I hope, honestly, as life changes, and there’s evidence of such, I’m not hurting anyone’s feelings.
The truth is, movement in any direction prompts a shift out of comfort. I am. There’s the reality that I’m saying I’m giving up on a place, full of people that wince with understanding of the intersecting reasons why. There’s others that have hopes of my ability to let go and move on. Some I know are absolutely frustrated that this has allowed me to slip into navel gazing narcissism as I try to process being in such a liminal space. I am feeling the clawing dread of leaving behind and the fresh birth of something new in a old life. Both are quite painful.
I hope there’s forgiveness when this is all done and I’m on some other side of life.
There’s changes about the physical reality that are informing the emotional. In all cases it heightens intimacy in a way that none of us would rather. Sometimes you’re the bowling ball. Sometimes you’re the pins that are the target. The mystery of momentum and impact is a never-ending story. I have to recognize, as many people as pins in a lane at Stoneleigh, I’m actively both in my own life and that of others.
I sit as the days draw significantly shorter, the days compressing 3 minutes of light out of each day til equinox hits. I look at the collection of photography that I’ve done so far in 2025 and realize a startling trend; a few significant people faded, faded with the upmost sadness and misunderstanding. There’s also some faces that longed to be seen wherever we find ourselves in the game of life. Some repeat year after year, some are new.
Bryan said that this season of Abbott Elementary seemed off. To be honest, as my personal life took a surprising turn as the 4th season of the most beloved mainstream network sitcom of the now premiered, I had very little bandwidth to absorb it. My life seemed more like the darkly humorous realities grappled with in an old episode of Six Feet Under with me reminding folks I had been long jokingly been called ‘Joan Holloway with a dick’ by others. We’re maybe just pulling out of a period where I find myself escaping for 2 to 3 weeks at a time, burning down a PTO balance to prevent burn out. So much of my writing and photography these days is a farewell postcard to me before a series of midlife crisis moments hit. A great deal of it is a sappy but genuine love letter to the potential future I hope comes true not only for me, but for all of us.
I hope for the sacred. I hope for the ritual, I hope for community. I live for the laughs and snacks, thrill of the pursuit of goals AND the recognition of missing the mark often leaves room for trying a different strategy. There’s a lot I remembered about how ‘Life is a Baseball Game’ as The Intruders once sang of by ironically going bowling on a Tuesday a a month ago. Both bowling and Baseball give plenty of butt watching possibilities too so there’s absolutely no detriment to choose either as your middle aged angst activity.
I bring up butts, cause, I mean, if you don’t like a nice butt, I don’t trust you. It’s also hilarious that each time I fly back east and drop into a fantasy future of mine, the pre-destination airports always give me an extra treat of ass. In 2023 it was some hippie white dude doing full on face down, ass up stretching in front of me in SFO. December 2024 had me mistakenly take some Indica edibles for a red-eye flight knowing damn well that could lead to some joyous sensations below the belt, especially with the G-forces of a Boeing 737 taking off.
At Love Field barely a month ago, I begrudgingly gnawed on a Auntie Anne’s Pretzel to avoid the indoctrination of eating Chick-Fil-A. Looking up towards my gate in the grey haze of the terminal, I saw a pitcher shaking his ass on the mound, more the ‘catcher’ in my mind on a big screen above the 31-60 at my Southwest gate. I was wondering, in this really heinous societal moment were we really saying white dudes love shaking their asses on ESPN? Given the currently hellscape, a pair of cheeky cheeks in the mainstream consciousness is probably exactly what the world needs right now.
The more I become familiar with driving in the mid-Atlantic, I realize that the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, at its Baltimore terminus north of Thurgood Marshall Airport, terminates and drops you immediately due west of Camden Yards. There’s no easy transition I can make of out of the fact Bryan brought up the Savannah Bananas were ‘playing’ there. The Bananas were who I was watching in Dallas pointing out the original first verse of “Tutti Fruitti” went along to say ‘good booty.’ As expected for those nearest and dearest to me, I started riffing to the posterior pontification of possibly people were ponying up $60 a ticket to watch what you could get at a gay bar for a couple of singles. Capitalism has people really paying out of pocket for what’s nearly free on Sniffies.
