A letter to God (from an ex-Catholic)

Dear God,

First of all, let me apologize about the fifteen years I've been out of touch. The last time I visited you (on a non-holiday) was at St. Mary's Church in 1993, and that day I sat behind an old man who lost control of his bowels during mass and let a forty-five second fart fly that sounded like You were unzipping the sky. After this spectacle of Monty Python-esque proportions, the old man turned to me, shrugged, and said, "What are you going to do?" Understandably, I broke into a fit of uncontrollable laughter and had to excuse myself from the church and continue busting a gut in my car. I suppose that was slightly blasphemous.

No. I don't have any good excuses for not attending to mass or praying since then. There was a short stint in college where I fancied myself an intellectual and started reading Neitzsche and talking about how You had died. I'm sorry for the misunderstanding. But from what I hear, You're a pretty reasonable Deity, and it is with the utmost respect and contrition that I come to You with one humble, mortal request.

Before I get to that, I'd like to thank You for allowing The Red Sox to advance to the ALCS. I'm sure I'm not saying anything You haven't already heard from Curt Schilling, but the three game sweep of Angels (one might be inclined to think you'd favor Angels over Red Sox, but, once again, You've proven Yourself just and benevolent) was pretty goddamn sweet. Oops. Sorry.

Now, I come to You, as Your humble servant, to ask that You please, please, PLEASE make The Yankees lose tonight. Look, Cleveland has Trot Nixon playing for them, and after listening to the man in interviews for nearly a decade, I can say with some certainty that there's no one who digs your son more than Trot. Nixon credited Jesus for everything from a game-winning homerun to the passing of a healthy stool. You owe it to Trot, God. Think about that.

Then there's the fact that The Yankees are evil incarnate, the children of Beelzebub. If The Indians were to win tonight, I would see this as a classic example of Good triumphing over Evil on earth. It was very kind of You to strip that fat, greedy bastard Roger Clemens of his ability to pitch last night, thus making him a big $20 million lemon in the lot at The Bronx. Now, all I ask is that You, in Your infinite love and kindness, make those assbags in pinstripes lose tonight. It would be even better if You could also find a way to humiliate Johnny "Judas" Damon or Gay-Rod. Perhaps You could have one of those guys, like the gentleman in my last memory of church, lose control of their bowels while swinging at Strike Three with the bases loaded, turning to the crowd and the national audience with indelible brown stain on their pinstriped ass. But I don't want to seem too indulgent. It's a sin.

Thank you for listening to me, God. Hopefully, tomorrow the clouds will part and I'll see You smiling down at me and my fellow Red Sox fans.

Sincerely,

Nate Graziano

P.S. You really need to lighten up on The Cubs. This is reminiscent of Your malevolent Self that punished the Puritans.

Congratulations

Congratulations, fuckers. I have only three humble requests left to ask of you:

1. Don't choke.

2. Stop drinking Bud Light. You make millions of dollars each. That stuff is piss. If me and my buddies made half of what you make, we'd be dousing ourselves in Guinness.

3. Most importantly: don't choke to The Yankees. If I have to watch Johnny Damon, Gay-Rod, and Jeter dry-hump on the pitcher's mound at Fenway, I'm going to off myself.

Good peoples

I was interviewed on New Hampshire Public Radio tongiht, and I wanted to take a second and give them some props. Yes, maybe I'll be preaching to the choir--- I'm a liberal who believes in free spreech---but I'm going to say it anyway.

A couple of months ago, my publisher sent NHPR a galley copy of my book, Teaching Metaphors, and we really didn't expect much to become of it.

Much to our surprise, I was contacted last week by the producer of The Front Porch, Andrew Walsh, and invited to be a guest. Wow. For the little men in the small presses, the bastards like myself with their nails dirty from clawing out the mud pit of obscurity, this really was a break.

Anyway, I want to thank the host Liz Bulkley, who is an incredibly smart and cool woman, and Andrew, a cool-ass dude that really needs to let me buy him a drink, for having me in their studio. And if you give a shit about independent news, programming and ideas, you really need to support your public radio. They rock.

Here's the link: http://www.nhpr.org/node/13777

Some perspective

Sometimes there's nothing like a little perspective to straighten things out. Perspective is that magic pill we pop when the seemingly insufferable mechanisms of the world drill an un-lubed middle finger up our clenched sphincter. Perspective allows to say, "Hey, at least it wasn't smoldering metal spike."

As a Red Sox fan, right now, I need some perspective. Fpr example, I don't live in Dafur or Baghdad. I'm going to a wedding on Saturday, and I'm pretty sure O.J. won't come barging into my hotel room waving a gun. So The Red Sox have played like a bunch of 8 year-old girls forced onto the field by their parents while sitting on tickets to a Hannah Montana concert. So what? It could be worse, right?

So I've watched my hometown team cough up a 14 and 1/2 game lead over a team that fills my mouth with bile each time I see a pinstripe. I've watched a handful of overpaid, avaricious assholes sit on the bench after being cleared to play, dog out plays on ground balls (something you get benched for doing in Little League) and demonstrate complete complacency with coming in second. I had a football coach who once said, "Coming in second is like kissing your sister; you get nothing out of it." There's some perspective.

So I've put off my work, my studies, my life, to follow these fucktards for the past five and a half months. So what? It's not like I've been kept awake in Guantanamo Bay with loud music and halogen lights 24/7 during this period. It could be worse.

