By PVG viagra
One mile yesterday, one mile today.
What I like about my walk is that it is up-and-down, a little. I am walking in the Mill Hill neighborhood of Trenton, where the first and second Battles of Trenton were fought. I start at the top of the hill, walk down, take three laps around Assumpink Creek, and then head back up the hill. I think this is maybe a little better than walking on flat ground, but what do I know.
I went walking yesterday, and noticed that one of the buildings down the block has a false front. It’s a state building, a satellite office of the Department of the Treasury. The first two floors are there but the third floor is phony – it’s just a stone façade with some weird peaks on it, and a weathervane. I don’t know what this all means other than you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.
I hate exercise.
I did another mile today. I think that I was on Whine Factor Five yesterday; today was more like Whine Factor Two. It took me a minute longer (31.9 minutes) than yesterday, but it was windier yesterday, which means I don’t know what.
I woke up this morning with this statement rolling around in my head:
“If you choose an outcome, you must choose all the steps that lead up to that outcome.”
So I went for a walk this afternoon – one mile, which is three circuits around the park that straddles Assunpink Creek in beautiful downtown Trenton. It took me thirty-one minutes.
I emphatically do not want to start walking again, but you can’t have the outcome just by itself, for nothing. You have to choose the steps that lead to the outcome.
Baseball’s player’s union is OK with expanding the MLB playoffs. How could that happen?
Well… what if you did this?
First, cut the regular season back to 154 games, with the last games played in mid-September.
Second, break out the three division winners in each league with three wild-card teams – six teams in each league, twelve total (same as in the NFL).
Third, have all six teams play each other in a round-robin format, one three-game series each, over two and a half weeks, with the top two teams going to the ALCS.
How would that have worked this year?
In the AL, you’d have the following setup:
1st seed: Tampa Bay Rays (96 wins)
2nd seed: Minnesota Twins (92 wins)
3rd seed: Texas Rangers (90 wins)
4th seed: New York Yankees (95 wins)
5th seed: Boston Red Sox (89 wins)
6th seed: Chicago White Sox (88 wins)
Okay, how does that make the ALDS look?
Sept 17-19: Chicago at Tampa, Boston at Minnesota, New York at Texas
Sept 21-23: Tampa at Texas, Minnesota at Chicago, Boston at New York
Sept 24-26: New York at Tampa, Texas at Minnesota, Chicago at Boston
Sept 28-30: Tampa at Boston, Texas at Chicago, New York at Minnesota
Oct 1-3: Minnesota at Tampa, Boston at Texas, Chicago at New York
Here’s the good thing about this. In the current playoff format, you are guaranteed exactly one postseason game at home. Sometimes that’s all you get. But here – with this format – even the worst teams are guaranteed six home postseason games, and you know when they are and can sell them in advance. (Maybe some of these games will be meaningless, but a bunch of them won’t.)
What about the NL?
Sept 17-19: St. Louis at Philadelphia, San Diego at San Francisco, Atlanta at Cincinnati
Sept 21-23: Philadelphia at Cincinnati, San Francisco at St. Louis, San Diego at Atlanta
Sept 24-26: Atlanta at Philadelphia, Cincinnati at San Francisco, St. Louis at San Diego
Sept 28-30: Philadelphia at San Diego, Cincinnati at St. Louis, Atlanta at San Francisco
Oct 1-3: San Francisco at Philadelphia, San Diego at Cincinnati, St. Louis at Atlanta
That’s a lot of baseball, right there. (The one drawback is that you’d have six games to watch every night; it’d be hard to follow the entire playoffs that way.)
Tell me why this wouldn’t work, especially with the likelihood of one-game tiebreakers at the end of it.
Over the next 13 weeks (August 2 – November 1) I have decided to:
1. Stop writing this blog. (Big shock, I know.) Basically, all non-commercial writing (except for two book reviews I have committed to do) is off limits.
2. Get off (and stay off) of Facebook. (This one may be a little difficult – Facebook is that addictive – but I am going to try.)
3. Stop lying to myself about my weight. By this I primarily mean no “cheating” with regard to the scale I use, but it’s more than that, it’s about taking the health consequences of my actions seriously.
4. Commit myself to recording my food intake on Weight Watchers – even if I cheat, which I probably will, just because that’s how I roll and you can’t beat yourself up over that.
5. Having said that, no pastries, no matter how delicious, or other obvious big-dessert thingies.
6. No fast-food unless completely unavoidable, in which case, good choices are mandated (out with the Baconators, in with the sugar-free ices from Rita’s).
