive” and “constructive” are a reaching-out, an effort to make contact and establish some sort of communication.

(1/2 cont.)

The good horror tale will dance its way to the center of your life and find the secret door to the room you believed no one but you knew of—as both Albert Camus and Billy Joel have pointed out. The Stranger makes us nervous . . . but we love to try on his face in secret.

The first time I saw Blair Witch was in a hospital room about twelve days after a careless driver in a minivan smashed the shit out of me on a country road. I was, in a manner of speaking, the perfect viewer: roaring with pain from top to bottom, high on painkillers, and looking at a poorly copied bootleg videotape on a portable TV. (How did I get the bootleg? Never mind how I got it.)

Stephen King, pirating video!

They maintained their circle until the end, and as the roof came down, Avery Dixon had one final thought, both clear and calm: I loved having friends.

It was so simple, but it was a revelation: what you did for yourself was what gave you the power.

She thought about entropy. The tendency to coast when things were going well.
To assume.

Luke Ellis was the guy who went out of his way to be social so people wouldn’t think he was a weirdo as well as a brainiac. He checked all the correct interaction boxes and then went back to his books. Because there was an abyss, and books contained magical incantations to raise what was hidden there: all the great mysteries. For Luke, those mysteries mattered. Someday, in the future, he might write books of his own.

“Back in the main corridor—what Luke now understood to be the residents’ wing—the little girls, Gerda and Greta, were standing and watching with wide, frightened eyes. They were holding hands and clutching dolls as identical as they were. They reminded Luke of twins in some old horror movie.”

It's always fun to find references to King's old works in his writing.

Being a people-pleaser requires you to submit a part of yourself to the person you aim to please. You give up your own needs and desires, and put the person’s interests in front of your own. In return you expect a payment in the form of validation and acceptance. This kind of currency is dangerous because the cost is you.

I’m very much an action person. I used to take people at their word, and their word would wind up empty. There was no action to it. The action must happen for the trust to form, and then the faith develops. The more the cycle goes, the stronger the faith becomes.

“As she compiles her full memoir (coming in 2024), this document is Gypsy’s first public account of how she managed to release herself from the abuse and lies of her past, while laying the foundation for her future truth.”

So there’s another memoir on the way!

Somehow I sensed what was coming for me even then. Really, though, what girl doesn’t? It looms over you, that threat of violence. They drill the danger into your head until it starts to feel inevitable. You grow up wondering when it’s finally going to happen.

I feel forced
over a threshold, thrust out of my ordinary life into a place where it’s possible for grown men to be so pathetically in love
with me they fall at my feet.