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.

Strange Happenings

I've done a lot of readings in my brief literary career. I've read at colleges, bookstores, and featured at dozens of open-mics in a number of states. This, by the way, is not boasting or a sad attempt at a resume. Anyone who has done the reading scenes will tell you that readings can range from exhilarating to "slit-my-wrists-and-drop-me-in-a-warm-tub" depressing. I've read to large, enthusiastic audiences and audiences you could pack into a bathroom stall. It's really crap shoot when you agree to read at a venue.

There's one thing, however, that I can ascertain: reading in Portland, Maine is always going to be interesting. Last night I featured at The North Star Cafe. Now, I should note that The North Star Cafe is a lesbian coffee shop---that serves booze---that has been kind and generous enough to provide a venue for The Port Veritas open-mic series in Portland. The reason I mention this is because the information will become quite relevant later.

The evening was almost Shakespearean in its foreshadowing. Early on, the host, whose name also happens to be Nate, and I were smoking cigarettes outside the cafe. "Man," he said, "something is off tonight. There's something strange about it." It would not have surprised me, in hindsight, to find three witches stirring a cauldron on a side street outside The North Star Cafe.

For the sake of brevity, I'm only going to stick to main events. First, any open-mic, by default, is going to draw its share psychos wandering off from a halfway house somewhere in town. This was no different. One of the readers, a regular who I will call Leo, introduced a new component to the weekly reading series. Generously, Leo has decided to start reading directly from his personal journals, something he has broken up into 15 chapters and has promised to read one, languorous chapter each week at the open mic. Book your plane tickets, folks. This is "don't miss." While Leo was a reading a young, rather pugnacious woman in a black wife-beater was restlessly searching for an acoustic guitar. Apparently, her reading, which she saw as the night's true "feature", required one.

After Leo finished with something utterly and mind-numbingly incoherent that stretched the five-minute time limit to close to half an hour of journal entry, I went on for my feature. And it went well. I read some new poems, a couple of family-oriented pieces from Honey, I'm Home (there was a young couple with their newborn in attendance and it seemed fitting), then I launched into the new material from Teaching Metaphors. The audience was receptive and kind, and it seemed that the night was going to take a turn for the better. Nate's instincts were erroneous, maybe even paranoid.

Then it all came down.

It started with an older man in a two-ton electric wheelchair and an American flag on the back (a friend of Leo's) reading fifteen-minutes of "Roses are red" poems, while the angry lesbian in the wife-beater brooded on-deck. She had found an acoustic guitar and was carrying it like lumberjack carrying an ax. She was pissed off that the crippled man was taking so long and holding up her show.

Finally, the wheelchair man finished, and the angry lesbian came stomping on stage, grabbed the microphone like it was phallus she was trying to tear off a male, and went into this acerbic rant that included post-it notes. Apparently, she had been writing some of it down while I was reading.

"And I don't give a fuck about hearing about people with a wife and kids complaining about having nothing," she went on.

I nudged my friend Jonell, who went with me to the reading. "Is she talking about me?"

Jonell nodded. "Oh, yeah," she said. "She wants to kick your ass."

So I spent the rest of the night afraid that the angry lesbian was going to sucker punch me outside the cafe because I read about my family. Didn't she know my marriage was on the rocks? I wanted to go up to her and make something up to get in her good graces. "Listen, that was all an act. My wife and I actually hate each other and the institution of marriage. Let's go buy some wife-beaters then slam some shots of whiskey, maybe punch some street signs after we're good and drunk."

It never happened. The angry lesbian played her song (in spite of some small details, such as she didn't know how to play the guitar) and didn't end up kicking my ass; however, I did end up carrying the man, in his wheelchair, out of the cafe with Nate and pulling a muscle in my back. Before leaving, the wheelchair man asked me if I'd give him a free book. Apparently, transporting him in his wheelchair out of the cafe wasn't enough. I gave him an old copy of Frostbite.

Later, at an Irish bar next to the cafe, Nate, Jonell and myself had a beer while some seventy year-old man next to us made out with his twenty-year-old girlfriend who was wearing a t-shirt that read Hottie.

"Looks like you were right, Nate," I said. "This was, indeed, a very strange night."

"I knew it, man. I sensed it in the air."

As I was leaving, a copy of Teaching Metaphors fell out of the box of books I was carrying. Hottie picked it up. "You write books? That's soooooo cool. He's trying to right a book," she said, pointing to her septuagenarian boyfriend. The man glanced coldly at me.

"Don't bother," I said to him. "The lesbians will hate you."

Idiot Bliss - Dan Cray

This is my good friend Dan doing one of his kick-ass tunes. Lyrically, this is fantastic and, sadly, dead-on true. I'm posting this without his knowledge, so he might be coming to kick my ass. But little does he know that I was trained to be a ninja. Check out more of his music at www.dancray.net