Control+Alt+Delete

The return to Virginia is almost always by train, almost always late in the week. It is a ride I have taken for over two years, the sights intimately familiar. The rock of the train on rails a comfortable rhythm.

In the coccoon of the car, with quiet business people reading, texting, working, I try to spend my time shedding the layers of gravity and stress that accumulated in the days before. I find the music from somewhere, plug in the ear phones and watch the palette outside me play.

In Gettysburg PA, there is a historic painting, a panorama painted by the french artist Paul Philippoteaux, over 300 feet in circumference and over 40 feet high. It revolves around you as you stand in the center, displaying the horrific July days of the Battle of Gettysburg.

In my train seat, the streets of Philadelphia splay by, unfurling against the window, past the boat houses and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The refineries at the edges of cities, rusting, split by the rails of the train, a view most will never see.

Slums that litter the side rails like discarded cartons. A slice of the American pie left to rot on the counter.

The train ride reveals many things, many sites. Some are beautiful, some are plain. But the single consistent sight is the ever nearing markers that indicate a closeness to home.


The tunnel underneath Baltimore.

The Woodward & Lothrop Building in DC.

The conductor's voice in the overhead speakers: "This is our last and final stop".

Last and final.

I can unplug from work, albeit temporarily. I can hit the Alt+Ctrl+Del keys of my work week and begin the shut-down. I can erase the street scent of the Manhattan sidewalks. I can loosen the tie.

I have stopped being the visitor, the traveler. The stranger, the one-seat at the restaurant goer. The alone in a strange bed sleeper. The unpacker. Repacker.

The one heading into the train station while everybody is heading out.

I can become whole again, with the people and the friends and the family.

I'm a local.

I am home.

Frequent Flyer Mileage

Sometimes I wonder.

The account summary states out of the first 6 and a half months of the year, I've spent one and a half months somewhere else.

One full third of the year. 8 hours of a day in specific ratios. Almost 3 days a week out of each week.

Those are not the travel days. Rather, those are the nights spent abroad.

I sometimes wonder what is the toll that it has taken. What have I missed.

I can remember clearly the nights (early mornings, for what their worth but it was dark out and it was eerily quiet so I prefer to think of it as nighttime) when I stood on the edge of the driveway. Listening to the sounds of nothingness. No cars. No airplanes. Complete and utter silence. A few scary times when a deer would come crashing through the trees and leaves surrounding the house and stand staring at me in the middle of the lawn. Other than that, it was black hole silence.

And then beams of headlights would splice the black and I knew my car had arrived, to take me silently away.

It's not a bad job. In fact, on paper, on a resume, it freaking rocks. The numbers look pretty good, the responsibilities look even better. It is a wonderful and sought-after opportunity.

I embraced it early on, and tore into it in a fairly fiendish fashion. Long hours, far away commutes, my life controlled by the blinking red of a Blackberry in communications.

Yet in 24 months, while I still put the blinking redness into the gaze of every hour that I am awake, the Sunday night packing has worn thin.

The balance of 5s...five socks, five pairs of underwear, five shirts, five ties. It is a week measured on a hand. It is complete efficiency when I can choose one belt and one pair of shoes.

It represents a full quarter of a month, bundled in a black suitcase and left on the bathroom floor so that I can retrieve it in the still-darkness of an early morning.

I will rise with a simple and familiar rhythm. I am a morning person by nature, and I am awake and alert at 3am or 4am...whatever. I need only 4 hours of sleep. I need only to see the blinking redness of a message waiting to know that I am about to start my day. With a decision.

I leave the quiet and warming confines of a bed. I hear the rain from our bedside noisemaker, and I hear the stir of dogs as they notice my movement.

I dress in faint light. I leave knots fairly untied, to be dealt with on a train.

I hear the squeak of woodboards as I step across the floor, the slight jar of a door. I try to depart in silence, but usually I cause a stir.

I am leaving, as I have done now for over two years. And for many years before, but in a much more predictable fashion.

I leave them sleeping, and warm and comfortable. I set off hoping that in the end, perhaps on a Friday, that I can return, albeit briefly, and try to make up for the time away.

Increasingly I cannot. The time away has caused an erosion. A dulling. A hardening.

It has become too hard. It is becoming increasingly difficult.

It is simply becoming too old. Too old to warrant the pittance of rewards based on the efforts of sacrifice. The middle is starting to wear through, and the seams are becoming undone.

