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.