7. The above includes Five Guys. (I will not get emotional about not being able to go to Five Guys. I won’t. You won’t see me cry. Ever. I… *sniff*…. let’s just change the subject.)
8. This means, of course, bringing my lunch to work every day (including diet green tea).
9. And making the meals that I cook as healthy as I can manage.
10. And taking my fish-oil supplement every day, even when I’d rather not.
11. Write on the new novel every day, unless unavoidable due to whatever. Ideally this is 250 words a day, say, with a rough goal of one chapter a week. That’s a little over 22k words, which is more than what I have now, so that’s good.
12. Use downtime (commuting, mostly) to thinking about plotting and characters on the novel. This means that I can’t use that time for frivolous purposes, like rehearsing what I will say to Terry Gross when she interviews me about the book. (Don’t tell me you don’t do this.) I don’t have the luxury of unlimited time to sit at a keyboard and plan out plot points; I need to reprogram my brain to think about what I need to write about when I finally get ten minutes to write.
13. I have a book I need to read – something about how to change when change is hard, and that seems to be appropriate reading for this sort of thing.
And these changes are hard. Re-looking at them, they’re all about denying myself without anything much in the way of reward. I would rather not take the fish oil. I would rather read a Michael Chabon book I’ve read sixteen times before I go to bed rather than write something new for myself. I would rather read people’s Facebook stuff, even when it’s drivel, than do something productive and useful (or write drivel of my own, here, for the Eight People Who Read This Blog).
I am hopeful that I will emerge from this process thinner, wiser, more self-aware, and generally feeling better about myself. Either that, or I will try to drown myself in queso. I don’t know. I can’t say. But these are good decisions, positive decisions, and even if I do just a little bit of this agenda I will feel better than if I did nothing.
Except for the Five Guys.
Man, is this going to be tough.
If this is the only place I see you, I will see you in November.
One of the things I despise is the lazy journalistic shorthand that ascribes the foolish and self-destructive things that people do to unnamed, unidentified “demons.” Case in point:
20. Michael Jackson Dies: Mysteries surrounding Jackson’s pedophilia charges disappear as the issue of doctors overprescribing demanding, drug-addicted celebs takes the spotlight. That’s a bad thing and ultimately a very good thing. But the worst part about Jackson’s death is that he was the world’s greatest living musical genius who gave in to his demons.
Michael Jackson didn’t have “demons.” Nobody has demons. Demons don’t exist. (Cf. Mark 5.) There’s no such thing as demons. Attributing negative personal behavior to demons is about as helpful as attributing it to the balance of our bodliy fluids, the malign influence of the planets, or George W. Bush. Demons didn’t make Michael Jackson give wine to underage children (for the probable purpose of seduction). Demons didn’t drive Michael Jackson to get plastic surgery to the point where his nose fell off. Demons didn’t make Michael Jackson a drug addict. Demons didn’t make his last few albums suck. Saying that Michael Jackson has “demons” is just a lazy way to say that he was unable to control his impulses – but it’s worse than that, because it negates the concept of responsibility. Anyone who says that his demons made him do something is saying that he doesn’t want to admit responsibility for his vile ways.
Just a quick Google search today:
Bottom line: “Demons” is a cliche, and a bad one. Stop using it.
1. Osama bin Laden. That OBL still breathes oxygen and eats hummus is a stain upon our banners. Not killing bin Laden was the single greatest disappointment of the Bush Administration, in an Administration that had lots of big disappointments (for conservatives, yes). And for all Obama’s big talk during the campaign – “John McCain likes to say that he’ll follow bin Laden to the gates of hell — but he won’t even go to the cave where he lives” – he’s done bupkis, too. Carthaga delenda est, the old Romans used to say, and I feel that way about OBL.
2. Khalid Sheik Mohammed. He’s in custody, but again, every day he lives is a stain upon our banners. There has to be some way to navigate through the dense and impenetrable legal thicket that keeps KSM and his cohorts with their date with the hangman, and hopefully that will happen sometime before his “compassionate release” due to health care reasons. Pfui.
3. Ground Zero. If you’da told me, on the first anniversary of 9/11, that the Freedom Tower (or whatever they are calling it) would not be completed unti 2013 (if that!), I would have called you a liar and plotted ways to smuggle a skunk into your car. But that’s what’s going to happen. This is what the site looked like as of yesterday (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Freedo_twer_update.jpg). Pathetic. This is what the memorial site looks like as of July (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wtc_construction_update.jpg). Double pathetic. We can do better. Can’t we?