I leave in the familiar, and sometimes come home to the unfamiliar.

I am leaving again.

And while the choice is ours to remain, it is really the only option we currently possess. And so we do.

And I depart, quietly, in a morning of Summer when time and hours really don't matter. When school does not interrupt and schedules are wide open.

Except for the moments and minutes that tick away until I return. I like to think those are counted with clarity. And carefully.

A Pinkish Hue

There really wasn't any reason to question my manhood. Honestly.

Imbibing the quaintly colored drink was merely a choice, a lifestyle. The color of a fleshy-grapefruit. The pinkness of lip-gloss. The light crystal skim of ice on the top.

Christ, you'd think I was the only guy to ever drink a Cosmopolitan.

Frankly the transition from hard-core pure Vodka drinker with only olives to taint the texture was probably a bit of a surprise. However, feeling free to join her new-found habit of drinking MY vodka, I felt inclined to join her in HER mixer.

And there, you go. Instant-gay. Just add water. Pinkish water at that.

My very good friend came out of the closet after he had left the Army. We went to graduate school together, worked in the White House together and I even spent one night in his apartment when I had an early shift and he was working a late one. (I slept on the couch). Clueless to all the "indicators"---superbly clean apartment, no mention ever of girls, an almost disciplined secrecy to a social life, I just always assumed he was picky.

Picky.

Okay. Well, so I misjudged.

Years later, when of course I learned and that small tiny fissure appeared in my logic, the ensuing cascade of collapsing emotions was really virgin territory for me.

I wanted to call him. And then I thought, what the hell was I going to say? "Uhm, hey there. So, yeah, I learned something about you I didn't know. Yeah, I know we were paid to keep secrets, but I thought just government secrets, not personal ones."

Or the even better one: "I just wanted to let you know that I'm okay with that."

I'm okay?

Frankly, nothing had really changed in our relationship, except a tidbit of knowledge. A tiny insight into an otherwise highly successful man. And I was acting as if I had become a secret accomplice. That by keeping his secret I was doing him a favor.

What a moron I was.

I never got the chance to have my patently absurd conversation. I learned of his outing from a mutual friend, and I felt certainly he was breathing a sigh of relief being out of the Army and in a successful law firm. Working on Gay Rights. (Now that's an indicator)

But the dilemma has appeared on the horizon again. As the years start to stack up and as the children get older, one of my dearest friends remains exceptionally coy and perhaps even unbalanced.

A little background. Again, an Army buddy. (Yeah, that don't ask, don't tell thing really put us on high alert).

Perennial bachelor. Tom Cruise-like looks, with a sense of humor and friendship that I probably find unmatched in all of my closest male friends.

Exceptionally clean house. (Becoming my go-to indicator of choice)

Has dated girls that I know, only to fall apart when things get physical. His last girlfriend was a 2, and that was being grateful. Maybe she cooked well. Maybe she was the one who cleaned the house. I don't know.

But then he would take vacation. With a "friend." To the Keys. On a cruise. To St. John. At his "friend's house." "His house" was how it was described to us.

Hmmm.

But the sad part is we don't have the nerve to cross the unoffered line. We don't want to question the numerous instinctive feelers, we don't want to change the dynamic.

And frankly, the conclusion I have is who really fucking cares? As long as he's my friend and not shooting straight to video gay porn with underage Filipinos, is it really any of my concern?

Isn't he always there when we want to get together? Isn't he ass-slapping (hey!) hilarious when I have him over to watch war movies? Isn't he unfailing polite when I introduce him to my co-workers? Isn't he, actually, one of my longest-lasting friends that I've ever had.

Hell yeah.

So, I won't ever question him, nor pose the question to him. I won't question his manhood either. I'll just raise my Cosmo in a silent toast to him and hope that he is, of all things, happy.

A Dark Smudge From a Moth

Tonight, washing the dishes, a lone moth had the unlucky happenstance to fly into the miasma of bubbles and water and hands and ultimately, it arrived captured in my hands.

And as I gathered it in some sort of PETA-fashion, it fluttered and left a small smudge against my fingers. A small ink stain. A purple mark. Not a bruise, but a memory of a struggle.

And so I thought about the people who have left their dark smudge against me. Perhaps indelible. Perhaps permanent. A staccato of tattoos that I have captured.

And frankly, it's become something of a topic for me. There has been a fairly recent reconnection, via social media, of people that I literally haven't talked to in almost 25 years. And yet I am picking up literally where we left off.

