Oaklawn Park

HOT SPRINGS—It was colder than two motherfuckers at Oaklawn Park today. I nevertheless walked all the heck over the place for 54:18, wrote two stories, won $1.40, and am up $9.50 after nine trips. Plus I got to drink a cooler full of iced-down Coors Light as Mary the Daily Racing Form writer and I talked horses and horse writing for an hour and a half in an otherwise empty press box. We had several theories, but neither of us could figure out why the usual crowd of Saturday night drunks left early. As a result, this was the first time after I was through writing that there has ever been a beer left in that thirty-year-old red cooler. I mean, at all, ever, since 1993. I'm not kidding. There were like, no shit, fifteen in there. I drank two, though I briefly considered stuffing the rest in my bag. Now I'm not sure why I didn't.
Oh, I experienced another first tonight when I included the noun mishmash in a story about the Hot Springs Stakes: There were a mishmash of pre-race predictions about how it might unfold, but most of those involved assumed their entrants would face a brisk early pace, and they did.