I-74 in southeastern Indiana is a surprisingly pretty drive: an hour of so of bigger-than-hills-but-not-quite-mountains reminded me of a 3/4 scale model of the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee. This was followed by another hour of picturesque farm acreage that looked like it was the basis for a Photography 101 textbook. And my [insert appropriate profanity here] camera was broken. [gnash!]
Ah, well, it couldn't be helped. I drove
to the house where I spent most of my first ten years of life and marveled
at it a bit. After a brief bit of simple math, my mortality threatened
to expose itself, but I quickly clubbed it into submission before it could
get any leverage. I noted that the entire area had shrunk yet again,
and moved on.Most of the area had changed; one of the few places still around was a pizza joint called Noble Romans. So I had lunch there, then scouted the phone book for camera repair shops. The quest for finding one dovetailed nicely with my goal of scoping out the area: I ended up driving up to Speedway, downtown around the circle, and out to Avon (which is pretty close to where I was born).
All this tourism left me with a nicely updated memory map and a camera that still failed to function properly. Too soon, it was time to head back.
Finally forging through the rush-hour traffic to return to the hotel, there was just time to call the cab, grab my ticket, and head out. This time I didn't do so well in the seat lottery: still at field level, just to the third-base side of home, but far enough back that one of the upper-deck supports pretty much obliterated my view of third base and everything left of it.
In the end, though, I wouldn't have wanted that good a view. The Dodgers took a little revenge for the beating we gave them yesterday.
The Reds started off with
two runs in the first, but the Dodgers came up with four in the fourth,
and we never regained the lead. The final was, if I recall,
12-5. But at least the Marlins
beat St. Louis, so we didn't lose any ground-- just a golden opportunity
to close the gap with time getting shorter and shorter.But, really, how bad can things be, when you've got Skyline Chili so close at hand? ( I really like the stuff, if you hadn't figured that out yet :)
I scoured the seats on the way out for ticket stubs for a friend who requested them as mememtos.
As a result, I missed the
throng of taxis that usually hovers around the exit. Before discovering
that to get one, all I had to do was go
one block west and one block north to the hotel district, I spend a lot of
time just looking at Cincinnati in the night.
I realized that I still
don't have a handle on this town. It seems full of contradictions:
staggering natural beauty juxtaposed to crumbling ruins of neighborhoods;
unlimited potential laced with a sense of futility; modern development
not so much intermixing with the city's history as shouldering it aside,
much as the Great American Ballpark is doing to Riverfront. 
There's a sort of
temporal lethargy here, mirrored in the calm of the drawling water: Time
takes off for lunch when it passes over the verdant hills, and it doesn't
feel a need to punch back in until it's well downriver.The river. The river is the key to it all, somehow.
Tomorrow is a 12:35 game, businessman's special, but in the evening I hope to have dinner and spend some time on the river. And while I didn't have success in properly repairing my camera, I did get a roll of duct tape. After all, the first line of the Tech Support Theme song is, "It's ugly, but it works."
