I had a nice weekend. I really did, even though I spent most of it in the bathroom stripping paint and my hands and shoulders still feel a bit stiff. The weather was perfect for that kind of work; warm enough to open the window, not so warm that it was uncomfortable to do that much physical labor for a long period of time. Sunday I wanted to go see Yan and BA (aka Rad Unicorn) play in Bushwick, so I got up and did the housework I normally do Sunday evenings and then went out and had a nice time. The band that went on after Rad Unicorn, Make-Pretend Pandas, were fantastic to the point that I'm about to track down anything they've recorded and buy it, and I never do that.

Normally this would have been a great weekend. But in between the last paint-stripping shift and getting ready to go out, I thought I'd check in on the sports scores. Which is when I found out about Josh Hancock.

Josh wasn't a big enough star to warrant a lot of media coverage here in New York; in retrospect, I'm glad I checked the scores on Sunday, since otherwise I would have learned of the accident when I glimpsed the article in a stranger's Post on the subway this morning. I don't have much more to say that hasn't been said ten times more eloquently by Larry at Viva El Birdos and Will Leitch at Deadspin. I can't believe the Cardinals are having to go through this again so soon, not quite five years after Darryl Kile. It's a little different for me, too, in that Josh was only two years my senior (Kile was eleven years older than I was in 2002, and seemed like more of my dad's contemporary than mine, though he wasn't really); surely I'm not the only American twenty-something with a greater sense of my own mortality these days.

I wasn't sure I should write about the good parts of my weekend in the same post as I wrote about Josh. But that's life, I guess. I had a good weekend. I wish I was able to say it was great.