Is it Deja Vu? No, not really. There are still people that I am fortunate enough to interact with daily, weekly, and they stamp their place on my heart like a stapler cutting into paper. They do it very business-like, and having succeeded, move on.

I'm talking about people who suddenly splash into this planet and create a nuclear cloud. People who I see and recognize, and then a name comes forth over the span of some clues and minutes.

They leave a mark on me. Or rather, they've left their mark on me. And in discovery, I find them. Not suddenly, but as if they had always been there and now I recognize them.

Strangers to an extent.

Does this make any sense? Probably not so much. But in the metaphor of a dying moth, held fluttering in the cupped hands, and released with barely a smudge on my fingers, I do realize the delicacy of interactions.

Of times when our times have intersected.

Of times when we were literally the only things we were looking at, or thinking about or holding in our gaze.

And I'm not sure if I've given those folks a better view than what I've gained. If they've received a portion of their skin in the game. If they've captured what I have seen.

If they've gotten a smudge of the colors and the feathers of their wings that they have left on me.

Because they have. And I go to bed with the dark smudges of them against me.

Sheer Randomness

While most of this should be in my portfolio, it's too lengthy to include there. Therefore, here are some random things about me that I thought I'd share:

-My absolute most favorite movie: "Braveheart", a combination of valor, blood-letting and a bit of nudity to combine against an eligiac soundtrack.

-Second favorite: "Stepbrothers", and thus you probably know enough about me to correctly judge.

-Favorite drink: Stoli Elite, straight up with an olive. Shaken. Icy cold.

-Second favorite: Knob Creek bourbon. A few cubes in odd shapes to make it slightly cool.

-Favorite time of the day: Sunset. Beach side. Probably a point in time when we had a chance to be in Mexico, Pacific side. Fucking sun burning a hole in the sky and bruising the clouds purple and blue as it settled in the West. A sunset you could almost hear.

-Favorite book: "The Stand" by Stephen King. Ultimate good vs. evil. Simple stuff.

(For those insulted by my lack of stating "The Bible" please understand that I prefer single author tomes)

-Favorite song: "Moving in Stereo/All Mixed Up" by the Cars. A defining song(s) at a point in my life when things were starting to stick together.

-Favorite poem: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by TS Eliot. "Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky"...

-Favorite food: Jack in the Box tacos. 2 for 99 cents. For breakfast. At 2am, when the beer buzz is fading.

-Favorite website: Deus Ex Malcontent

-Favorite Secret: I f'ing love Tom Cruise. From Maverick to Jerry Maguire to Lt. Daniel Kaffee.

More later, but while this may seem boring, it's sort of nice to figure out what I truly, truly love.

Something Absurdly Personal

Somewhere is a picture of him, taken on that day. He is smiling, that whip-bright white flash that still comes through in the photograph.

Somewhere, inside of him, something is attacking his brain. And neither of us know it.

When my son was 10, he left the golf course complaining of a severe headache. When he spiked with fever and was anguishing in bed, his pediatrician asked my wife a simple question: "Does it hurt when he touches his chin to his chest?"

"Yes"

"Call 911. I will meet you at the hospital"

We didn't call 911, rather, I carried his little-boy frame into the back of the SUV and drove him well above posted speed-limits. We entered the emergency room, filled with the usual complement of little boys and girls. I walked up to the lead nurse and told her bluntly "our pediatrician thinks he has meningitis."

Some parts of a hospital act quicker than others, particularly when certain words are uttered. It appears meningitis is one of those words.

At that point, my son and I were masked men. Gauze coverings as I held him and watched as he pointed out "pain" pictures...unsmiling happy faces are medium...he was pointing at the highest pain indicator.

We were isolated and kept in a separate room. Whenever doctors or nurses came in they were masked as well. They treated him as though he had something horrific. And yet they still were unsure.

So, there was only one way to find out positively.

For the unknowing, the spinal tap is also known as a lumbar puncture. If one saw the needle prior to entry, most would blanch. Most kids would cry. When they prepare a child for the procedure, they have them lay on their side like they are doing a cannon-ball off of a diving board. When they punctured the spinal column, he grimaced. He tightened and squeezed his eyes and his mouth in an indication of the most pain he had ever felt. He didn't say a word. He didn't move a bit.

