Gearing Up
1. Working on the best way to insert the words Boston Red Sox, defending World Champs into every conversation. Man, that shit never gets old. The best people to try this out on? That easy - telemarketers. The other night I got a call from one of these folks asking me to take a 'brief survey." I agreed and happily replied the World Champion Boston Red Sox to every question until the poor bastard hung up.
2. Stoking the fires of my fierce man love for the Ortizzle. No, I'm not ashamed of the way I feel. Does it get any better than drifting off to sleep in your Big Papi t-shirt, dreaming of the left-handed havoc to come? Sometimes:
But it will be when he steps onto Yawkey Way that Ortiz will feel he is back where he truly belongs.
"Man, I don't know, but we're having so much fun here," he said, his 230-pound frame anchoring the picnic table outside the Sox batting cages here. "Like, when I go to Fenway, never in my life have I ever felt like that. It's like, damn, I'm at home. This is where I want to be. "
"Sometimes I want to be out of my house, hurry up, just because I want to be at Fenway. Sometimes, as soon as I walk into Fenway, everything is like I'm walking . . ." he pauses for a long moment. "I'm walking into the most unbelievable place I've ever been."
3. Trying to figure out what's going on with Shaughnessy. You know, Dan "Shank" Shaughnessy, hatchetman, hater and hack, the man whose first instinct after the historic defeat of the Yankees was to scramble to protect his royalty machine by reminding everyone that the so-called 'Curse' was intact until the Red Sox won the World Serious. You know, that guy. Well, today he goes and writes this:On paper, New York looks better, but the Red Sox will beat the Yankees when it counts because of what happened in those last four games in October. It's the new reality, the alternative universe, a place where the Red Sox are clutch and the Yankees choke.
One constant in my life has been that I am against whatever Shaughnessy is for; the fact we're apparently on the same page may make my head explode.
4. Reading a whole lot of Red Sox blogs. Which reminds me, where all the Yankee blogs? Sure, there's Bronx Banter, the Replacement Level Yankees Weblog and some others, but where are the rest? Where are the Yankee equivalents of Surviving Grady, Rallycuff, Cursed To First and the like? Maybe they're out there, and my inherent bias has blinded me to their existence, but I've yet to come across a Yankee blog with anything as funny as this:2. When I come up to bat they would play the song "Goodbye Horses" by Q.Lazzarus, which you may remember as the song from "Silence of the Lambs" during the pivotal Push-My-Cock-and-Balls-Back-Between-My-Legs scene, and to pump myself up for my at-bats I would look into the mirror in the dugout and scream at my reflection: "Would you fuck me?? I'd fuck me!! I'd fuck me so hard!!"
5. Doing a lot of 'real' reading about the 2004 Red Sox. So far I've read Why Not Us? by Leigh Montville and A Tale of Two Cities by Tony Massarotti and John Harper; I'm currently working through Faithful by Stewart O'Nan and Stephen King. And let me emphasize the "work" part; the last title is my least favorite of the three. Every day, for the rest of his life, O'Nan ought to get down on his knees and thank whatever god he prays to, be that Jehovah, Yahweh or Ted Williams, for allowing him to co-author a book about the Red Sox, during a season in which they finally win it all, with Stephen King ferfuckssake.
Some might say I'm just jealous of Mr. O'Nan. And in response to that I would say, maybe I am, maybe I'm not. But I'm definitely working on a plan to knock him over the head, put on my homemade O'Nan mask, and score some of the sweet seats in Fenway that he gets from SK.
Numbers 6 through 10 to come later.
<< Home