Slice of Life

Yankees Go Home

Gotta be honest here:  I'm not all that broken up about the Yankees getting punked by Detroit in the opening round of the American League Division Serious.  I was pretty pumped after the game 1 win, nervous after losing game to at the Stadium, dejected after falling behind 2-1 at Detroit, then reached closure when I heard Jaret Wright would be the game 4 starter for the Yanks.  To be honest, I didn't even know the game was on Saturday (a whirlwind of painting and cleaning in preparation of an open house on Sunday, which went well), so when the wife announced the score from the living room (8-1 Tigers, 8th inning), I was actually relieved that I had forgot about the game, because I surely would have broken something and scared the living shit out of our dog - again - with my ranting and raving during a televised sporting event.

So in recognition of the Yanks' fall from total dominance over major league baseball, I've picked up a book I've had for a while now (I'm amazed myself that I'm reading again), The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty, by Buster Olney.  I bought the book for my friend and neighbor (and die-hard Red Sox fan) as a Christmas gift, kind of a joke in a way saying, "Here's something about the Yankees I'm forcing you to read, but at least it's negative."  I'm curious as to what the author's theory behind the Yankees' demise is, and to his credit I believe he marked the game 7 loss in the 2001 World Series to the Arizona Diamondbacks as the official end of the Yankee dynasty.  (What the author doesn't know about that game is that the real reason the Yankees lost is because, with 2 outs in the 9th inning, my wife walks downstairs where all night I had been arranging and re-arranging karma and speaking to the baseball gods - drinking one beer in the kitchen when the Yanks were batting, pacing in the living room and dropping to my knees when the D-Backs were batting, for the entire game - to celebrate or something and quite frankly I'm trying very hard to forget what happened in the next 5 minutes.  But that is the real reason, and not too many people are aware of this fact.  And it is a fact.  Definitely.)

So I don't know about the Yanks.  I love Joe Torre, absolutely love the guy, but is it a problem that he is "too close" with the players.  I played team sports my entire life, and I honestly don't think there is such a think, unless the coach is 18 years old and just out of high school coaching the JV hoops team.  The past couple of days I've been asking myself if it is possible to feel sorry for someone worth a quarter of a billion dollars like Alex Rodriguez.  My answer is no.  Break a fucking bat over your head, throw a water cooler onto the field, punch the shit out of the dugout wall, but for chrissakes, man, DO SOMETHING!  You're playing third base for the New York Yankees out there, not getting ready for your first colonoscopy.  Seriously.  This aura you think is keeping you aglow this whole time is nothing but a shitscreen my friend, and everyone can see through it.  Stop porking your wife.  Get drunk some random Tuesday night.  Pierce your tongue and get a tatoo, but whatever you do, just DO SOMETHING!  I want Alfonso Soriano back and I'm afraid that offering A-Rod for Soriano right now would be a lopsided trade - in the Yankees favor.

In the meantime, I have a house to sell.  Go Bengals.  And 'go NASCAR,' or whatever you say to support NASCAR.

My New Read

I'm now reading Bird by Bird:  Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott.  My wife got me this book for Christmas with a journal and the message encouraging me to write more, because apparently she thinks I'm good at it and my creative side is something that should be explored and developed.  A thoughtful gift, for sure.  The author talks about growing up with a father who was a writer, watching his habits and sharing in the joys of when he would publish books, and all of his drunk writer friends that would come over for Sunday dinner and pass out at the dining room table.  She gets into her own struggles about becoming a writer and the effort and dedication she invested into reaching her goals.  Very interesting.  I never really gave much thought to what the life of a writer is like.  I just figure you sit down at a computer, start cranking it out, meet with a publisher, make some edits and there you go.  Too simple, I know, but I just never gave it much thought.  I respect writers, I like good writing, but I just never considered how much effort and hard work goes into it.  The author is now getting into different ways in which she structures her day and exercises she has done in the past to develop her writing skills.  The very beginning of the book jumped right out at me:

The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth.  We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are.  Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little.  But we do.  We have so much we want to say and figure out.  Year after year my students are bursting with stories to tell, and they start writing projects with excitement and maybe even joy - finally their voices will be heard, and they are going to get to devote themselves to this one thing they've longed to do since childhood.

For about 6 months I've tinkered around with the idea of writing a book.  Crazy, crazy, crazy.  I'm not really sure what the whole message would be but I think the overall theme would be personal struggle and the attempt to find one's place in life all the while dealing with the many X factors that comprise one's life - we all have them in their various forms:  an illness of a loved one, whether physical or mental, job satisfaction, general angst, addiction, you name it.  It's shit in various forms, and the game of life gives everyone his or her own hearty, assorted dose.  I've thought about focusing on what it's like to deal with a relative who is a compulsive gambler, but there is so much more to that situation and it would be too limiting.  A bigger issues I've taken away from this over the past two years is the importance of communication, not only how to do it, but do it well.  Nearly two years after I found about the proverbial elephant in the living room, I'm talking to my parents less and less, hardly at all.  No phone call on my birthday because as my mom later e-mailed me, she thought I "would be busy with my friends."  Mmmmkay.  As I'm getting older, I'm getting more tired.  More tired to waste energy on things that don't get me anywhere.  If I'm banging my head up against a wall, I'm just going to get too fucking tired and stop altogether after a while and say "I quit."  It's as close to an on/off switch that I have, but with the right mindset it's something I've been able to do over the years with relative success.  With my parents, my mom especially, I don't waste energy mincing words or BS'ing anymore.  A frequent conversation will unfold as follows:

Mom:  Your brother is turning things around, he's starting to workout now.

