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As John Mellencamp sings on Track 5 of the 1996 album shown above, "This may not be the end of the world... but you can see it from here." Rolling Stone described Mr. Happy Go Lucky as "long on atmospherics, a dark-carnival collage of mad laughter and distant whispers." If that's not something for a blogger to aspire to, I don't know what is. They also called it "a little uneven but unrepentant," while No Depression called Mellencamp "wonderfully mixed up, unclear about who he is and why he does the things he does," all of which seems fitting, too.
If everything goes more or less as planned, 2017 could well be the antepenultimate one of Baseball Byways. That is, by the end of the 2019 season, Rob and I might be able to say that we have been to all the active MLB and MILB stadiums. (Characterizing that moment in time as being "done" raises a slew of terminological questions that might get addressed at a later date.)
We start this year, fittingly, in Indiana, home state of this post's bard. Herewith the belated but ambitious season preview for 2017:
