the crack of the bat, the crispness of autumn's first breeze, and the throb of a $9 beer headache

So I went to the Yankee game on Saturday with Chris H. Fine gentleman, he is. He has a ticket package which gets him his two seats for every Saturday home game all year except like one or two. The seats were pretty sweet, towards the front of the upper deck between home and first base. Here is what we were looking at:

It was a great place to watch the game, and numerous foul balls were hit right near us. One came off Jeter's bat and landed in the hand of the guy two seats over from me, the closest I've ever come to getting a ball. I even reached out for it and was probably only a foot short. They let us hold it -- check out the paint/pine tar from Jeter's bat:

After touching the ball I began to wonder if I had contracted herpes from it.*

Unfortunately my dad had a crappy weekend with his health. I am hoping he feels better on Monday. In the meantime, I will post this picture -- I took it after I snuck down to the lower deck for the 9th inning. The story goes that my pop was in L.A. working on a show in the summer/fall of 1980, and he became homesick for NYC almost immediately. The man doesn't even drive. Anyway, he was sitting in his hotel room watching the Royals and Yankees in the 1980 ALCS, and as they go to commercial, the director takes a shot through the right field stands of the 4 train going past the stadium on the elevated track. It was at that moment that he knew he needed to come home. I wish the pic was better, but it goes out to my pop and the city he adores:

Fucking George Brett.

It was great to hang with Chris H. -- I learned a lot of things about him that I never knew:

1) He has an identical twin.
2) He is/was a really good basketball player. Apparently he and his bro were a deadly backcourt combo in high school. He said his strength was beating his man off the dribble, and I can see that. He's still a quick mother. Oddly, he stopped playing in recent years, sort of because he feels like he is a shadow of his old self and that ruins the experience for him. Same thing happened to our friend Jonah -- he was once awesome, and then when he was no longer awesome, he quit playing. I guess no longer being awesome at something could be depressing. Luckily I've never been awesome so the 50% decline in my skill level doesn't really bother me that much. My goal is to get Chris H. onto the court at some point this fall. We got Pete out there, now it's Chris's turn.
3) He grew up near Syracuse but was not present when Derrick Coleman walked into a bar, proffered a fistful of condoms to the crowd, and said, "Who wants to get fucked tonight?"
4) He and his wife have a swanky pad in Jersey City with a rooftop deck thing. And two strippers just moved in down the hall from them.
5) His favorite expression is "Game reckanize game."

Pete B. asks about my throry that postseason baseball is really just a lottery for the good teams. All I mean is that 162 games is a far greater measure of how good a team is than 3, 5, or 7 games. In football and basketball, I think that the best team will win a playoff game/series like 90% of the time. You can physically overpower your opponent. If you are superior, it will become apparent. Baseball is a different game. It's the type of game where the Devil Rays could easily take 2 out of 3 or even 3 straight from the Red Sox or Yankees, based on a couple of timely pitching performances, a few clutch hits, maybe a blown call or a bad bounce. And the same thing can happen in the playoffs. Look at St. Louis last year. They won only 83 games and then won the WS. And does anyone really think they were a great team? They outscored their opponents by 19 runs over 161 games. They were dead average and got into the postseason by virtue of playing in a shit division. Then they got hot at the right moment and went 11-5 in October. That was an extreme example but the point is that baseball is just a really unpredictable game and the best team does not always win. It doesn't mean we should get as excited for division titles and 100 win seasons as we do for WS wins, just that we should be aware of the fact that anything can happen in a short series. And we should respect the great teams that don't go all the way.

Like a lovesick dork who keeps getting shot down by the hottest girl in school and coming back for more, I am oddly excited about the approaching NBA season.

* This bad, sorry, lame, Peter Vecsey-level joke assumes the reader's familiarity with this horrid, unfounded, and vicious rumor.

just like keith hernandez

We are coming out of the tunnel at work. I can feel it. The nights are slowly getting shorter. There is hope. There is laughter. There are awkward fist-bumps and calm coffee runs.

And, lucky me, I love the people I work with. Strong citizens of the world. Team players. Sarcastic, angry, prone to swearing, but righteous in their hearts and committed to the job at hand.

Plus, I have discovered one antidote to the long hours and the completely unexciting pay: I have begun openly drinking beer at work.

Here's how it goes: once the higher-ups filter out, around six or seven, I have decided it is officially OK to drink beer. Not a lot, just a couple. Maybe just one, depending on how precise my work has to be on that given night.

Even the higher-ups drink wine on certain occasions. My beer drinking is practically sanctioned. I might shotgun one at my desk tomorrow.

It makes things more better. Although it isn't helping me get skinny, and I have a big red gin blossom on the bridge of my nose.

Whatever, I am drinking beer at work. I got no worries. Are you drinking beer at work? You should be.

Although the other day I was in the middle of a beer and I left it somewhere in the office and was unable to find it. I don't think that's very smart. It's not Nancy's house party on the corner of Bassett and West Mifflin, it's a place of business and some people there don't even drink on the job. Keep track of your beer, son.