4. Airport Security. I hate airport securiy as much as the next guy. I’ve been detained three times for absolutely no good reason (once because I was late for a plane (through no fault of my own), and twice because I took one-way flights into and out of Reagan National). It sucks. The shoe thing sucks. The petty superiority of everybody who I have ever come in contact with at TSA sucks. But they are 0-for-the-last-eight-years, and you got to give a little somethin’ to a record like that. (And you Mexican airport security people, wake up over there.)
5. Obama. No terrorist attacks under his watch so far, at least one big-time terrorist squashed by an airstrike in Pakistan, Gitmo is still open, and he’s making all the right noises about increasing our footprint in Afghanistan. A lot better record than I expected.
6. Technology. One of the things people forget about 9/11 is that’s the day when CNN instituted the non-stop news ticker at the bottom of the screen. (I remember this because I was watching the news coverage with my boss, who is blind – we kept talking about stories on the ticker that didn’t have any relevance to what the talking heads were saying, and it ticked her off.) Imagine if 9/11 happened today, what with all the social networking stuff out there – people Twittering the attacks, people having to tell all their Facebook friends that they were OK. In a country where people go slighly off their bearings if Gmail is down for an hour, imagine if all the big news sites were down today as much as they were during 9/11? Makes you think.
7. God. I went to a memorial service in a park in Austin right after 9/11 sponsored by some church or other – after not really setting foot in a church for over a year – and the idjit leading the service called 9/11 a judgment on America for all our sins. I left and haven’t been back except for maybe the holidays, and not all of them. Not that I don’t believe in God, not that I don’t love Jesus – I do, sometimes in spite of myself – but I’m just not going to participate in communal worship if it means I get blamed for horrible terrorist acts because I’m not nice enough to some people or because I don’t give enough money to the poor or whatever other sins I happen to commit.
8. Sa-lute. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ground_Zero_Spirit.jpg)
(And just completely in the spirit of shameless self-promotion, here’s what I wrote eight years ago today. It ain’t enough, but it’s something.)
I think back, occasionally, of when I was single and living alone in Atlanta, and could do anything I want on the weekends, so long as I had clean underwear to wear to work on Monday. I am not necessarily indulging in nostalgia when I do this – I can’t, and shouldn’t, because I was lonely and unhappy and broke for a good part of this time. But on any given fall weekend, you could find me doing any of a variety of pleasant things:
There’s a lot you can say about living your life this way – wasteful, high-calorie, lazier than Adam’s off ox – but what it was, you see, was self-directed. I decided what to do. Nobody else told me what to do, ever, period. I got to choose what to do – and maybe just as importantly, I got to choose what order I could do them in. If I wanted to get up early and grab donuts and then haze out in front of the TV to the Falcons game all the rest of the day, I could do it – with whatever snack and donut breaks that I wanted. If I wanted to sleep late and write and not stir out of my apartment until three in the afternoon, I could do that, too. I decided what to do and when to do it.
I mention this because it occurs to me that a lot of the trouble that I have in relating to my daughters is that they have absolutely zero freedom at all to do anything. Being a four-month-old baby is like watching a giant TV but having someone else change the channels for you randomly – somebody with a good idea of what you like, but no clue of what you want to see right now. Storytime with Daddy? That’s a good show, very popular, but not everybody wants to see it when it’s on. Let’s Ride in the Minivan? Usually a hit, but sometimes it’s too short, and sometimes it drags on. What about Does The Baby Have A Fever? Oh, not so popular.
The only mechanism that the baby has to change the channel (so to speak) is crying; even the threat of crying is enough to cause the program directors (that’s Mommy and Daddy) to produce a new show. Is Tummy Time not testing well? Okay then. Time to switch to Monkey! Monkey! Monkey! That’s usually a big hit… no? How about the interactive version, where the baby gets to hold the monkey (it’s a rattle, shaped like a monkey)? No? Okay, how about Riding on Daddy’s Shoulder. That’s a great show – that’s like The Sopranos when you’re four months old. If that doesn’t work – sometimes it doesn’t at first… then what?
Here’s the thing. I want to do good here. I want to be a good program manager. But I have no – zero – idea what to do at any given moment. I can try the monkey-rattle. I can try the swing. I can try the diaper change. I can try the bottle. But I don’t know what’s going to be popular at any one given moment in time. And that problem doubles when you’re trying to figure out two babies at once – one may want to spend some quiet time watching Let’s Look at the Ceiling Fan while the other one is interested in Pick Me Up Or Else. It’s difficult. Throw in short attention spans – you can’t really count on Monkey! Monkey! Monkey! to distract them for very long anymore – and it’s impossible. (Not to mention that they are starting to create new shows of their own – last night saw the premiere of I’m Keeping This Pacifier In My Mouth For Three Seconds and That’s It.)