Me:  He gets shitfaced 5 or 6 nights a week.

*crickets*

I don't know if it's an Italian thing; I perceive the females on my mom's side of the family to be living in this fantasy land a lot of the times, where the sky will come crashing down and you'll have 7 years of bad luck if you hang your hat on the back of a dining room chair during dinner.  Shit like that.  I could honestly go on forever.  And what is worse is that the respective patriarchs just nod their heads and put up with this shit.  Back in the day I had this counselor who helped me take a close look at the various relationships in my family - mother/father, grandmother/grandfather, aunts/uncles, the whole friggin' tree.  How they deal with problems, what their personalities are like, how they communicate.  The idea was that I would see what was modeled for me over the years, and in turn be able to better communicate with others, primarily my bride-to-be.  I should have worked harder, because my communication skills on the homefront are still not where I'd like them to be.  (But I'm working no it.)  I guess the whole point is that whatever shit you're dealing with, you have to have open communication lines whereby you can be honest and not be judged or shut down.  The struggle to obtain that is what is key, and I think that is what my book would be about.  Throw in a story or two here and there about my ability to piss in an empty Nalgene bottle in stopped traffic and I'll be booking a flight to Chicago to appear on Orpah.

I have a ton of archived e-mails from the past two years that are pretty sobering to go back and read, as they elicit a lot of emotions as to what I was thinking and feeling, what others were saying to me.  I look back at it all now and think, what could I have done differently?  What did I miss?  It all moves so fast sometimes.

Book Report: I'm a Whore

I just finished The Broker by John Grisham in about a day and a half.  I know, I know, not many steps up from Sports Illustrated but hey, the new 30s me has to ease into new habits, reading more being one of them.  I'm not going to go on and on about the book because I could easily give it all away in about 3 sentences.  But, I will say this:  better than The Firm.  Really.  After I finished the book I couldn't figure out why I liked it so much, why I thought it blew his last 5 or 6 books away, then it came to me - the plot mirrors that of The Firm.  Different subject matter altogether, different bad guys chasing our hero/villain, but intense and you never know what is coming next.  And, in this case, the bad guys are the biggest, baddest most secret spies/assassins from China, Israel, Russia, and Saudia Arabia with a serious axe to grind, mixed in with some CIA operatives who want to make sure the main character meets his doom without them having to get their hands dirty.  Good shit, well worth a read.  Easy and light, don't get me wrong, but I got pretty fired up throughout the book and for the first time since I can remember, I wasn't halfway through a Grisham book saying, "oh, he so did it" or "I got it now, it's her."  Nice work, John.

Only Because He Beat Up the Fat Bully Who Was Pushing Me Around When I was in the High School Jazz Band as a Sixth Grader

God help me.  I am using this sacred space to promote, of all things, a book about the Boston Red Sox 2004 championship season.  (Enjoy that banner on the Sox home page that currently includes a picture of Manny, ha ha.)  With the Curse of the Epsteino now plaguing Red Sox Nation, this book is a great holiday gift for the sports impaired who plan to spend the better part of this millenium wallowing in the depths of the Sox certain mediocrity.  However, having known the author since I was a young, impressionable lad in a small New Hampshire town, I must admit that I have first-hand knowledge that not all Red Sox fans - at least one, anyway - are not complete idiots.  This one just happens to be the most brilliant writer I have ever known and has a passion for the world in which we live that all educators like him should strive to match.

So, with all this being said, get your sorry ass to amazon.com and buy "Bleeding Red:  A Red Sox Fan's Diary of the 2004 Season" by Newport High School's official record-holder in the long jump.

Slice of Life Book Report: The Last Season

At the rate I'm going, I'll finish Siddhartha by the time I'm 30.  That's like a word a week.  In any event, I threw down Phil Jackson's new book about his last season coaching the L.A. Lakers in about a week.  Quick read, essentially a string of sports write-ups about games but from the viewpoint of a pretty sharp guy who seems to be a fairly spiritual individual in terms of being in tune with one's inner self and all that other intangible kind of stuff.  (The subtitle of the book, incidentally is "A Team in Search of its Soul."  Heavy.)

I already knew that NBA players are over-paid crybabies that place so much emphasis on the individual aspect of the game that I'd rather balance my checkbook than watch a game on TV.  This book reinforced that point.  What I suspected, but have now confirmed, is what a disrespectful, ungrateful candyass Kobe Bryant is.  The following says it all:  during a game, Bryant threw a bad pass that was intercepted by a defender.  Jackson called a timeout and as Bryant was coming off the floor Jackson told him something like, "you really can't make that pass," to which Bryant replied, "then teach these motherfuckers how to run the offense."

Whatever happened to, "Yes, Coach.  I'll try harder next time."???

When I was a kid, my parents always taught me that no matter what, you listen to your coach.  And we ate apple pie at the living room table for dessert every night.  Seriously though, I don't care at all about being role models or any of that crap, the NBA is so pitiful right now they simply need to focus on the basic fundamentals of how humans need to interact with other humans right now.  I read that part in the book and immediately wondered what would have happened if, during a game in which I fumbled or made some other blunder, I came off the field, heard some words from my coach and replied, "[COMMENTS ACCEPTED.]"  It's just kind of sad really.

At least the story ends happily ever after, with the Lakers getting their asses handed to them by the Detroit Pistons in 5 games.