(At this point I should tell you that the doctor in the procedure was showing off for some intern. She was cute, and he was showing off a bit. Unfortunately, when he did the first puncture, he nicked a wall and when he withdrew the spinal fluid it contain traces of blood. "Damn" he said. "I'll have to do it again." I thought briefly about how he would look with the needle jammed into the fat part of his forehead.)

So another was done, with the same impact on my son.

That night, I slept beside his hospital bed. He was shoved full of IVs. In a small act of blessings, we learned that he had viral meningitis...not as severe as bacterial, but certainly as dangerous and certainly as painful.

He thought the nurse button was "room service." He had jello, stayed up later than he ever had in his life and improved each hour.

Three days later he was released, and he walked out into the sunshine of a morning.

He just thought he was sick. We knew that he was better than lucky. But when he was being perforated by some of the largest needles I'd ever seen, he was the toughest kid I'd ever known.

Message from the Generalissimo

-Subject: Motivation

When I fired the CEO after 6 months in position, I truly hoped that it would inspire the troops to rise to the occasion and dutifully overachieve their sales targets.

Apparently not.

Therefore to provide further motivation to the troops, we are cancelling the Corporate Award trip to that Island-place I announced earlier this year.

People no longer have to stretch in their efforts to achieve those lofty targets...the pressure is off!! Why achieve 200% of your objectives when there's no place to go to celebrate?

In lieu of this Award trip, we will be bombing the previously mentioned island, and will put the video up on the marketing home page.

Happy Selling!

Upper Management

It's Not the Heat, it's the Warmth

So we began a Salsa challenge while in the heat-infused days of Lafayette, LA, home of Tabasco and other sundry spices.  A neighborhood challenge.  A throw-down, Bobby-Flay style.

People always wondered why my salsa was extraordinarily chunky.  Carved almost from a dull blade.  Not the small, piece-meal stuff you get in a chain restaurant...mine had girth (a smile at that word), mine had heft.  Mine broke the chips but more importantly, like the taste of a kiss from a girl with freshly applied strawberry lip-gloss, mine remained tingling on the tongue and on the lips.

It was in the smallest of smalls, the tiniest of morsels.  Literally the devil in the details.  To find the hottest on the Scoville scale of chilis (not quite nuclear, but much more enticing than the somewhat mainstream Jalapeno).   Scientific fact:  The jalapeno, a green very sturdy pepper yields about 2500-8000 on the Scoville rating; my little precious is somewhere near the 100,00o-350,000 mark).    It's like dating Britney Spears before the head-shaving or Jessica Simpson from the "Newlyweds" vs. the somewhat pudgy one.  That kind of hot.

But it's the subtlety of hotness, the unveiling in an almost lingerie fashion...yeah, this tastes pretty good, pretty nice, pretty tasty....holy shit, this is melting my teeth!  So, it's the tiniest of slivers in an almost castle of flavors that suddenly pokes you to get your attention.

It's also the greatest therapy that I've come to know.  The chopping, the slicing, the dicing, the mincing.  Throughout it all it is the mixing.  It is the salting.  It is the tasting.  I try to create a cacophony of colors, a deluge of greens, yellows and reds.  In winter I stick to Christmas colors and in fall the colors of leaves.  

The purpose, however, is to introduce.  To take something that is ordinary, seen everyday in supermarkets and grocery stores, all aligned and assembled and nicely arranged.  And like the individual piece parts of a nuclear weapon, when exactly pieced together creates a nuclear yield.  It explodes in your mouth.  It is lulled first to sleep then awakened to an explosion.

My salsa.  It makes me proud.  It reflects that way I want to impact people.  It causes them to pause.  It is something that some folks find addicting.  And I'll be honest.  I want them to want more.  

Message from The Generalissimo

Given the very high body count due to recent self-inflicted actions, I am taking time out of my busy schedule to come visit the troops and hand out free items left over from last year's marketing events (notably pens, balloons and a couple of sparkling bouncy balls). As an executive, I'd ask you have your people formed up into tight ranks so I don't have to mingle with them awkwardly.

And oh yeah, I am also going to host a webinar first. And ask that people submit questions to me. However, personnel actions, pay-cuts, forced furloughs, unmatched 401ks and cuts in healthcare coverage are strictly off-limits. Rather, I will answer questions that fall into the categories of "favorite movies", "customers who's names start with R" and "Potpourri".

Thanks in advance for helping out during this difficult time in our company's history.

