THE LAST FIVE ...

Closing up shop
- Wednesday, Aug. 02, 2006

It may be time for a change
- Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Entry in the air
- Friday, April 21, 2006

Still here
- Thursday, April 20, 2006

Music of the moment
- Wednesday, March 1, 2006

Or ... BE RANDOM!


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101 in 1001
American Road Trip, 1998


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Tuesday, Apr. 1, 2003 - 10:34 p.m.

I can drink, and I can't lie

OK, the weekend: As promised mere hours ago.

Bryan, Jim and Jess came down from Boston on Friday and I came home from work a little after 8 p.m. to find them already into the wine and beer and Nintendo. They were so caught up in Super Mario Bros. (2 and 3), Tetris, Paperboy, Balloon Fight, Q-Bert and Rad Racer that we didn't go out.

Instead, we kept drinking. We brought out the champagne bucket (and its waist-high stand) and put ice in it so that the beers were within reach -- like the two-second walk to the kitchen is so far out of the way. Ah, but we had fun. Bryan hadn't seen some of the games Casey grew fond of as a young lass, and Balloon Fight was a novelty. At one point, after Casey's final balloon had burst, she said to Bryan, "You must avenge me!" Moments later, as his balloons continued to pop, she observed, "You're not doing a very good job of avenging me." It was yet another one of those nights where we went to bed and realized the room was spinning and it was like, "Did we drink that much?" When Casey first crawled under the covers, she thrashed and wiggled and said in an 8-year-old manner, "I'm not tired I'm not tired!" But in two minutes she was snoring.

Saturday we trapsed around the City. And I mean around. We exited from Port Authority onto 40th St. and walked over to Broadway, where we encountered more war protesters -- as regular on a weekend in New York as Saturday matinees. From there we walked down to 23rd St. for lunch, then continued on into the Village and east (I think) along Bleeker, past all the familiar shops (like Murray's Cheese) and had a beer out on the sidewalk of the Red Lion or some bar. This was all when it was still rather warm and merely overcast; the rain came later. Soon we were back on the subway around Broadway heading up to Rockefeller Center. Bryan and Jim went to St. Pat's for mass while Casey and I met up with Kerry and browsed through stores until we found ourselves caught in J. Crew when the skies opened. There Jess found us (she had gone and met Mom and then went to the Matisse/Picasso exhibit) and we waited for the guys before heading off to an Irish pub on 43rd or so where we realized most everyone's NCAA brackets were busted with Arizona and Kentucky's miserable performances (well, just Kentucky's was miserable).

Bryan insisted on meeting Mia's bazillionaire boyfriend who flies in from Massachusetts on weekends, so he and Jim went to meet her at 8:30 while Casey, Jess and I -- exhausted from our active day -- drove home.

Sunday it took longer than it probably should have to make crepes and home fries for breakfast, but we did and they were tasty, and then it was a group outing to the wild lands of IKEA. That place is a madhouse on weekends. Casey and I usually got there at opening on Sundays when we made biweekly trips to Elizabeth, and it's not as crowded then. In the middle of the afternoon, it's like Times Square on the Friday after Thanksgiving. I wanted to use the two 55-inch curtain rods I carried as prods to move people out of the way. And I wanted to hit every child that ran across my path playing tag with a sibling or complete stranger they'd never see again until they one day meet later in life, get married, and by some fluke realize they once met as children in IKEA. Wait, that was the "history" behind Paul and Jamie on Mad About You, only it was the Museum of Natural History. Whatever.

After getting through the checkout lines, Casey and I bid the Bostonians farewell and went west to the Hills that are Short to pick up some household items at the store for Ceramics in a rural Outbuilding (Pottery Barn). We got shammed. Or is that shams? In any case, they're colorful:

And Johnny Rocket's. Mmmm...


OK, so I'm a terrible liar. Or maybe I have an overactive conscience.

It took me nearly five years to take my first "mental health" day off from work. In fact, it was my first sick day ever. But yesterday morning, I woke up, called the two people I needed to at the office (before they came in, naturally), and told them I wouldn't be able to come in.

It was Opening Day, people!

So Dave, Gayle and I froze our asses off at Shea Stadium while the Mets were laughably bad and we enjoyed the drunken idiots around us who didn't take long to get on Tom Glavine, Roger Cedeno and Cliff Floyd, for the most part. We were actually rather warm for the first seven innings, sitting in the sun with the wind blocked by the stadium. When the sun went behind the third-base seats, however, we became chilly.

Still, it was our fourth straight opener together, and the first loss (though a bad one, at 15-2, at that). It was my fifth opener overall, having cut school with my dad and best friend in high school in 1993 to see the Mets beat the Phillies. If I'm not mistaken, I was sitting in a similar spot that day to where I was yesterday. So I'm 4-1 overall at Mets home openers (once, I think, they had opened on the road -- 2000 in Japan).

But it just feels good to have baseball back. There's always something else to look for, something else to discover, someone else to root for, that I can be rejuvinated every spring by those two special words:

Opening Day.

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