Beyond the Bleachers

[setsuled]

I woke up at around 2am and read the latest Sirenia Digest, which contains a new Caitlin R. Kiernan story called "PALE ROLLERS". As Digest stories go, it's uncommonly straightforward, the narrative book-ended by a present tense account of the narrator's trip to sea in a small boat. His destination is a mysterious spot related to an object he acquires in the middle section of the story, in the past, at a curiosity shop where objects choose their purchasers.

By keeping the supernatural and narrative experimentation to more of a minimum than usual, Caitlin achieves a milder, but potent sense of threatening weirdness.

Reading it at 2am, it blurred oddly with an article I read on Yahoo about how Shohei Ohtani is somehow the best and the worst thing that ever happened to baseball. Like he's hit a high point no-one can ever match. Somehow the author's hyperbolic mixture of awe and dread followed smoothly from Caitlin's story of things of abnormal magnitude drawing people in.

Of course, people love to talk about Ohtani here in Japan. I don't follow professional sports at all but I kind of like how Ohtani has an old fashioned, Joe DiMaggio, national hero quality. I guess Ohtani would be better called an international hero.