Table Stakes...for what they're worth

Growing up in the 60's and 70's, there was a certain rhythm to dinner time and the gathering of the family. It was somewhat chaotic, a bit of a challenge to get the four of us around a table for any length of time. Usually it was my mother and sister and I; my father, a fast-rising Secret Service man usually was not home in time and ate separately.

It must be something in the DNA.

Tonight, we were able to come together and despite the relative late hour, it was a singularly blessed event. A sophomore in college, a sophomore in high school. An 11th hour decision to make home-made mashed potatoes vs. box versions. A full-press effort to find butter, or a favorable substitute.

Most families cannot connect the pearls throughout the day to string together two in a row. To bring the family together, for at least 30 minutes, and to collectively share something in addition to matching chinaware is something special. I'm sure that regardless of how old the children become, the inevitable Cocoon-like effect of the dinner table is forever: we revert back to an age where we once shared time, space and talking.

It was an extraordinarily average day. It was perhaps filled with some elements of drama, and some elements of boredom. However, in the end, with the quiet tones of a clock in the hall, we successfully overlapped our busy schedules into a time together that we shared.

It is, unfortunately, sweet rarity. But at the same time, it merely reminds us of the lure of the next go-around.

And at the appointed time, we devolved into our separate ways. We scattered, merely waiting the randomness that perhaps will bring us back together again.

And I look forward to such gatherings, if only for the notion that we once again share in something beyond just being related. We crave, we hunger, we seek, and as we attempt to satisfy such urges perhaps we put away ones that we can alleviate by being together.

It is visceral, and it is vital. And it makes me ultimately very happy when I listen to the hum of the dishwasher as the lone conclusion of our time together. It is a reminder of a time when we shared.

Anti-Social Networks

In 1979, the terrifying horror movie "Alien" came out with an all-together bone-chilling tag line..."In space no one can hear you scream".

In cyber-space, it's kind of the same thing. Nobody can hear you screaming, whether with laughter, fear, or sheer frustration. People represent themselves in some sort of self-constructed image of themselves, and hope that their "friends" in space find them to be exactly like that...

The difference is that most people are not their avatars; most people are a little bit different than what they represent behind the curtain of their MySpace page, or Facebook persona. But perhaps that's the beauty of such a network application...we can truly become what we want to be.

Either way, where it starts to fall apart for me is in reconciling people I actually know vs. their cyber-space persona. Maybe it's me, but people did not just become suddenly hip. People did not just become artfully articulate. And people still make misspellings, despite handy-dandy spell-check apps.

At the same time, I do realize that when people reconnect on Facebook, time vanishes and your remembrance is of the time spent in the past. I connect with friends who I haven't talked to since I was 16 or 17. In my mind's eye, that's where they remain.

Yet a quick scan of their information reminds me that they have achieved much in the time between. Much more than anything I have done, and it makes me a little jealous of their success because frankly I am having a hard time wrapping my head around this fact. I mean, honestly, who would have ever expected some of these folks to end up where they are at this stage of life?

So I enjoy catching up with them, and the banter shared reminds me of times very long ago. But now, the quips are from somebody who I probably wouldn't even recognize and that part sort of bothers me. That we are looking backwards to find our laughter and connection point, vs. using the very talent they've achieved as a starting off point.

I'll have to reconcile this in my own way, but meanwhile I'll try to find even more friends out there who were with me in my youth. There's only a handful of them, so it shouldn't be too hard!

Martini Moments

I had always wanted to be a writer.  My first foray, a stint in college, yielded $30.00, a check that remains tucked in an album that sits time-zones away.

My problem is my writing comes in bursts, sporadically.  Hale-Bopp frequency.  With no jello or black Nikes.  Rather, almost like a haiku, it spills out in increments that are captured either by a mood, or a vision.  

Kinda boring, right?  Melodramatic?  Probably.  

I've written a ton of things, and probably would score a C+ in many of today's college courses.  My actual highest scoring compliment came from a creative writing teacher in college who put me in his top 11 writers over a 20 year span.  He's dead now, and in some ways so is the person who got his attention with his words.  But kind of like a parasite twin who sits inside you eating away as you go on your merry way in life, the budding author never sat quietly.  

The problem is ultimately I'm almost Faulkner-ian in my descriptions.  I almost once got published in "Cosmopolitan" magazine with a poem about the way a lady looked when she wasn't looking at me.  Highly visual, highly colorized.  A 2nd place choice, according to the editor.  And I wouldn't have changed it.