We joked at the potential absurdity of the crowd based on what we had both recently gleamed from television. It slid gracefully into socioeconomic commentary in the hyper-stratified still aftermath of white flight out of Baltimore decades before. We later got confirmation, running into friends of his after dinner that the crowd exactly was what we thought: A bunch of straight white normies mostly afraid to come into Baltimore from Towson or Owing Mills but for absurd winks and nods. This helps to make up for the Orioles having a less than stellar season this year. This is what every ballpark is for. If there’s no reason to root for the home team, you might as well make a circus for everyone to laugh and possibly titillate their troubles away.
I’ve said to a few recently that watching baseball with my great grandmother Clara was a past time in my youth. On these days where Summer loses its grip with the proliferation of green, edges of yellow and orange start to fade in, afternoons were taken up by watching Oakland A’s games when I was a kid. Beer to her left, Bufferin in her system, the A’s themselves clad in Greens and Yellows against form fitting whites. I wonder if I’ve long shared in the communal ritual of watching nice butts put their all in trying to make magic. It’s been interesting where I’ve potentially been that nice butt.
It’s telling I’ve always had more of a talent of the holistic body effort that is bowling. I’m better at pitching baseballs but to hell with catching something to prevent it becoming a home run for everyone else to score on you. I’ve never had the hand-eye coordination to hit a home run my damn self. Have I knocked every pin down a lane in a bowling alley between Root Beer and shitty Pepperoni Pizza?
Indeed.
It was my first trophy in an era before merely participating gave you an award.
35 years after I got a little gold plated 15 inch tall tribute to my pre-pubescent prowess with a set of pins, I found myself heeding Bryan’s invitation to spent an extra evening to do Duck Pin Bowling. Duck pin is a style very specific to the mid-Atlantic, even more at home in Baltimore than any place in the world. Stoneleigh maintains machines, sometimes by moving you lane to lane while unjamming the mechanism for resetting pins with a very visible broomstick to keep the fun cranking. There’s something this symbolizes for me and Baltimore as a case study for a city-and-its-citizens. It’s always worth working through the flaws to meet golden moments of joy in that you had before and wish to continue to have. It’s good for the soul to come out a victor in the end. I’ll always have a deep appreciation for the social codes and conversations that come out of preservation of doing something the time honored way. I’ll always adore strategizing around when it makes sense to keep going or throw in the towel.
There’s always another Tuesday night, until there’s not. I’m facing endings, but I can be careless about others facing endings. Admittedly, where I find new excitement can make me a momentarily reckless and unsightful about the mechanics of others daily lives around me. I could do better, as I look at the bodies, beyond butts, remembering that it’s always the sweetest of faces that draw me in to understand the subtleties of existence.
That 1988 bowling trophy was the last one I won, unless you want to count 5th grade spelling bee prizes. I’m still not the best at remembering to step out, to sit down and be with those calling me into community, and the complications of such. I’m only human. Sometimes the definition of me striking out isn’t the victory of the lanes but the defeat of the mound. I hope for another season to prove I’m worth being put in the game.
I sit about exactly a month later, looking at these pictures from Stoneleigh. Looking at them as one of the very few unfettered times where I’ve clearly grounded my photography in a day-of-life scenario not only of someone I deeply care for. I recognize they know and see what I love to do, and invited me back into an activity that I sorely missed. It felt very much a homecoming. I’m sure, to a degree it was intended as such, knowing those ears heard a mere 24 hours before that Baltimore was the first place beyond what I knew as home that felt like “home” some 13 years ago.
Even if I wasn’t choosing it as the next home I’m making for myself, it will always be home in that way. In that saucy, silly way that still reverbs through the city like a John Waters movie despite every effort to change it into something more normative, more bland, more Towson, more middle American. I hope I’m not breaking hearts, but I know I am. I hope that means that there’s gonna be opportunities soon to fill in those fractures with gold.
All photos from Stoneleigh Lanes, Baltimore, Maryland, August 5, 2025