And that means they’re going to cry. A lot. And it’s going to be really, really loud.
(A little literary piece here, for your amusement.)
First thing I have to say, you know, is that I understand I really have nothing to complain about. Being the announcer for the New York Yankees, I mean, how could you ask for a better job than that? The history, the tradition, the pinstripes, the twenty-six world championships. There’s nothing like being part of the greatest team of all time in professional sports. And the people I’ve been privileged to know in the organization, from Mr. Steinbrenner all down, Mr. Cashman, all the great people at the YES Network, you could not ask for better, classier people to work with. And now that we’ve moved across the street into the new House in the Bronx, it’s just that much better. If you haven’t been there – and I know a lot of you haven’t been, yet – it’s just mind-blowing. The concourses are so much wider. The new steakhouse, which is just incredible, and the new Mohegan Sun sports bar. And they’ve kept so much of what made the old Yankee Stadium such a great place, too. It’s really a testament to Mr. Steinbrenner’s vision.
What was I talking about? Oh, yeah, the whole “See-ya!” thing.
I gotta tell you, I love making that call. It’s the best part of my job. Late innings, the Bombers are down, and Jeter or Damon or Posada come through in the clutch with a home run, well, there isn’t anything more exciting in sports than that. And I get to punctuate that great moment by saying “See-ya!” over the YES Network, broadcasting to millions of Yankees fans in the tri-state Ford area – well, that’s an incredible feeling, I don’t mind telling you.
But even better than that is when I’m out on the streets of the City, and Yankees fans come up to me and say hello, and then when they say “See-ya!” when I’m walking away – well, that just gives me chills. Because that means they’re out there, listening, and that means a lot to me. And of course, they always want me to say “See-ya!” back to them, which of course I don’t do, because it’s kind of a strain on the old pipes to give out the home run call all the time. That’s a little disappointing for them, and I recognize that. But that’s not really the problem.
Let me kind of illustrate what I’m talking about. The other day, the Bombers are in Baltimore, taking on the O’s, and it’s a day game, so I go out to a nice place in the Inner Harbor to get dinner. And I’m there by myself. Which is no big deal. I usually go out with my YES Network broadcast partner, Ken Singleton, but of course he had a great career in Baltimore, and when we go back, it’s like Old Home Week for him, so he ended up going out with Boog Powell and some other old Orioles, and I wasn’t invited for some reason. Same thing used to happen with Kitty up in Minnesota, so I’m kind of used to it. Come to think of it, Cone does the same thing in Kansas City. Anyway.
So I went to this seafood place. And the waiter comes over, and I ordered a Miller Lite and some chowder. And he says, “See-ya later!”
First of all, it’s not “See-ya later!” It’s just plain “See-ya!” That’s irritating. But I didn’t think it was meant in a mean way, so I shrugged it off. He came back with the beer and the chowder, and it was Manhattan chowder, so I sent it back, because I can’t risk all that spicy tomato sauce somehow messing up the old instrument. I had some really hot salsa once in Arlington, and my throat was so irritated I almost couldn’t finish the road trip, but that’s beside the point. So I asked him to send it back, and he said sure, and then he said “See-ya!” I sort of smiled at him, because at least this time he got it right.
So he brought the right chowder back, and then he did it again with the “See-ya!” Only this time, half the other waiters were watching him do it, and when he did, they all started cracking up. That’s disrespectful, if you ask me. I know there’s a lot of resentment of Yankees fans in Baltimore – after all, we outdraw them in their own stadium nearly every game – but there’s no need for that kind of treatment.
I finished my chowder, which wasn’t half bad – they had the oyster crackers and the saltines with it, which is nice, you usually just get one or the other. And the waiter guy brings me my crabcakes, which are always great in Baltimore. And I look up at him, and this time the entire wait staff is looking at him, and he does it again. “See-ya!” And everybody in the restaurant starts breaking out laughing. And I don’t see why, because it isn’t funny or anything. Well, eventually, the manager came over and apologized, and offered me a free dessert, which I had to turn down because I’m starting to maybe get a little tubby, you know.
That’s the kind of thing that I’m talking about. You see me out on the street, and greet me with a nice “See-ya!” – that’s a nice thing for me. All I’m asking is that people not overuse it. That, and come out and see the new House in the Bronx. You’d be surprised at how affordable the tickets are – the sightlines in the upper deck over by the left-field foul pole are amazing. Like I said, it’s a real testament to Mr. Steinbrenner’s vision.