Because to me, writing is the slow development of Kodachrome.  It is the unveiling of an image, the portrayal of a portrait, that unfolds while you wait.  You can read faster, hell you can fast-forward the book on tape, but if you miss even a single portion you probably cannot absorb the efforts that I am struggling to illuminate.  

It's the description of blond highlights to a blind man.

And I try to not be like anybody else; I try to take classic tools of pen and paper, hammer and chisel.  It's not noble.  Some chicks in high school seemed to appreciate it, and I crafted some prose on our wedding day that I still remember in highlights.  But I'm not sure if my writing was to be read aloud.

Rather, it is to be played silently in a mind's eye.  To unfurl in colors unique to the reader.  To scroll across at a pace that beckons down a lane that has both shadows and light.  At times, yeah, it's trite.  At times, yeah, it's sappy.  But Harlequin sells a shitload of paper with stuff that barely qualifies.

So, it's a bit of an effort.  It's perhaps the most selfish thing I've ever done.  It's also a very transparent act of putting some things out there for others to remark upon.  

I hope over the next few days, and hopefully the next few weeks, and ultimately the discipline of years to put together something that is mildly interesting.  That can be picked up like Sky Mall, absorbed, appreciated and even taken for free if you are so inclined.

But I'll try to be clever.  Try to be different.  Try to be insightful, and try to be something that takes your mind off of a million other options of print and for a brief martini moment be something that is unique to the two of us.

Bitch Forgot My Salt

For those who travel for a living, or even those who travel on vacation, the temptation to imbibe and simply fall victim to the road-side conveniences of America's fast-food machine is incredible.

Time Magazine asks "Why are Southerners Fat?" in a recent article, and frankly, Time has never traveled to the great cities of Chicago or Detroit. Time could've at least thrown the rural types a bone and said "Why are Southerners Fat but at least Tan?" And who's not to say that Time Magazine didn't park themselves near the Train Depot at Walt Disney World and merely assume the vast quantities of flesh were locals?

Either way, as Colonel Nathan Jessup said in "A Few Good Men", "I don't care."

Rather, I ran across an interesting food item about "Evil Foods", and the menu shown indicates the copyrighted Quadruple Bypass Burger. While not advocating fast food, let alone FAT fast food, I did notice something clever at the locale's website: Folks over 350 lbs EAT FREE.

Honestly, I cannot think of a better combination nor economic stimulus exercise than to line up folks who are border-line myochardial victims and offer them quite literally their last meal.

But I do sort of protest the fact that those who only weigh 345 lbs have to actually pay for their meals. But watching them trying to extract their wallet out of their back pockets might be amusing visually.

I, on the other hand, tend to skip these places unless it's Jack in the Box, but more on that later. However, I did fall recent victim on a trip to Boston, when I visited the 5 Guys in the airport.

For a meal.

At 9:30am.

For breakfast, consisting of a small cheeseburger and fries.

Frankly, it was quite good, and almost counted as brunch since it was reaaaaallllly close to 11am.

Message from the Generalissimo

Some important dates in company history:

-New ownership. Check
-Fire key executives. Check
-Fire sales people. Check
-Fire CEO. Check
-Effective immediately, the new CEO is going to talk directly to the most junior people in the company. Bypassing all chains of command, all synergistic resources and asking the guy on the front line for his "perspective." Weekly. In a 5-minute window of time.

Hard to believe, but true.

Dayummmmnnnn

For those unfortunates who are outside the AL East, the forthcoming All-Star Break represents a critical juncture in the life of a team...winning averages mean momentum and a well-deserved break...losing averages allow loser-ville teams time to ponder and fret.

No team in baseball can generate the unbridled love/hate passion like the northern New York team. And as we enter into the All-Star Break period, nothing pisses me off more than the Boston Red Sox blowing their lead in the AL-East to allow the merry band of pin-stripers a chance to gain some mojo.

My father in law loves the Yankees...but he's the only one I don't dislike with total disdain. The rest of you in the Bronx? Just go watch "Cloverfield" while I laugh with my popcorn.

Oh Welcome, oh welcome

To: Reader
From: Management

Why now? What unearthly idea bubbled up from your unrepentant wise-crackery and compelled you to stop writing for yourself and start attempting to entertain others?

Not sure. But like those kids strapping into Space Mountain's open-air sleds, let's just see where this thing takes me. Us.

I invite you to join me, as often as you can. And I'll do the same.

Management