I'm not going to say anything that hasn't already been said on talk radio or the New England sports columns. The Red Sox are shameful. Sure, they might still take The Wild Card, although in my opinion, there's about as much chance of them going to The Series as there is of Bush pulling our troops out of Iraq. The point is that they've been humiliating to watch and don't even seem to care about their colossal collapse (minus Youk, Beckett, Paps, Lowell, and the new breed of young pups). Watching The Red Sox this past month has been like watching a grossly obese person chow down on a pint of Ben and Jerry's Chunky Monkey. You just want to shake them and scream, "What the hell is the matter with you!" But, then again, nothing short of the aforementioned smoldering spike will wake up Terry Francoma.

Again, it could be worse.

So to my fellow Red Sox fans (if either of the two of you who read this blog might happen to be a Red Sox fan), let me offer you some perspective: We still have air to breath (until we destroy our environment through global warming); the world isn't coming to an end (until Iran builds a nuclear weapon while the US remains mired watching over a civil war in Iraq), and, more importantly, we still have beer.

So screw perspective. Drink up. This round is on me.

I told you...

See. I told you so.

Put a fork in it.

It's over. There. I said it.

I want everyone to see that I called it: The Red Sox are going to lose the AL East and the wildcard, and the team will be sitting home updating their own blogs come October. I especially want Yankee fans to take note of this, so come September when you're celebrating your tenth straight division title, you can save your sick gloating for Red Sox fans who are actually shocked and distraught. I see it coming. I'm prepared for the worst.

And worst of it is that I was again cuckolded by this club. Bamboozled. Hoodwinked (go to your thesaurus and pick a verb) into believing that somehow The Red Sox could be anything other than...well, The Red Sox. As if somehow 2004 magically obliterated 86 years of pain, disappointment, and, at its lowest points, despair. The Red Sox may have become fashionable and sexy to a whole new crowd of urbanites who can afford forty bucks a seat to see a game at Fenway Park, but behind the big names and engorged salaries, they're still the same Red Sox that helped spawn three generations of pessimists.

I'm not going to go into the particulars of what is shaping up to be the team's most colossal regular season collapse since 1978 (it looks like Yankee fans will be able to paint a line across the top of the "1" and reuse their old "1918" signs). Three names---Drew, Gagne, and Epstein---just about tell the whole story. I'm more concerned with the fact that I almost feel at peace with the inevitable. It's as if the whole universe is back to normal.

For anyone that has grown up a Red Sox fan in the past eighty years, losing and disappointment are inevitable parts of our lives; they have shaped our entire world views. For example, someone who wasn't raised a Red Sox fan may bust their ass at work with the expectancy of getting a raise. The Red Sox fan knows better. There is no raise; it's not in the budget. In fact, you're probably going to get laid off as soon as the company gets around to outsourcing your job. You're prepared for disappointment, therefore you've successfully mitigated its effect. Disappointment, when you're surprised by it, is insufferable. Watching the Red Sox pull their old antics isn't going to surprise me because I've prepared myself this fate long before the hammer will fall. For a couple of years now, Red Sox fans seem to have forgotten this fact. We've been spoiled. Now the honeymoon is over, and we're back to watching the same bunch of fucking bums that have made us miserable every summer (sans one) for the past 89 years.

Perhaps, if we're to take the Eastern approach to this, we can say that everything happens for a reason. Maybe the hordes and hordes of Pink Hat Fans that are talking on their cell phones in the stands during the games at Fenway, helping gouge ticket prices, and taking seats that some of us who actually give a shit about baseball could be using will realize after The Red Sox choke this year that the team is really a disappointment to follow, and they'll go back to spending their evenings at The Wang Center instead of Fenway Park.

So Yankee fans can save it, stuff it, stick it, and blow me. I'm going to give you the same response all real Red Sox fans will give you: "What are you talking about? It's football season. How about those Pats."

Scooby Dooby Dumb-Ass

Being a teacher, I freely admit to having one of the sweetest schedules in the working world. Of course, there are always people out there with better schedules---people who work for themselves and get to set their own schedules, or better yet, someone who doesn't work at all---but I think a teacher's schedule is still pretty damn good: weekends, holidays, vacations, and summers off.

However, most teachers take on some kind of employment during the summers because they're responsible adults and realize the extra money will help their family's financial situation. I didn't get that gene passed on to me. I take summers OFF. No work. The reason for this is simple: I'm lazy. This summer, however, I did tell myself that I was going to work through the novel I've been writing for a couple of years and have another draft by the end of August. That, I told myself, counts as work, only I'm not getting paid for it, nd it helped assuage the diminuitive amounts of guilt I feel for sitting on my ass for ten weeks. A modicum of my parents' work ethic must've rubbed off on me at some point.

So here we are, the beginning of August. My novel is 300 pages in draft form. Care to guess how far I've gotten into my rewrite? No, I won't make you guess. I'll tell you. 82 pages. Yup, that's been my work this summer, approximately half an hour of real writing a day.

I have become a veritable expert on making excuses not to write. Most of these excuses start and finish next to a beer tap, but there are other excuses as well. Today's excuse: There was a Scooby Dooby Doo, Where are You? marathon on cable. That's right, folks. I watched six hours of Scooby, Shaggy, Fred, Velma and that hot piece of ass Daphne on my couch with my kids. I did, however, get some inspiration to watch all of them by participating in some recreational activities. After six hours of Scooby Doo, I turned on the Red Sox game, and that did it. Here I am.

I was about to do some actual work a couple of minutes ago, but then I started writing a blog entry on my own slacking and Scooby Doo. Now, Entourage is almost on, so scratch today. Maybe tomorrow I'll work on writing a sequel to Teaching Metaphors about teachers during the summer break. I'll title it Doing Jack Shit. But don't expect me to start working on that any time soon. There has to be a Brady Bunch marathon on somewhere.