I think it is now just about safe to say that the Yankees will make the playoffs (I might regret that, but I doubt it) and if so, it has been the most enjoyable season in years. Well played, Yankees. Joe Torre, go win us a WS and step aside with dignity and grace. Mike Mussina, keep sprinkling the HGH on your wheaties for another month and then disappear. I still think it's a flawed team with only one and a half reliable pitchers, but the bats are scary and if they get hot they could do a little damage. As anyone with half a brain can tell you, the playoffs do not necessarily measure anything more than luck, timing and luck. Sad as it is, the best team does not always win. The regular season, 6 months long, full of twists and turns and injuries and slumps and underage girls from the hotel lobby and angry wives and bad food and long flights and 81 performances of "Cottoneye Joe" and repeated offenses of ignorance and malice by the sports media who read way more into every loss and win than they need to and clubhouse music arguments and facing every team a whole bunch of times, while less romantic and exciting than the postseason, is a better indicator of who is good and who is not. Consider the playoffs a fun little lottery that the best teams get to play in as a reward for being good for half a year.

Do you ever hear about something and you know you'll like it because it's right in the middle of your wheelhouse, and you get embarrassed at how predictable you are, so you don't check it out? That's how I was with The Hold Steady. Everything I heard about them excited me and reminded me of my own lameness. From Brooklyn via Minneapolis. Replacements fans. Springsteen comparisons. Nerdy emphasis on lyrics. I was ashamed of them and of myself. And then I broke down and I iTuned all their records. And I like 'em a lot. Dammit. The singer's speaky style gets super-annoying sometimes but overall I'm digging that shit.

This goal is 10 feet, bitches:

Photo by PBdotC

The Asshole Factor

If you're wondering where I've been, I'll tell you. Working. Way. Too. Much.

Last Friday night at 2am, I punched out and headed home after a 41 hour workday. That's right: I showed up for work at 9am on Thursday and didn't return until Friday night at 2am. That's 41 hours straight, no sleep, no poop, no special massage, no internets, no steakhouse dinners, no champagne, caviar, or bubble baths. No relief of any kind. I must have downed 18 cups of coffee in the 41 hours. Somehow, my bowels held up.

By the end of the 41 I was punch-drunk and wobbly and I had lost control of my thoughts and movements. Words were coming out of my mouth before I could think to say them, and as a result most of them made no sense. It was a really unhealthy, disorienting kind of fatigue/nausea/panic/depression that I can't quite describe. I think it's probably sort of what The Bends feels like. You tweakers probably know what I was dealing with. Same goes for doctors who's worked multiple shifts back to back, anyone who's ever been trapped in a building collapse, anyone who's watched a Real World marathon on MTV, and Jack Torrance.

As I groggily stepped into a cab at the end of this monstrous shift, the ass of my pants ripped spectacularly -- right up the seam, a good eight inches. It was all too appropriate.

I won't say any more about any of this other than how gratifying it was that all our efforts paid off: we saved that ten year-old boy's life.

Oh, wait...we actually didn't. We just made some stuff and sent it out to the people for consumption.

One thing I really wanted to do was an iPhone review, but I haven't had time. Now I have like eight minutes, so here goes.

Cons:
1. internet is painfully slow unless connected to wifi
2. rarely connects to wifi; how many hotspots are big enough to stay with you as you walk or drive around? zero.
3. cannot create your own ringtones by yelling stuff into phone
4. camera fairly well sucks; if you twitch or if your subject twitches you get a blurry piece of shit. if it's dark, you'd be better off just making a quick pencil sketch. however, if conditions are good, you can get a decent shot. here is a cute one of Baby Bungle:

5. touch-screen typing sucks, you must stare at screen to type and still get frequent key misses
6. vibrate mode is not vibratey enough, leading to numerous missed calls
7. ATT service sucks, leading to dropped calls, missed calls, and lots of what?-based conversations
8. need to press multiple buttons to dial a call
9. iPod interface kinda sucks. not enough controls handy and need to press buttons more than once to register a press all the damn time. then accidentally starts or stops playing at random moments because it brushes against a piece of lint in your pocket
10. battery does not last as long as they say it does, i forgot to charge the phone one night and it actually died the next day; this never happened to me before with a phone
11. The Asshole Factor: it is hard to walk around with a $500 phone and not feel like an asshole. As a result, when I make calls on it at work I find myself sneaking away so nobody can see it. I went to a bachelor party a few years ago for a friend who I hadn't seen much in recent years. There were some people I knew there and then some other dudes who I'd never met. One of these new dudes had some fancy-ass cell phone with a sliding spinning panel thing on it, and he kept showing it off and bragging about it. Finally, somebody (possibly me) made a sarcastic comment about it and he replied, "You have no idea how much pussy this phone has gotten me." I let this declaration of assholery stand instead of piling on top of it, a decision I now regret. Whatever, the point is that people who have $300, $400, or $500 cell phones are usually assholes. Pussy-gettin' assholes, but assholes nonetheless. So I need to distance myself from them -- I assume it will be easier now with the price drop and the ensuing ubiquity of the iPhone.
12. touch screen in general activates too often by accident, and not often enough when you want it to
13. no cutting and pasting
14. cannot use blogger for some reason
15. hands-free does not sound all that good

Pros:
1. Every time I hold it I feel so irrationally happy that I nearly pee myself.

That's it.

Seriously, I also like the voicemail interface a lot -- you can see a readout on the screen of your messages and choose which ones to listen to and in what order. And one thing I never thought I'd care about, but I do -- having all my devices in one unit. I love not bringing an iPod to work anymore.

There are lots of other cool grabby features and stuff but they get old after awhile. Overall I would say that I love having it but I expect the one that comes out in 6 months to be 85% better than this one (and cheaper, too).