I wish I could mute the people and not the TV.

I wish there were four more Beatles albums.

I wish I could understand why middle- or working-class folks vote Republican.

I wish that major league baseball had a salary cap.

I wish I could play piano.

I wish that I had a photographic memory.

I wish I had a job that would not require me to wear leather shoes.

I wish that everyone wore cool glasses.

I wish that Liv Tyler would record my voicemail message in Elvish.

I wish I could be a hero.

I wish I liked salad and exercise.

Okay, I wish I tolerated salad and exercise.

I wish I had a 500-gallon saltwater fish tank.

I wish that the global oppression of women would stop.

I wish I had a car and driver.

I wish my driver were Bar Rafaeli.

I wish GG would skip over the Bar Rafaeli comment.

I wish you would make me brownies. Like, all the time.

I wish I could ski or snowboard.

I wish that talent always translated into money.

I wish that all the great musicians who died in their twenties lived until their seventies.

I wish that I could summer in Nantucket and winter somewhere warm.

I wish I were friends with people who said things like, “My dad is letting me use his Gulfstream 8. Who’s in for Macau? Let’s do this.”

I wish that I could devise a way to print money…legally, of course.

I wish I had offices in Amsterdam and Prague.

I wish that I could choose the musical guests on “Saturday Night Live.”

I wish the Vikings could just…..never mind.

If ever a show was aptly named, besides for The Biggest Loser, it has got to be ABC’s extravaganza of confusion, Lost.

I’ve tried over the years to see if I could wedge the show into my busy viewing schedule since I’m a late starter. It took me three years to get into 24, I missed a half-season of Gossip Girl due to my own stupidity, and I just watched the first few episodes of MadMen.

I’ve wanted to like Lost, because as you know, I pride myself on going along with the crowd. And I’ve certainly enjoyed watching my friends interact the morning after another episode with doofy, confused smiles on their faces, trying to decipher whether that flashback actually had a foreshadowing and…never mind.

Everyone is looking at each other to see if anyone knows what is “really going on.” On a television show. Seriously. Even after all these years, no one truly knows what the hell has happened, is happening, will happen.

If I can’t figure out what a show is about in 10 minutes I am outski. My friends obviously feel differently and I do not begrudge them that. In their defense, they think there has been some grand master plan all along. That each numbingly confusing episode is one small piece of an elaborate, and ultimately satisfying, whole story arc. That one day, in the near future, their faith and their time will be redeemed.

And I am nearly 100% positive that their theory is bullshit. That the two creators have cobbled together a storyline on the fly, never thought the show would be such a success, and when the final season ends in a few weeks, they will peddle an ending that will leave my friends furious and unsatisfied. And I will have been proven correct. Yet again.

When that happens, please think of those developments as one of those umpteen Lost flashbacks. Only this one, it will make perfect sense. I promise you that.

Last night, by the time I reached my breaking point, GG had already rebuked me several times for ragging on the Grammy Awards telecast. I like and loathe celebrity in equal parts, and nothing makes me happier than heckling Jon Bon Phony while I sit here surfing the net on my new iPad that a designer friend at Apple gave me.

Joking. So anyway, I was busy armchair disrupting the ceremony, when I loudly observed that Ringo Starr’s leather-skinned wife looked like “an ancient burn victim” that had been “discovered in those bogs outside of Pompeii.” With that, GG gave up and wandered off. I have a way of outlasting a person’s expectations of me. You seem surprised.

Many of my opinions of the Grammys come with a grain of salt because I loathe most of today’s popular music. I likewise hate what the music industry has become: a purely numbers-based financial institution bent on stapling fiscal expectations and a timer to musical genius and trying to bind its feet, and force it into narrow little boxes, so the people who are bossing around the people who are stocking it across from boys underpants and Scott’s Turf Builder, don’t have to actually think about who might benefit from more exposure.

If it takes an artist two albums to find his or her voice, they will be cast out, but not before being forced to “pay back” all that stupid money the company spent on the video that went nowhere. And it’s out of that fertile soil that budding gay cricket Justin Bieber has emerged.

I thought that the awards went, more or less, to the right folks, with two glaring exceptions: 1) Diane Birch clearly should’ve been nominated and won the best new artist award; and 2) Lady Gaga deserved a couple of trophies. I mean, come on now.

Two hours in, I assumed that the worst was behind me when I saw Stevie Nicks come trudging onstage in the manner of a person walking to his or her own execution. She was there to duet with Taylor Swift, a really talented young lady whose music nevertheless has the gravitas of Josie & the Pussycats rockin’ at a slumber party in space, with Alexander the cat on the ones and twos.

But Stevie has done about a Taylor-Swift-and-a-half of cocaine in her lifetime. She has undoubtedly punched her share of men and women, been shacked up with a million-or-so ne’er-do-wells and has had more than a few handguns in that purse of hers, I reckon. She’s lived, man, and her songs stick to your ribs. Taylor Swift? Her last two boyfriends—Taylor Lautner and the middle Jonas kid—are prettier than most women I know.

Not to mention, Stevie was part of Fleetwood Mac, and co-wrote some killer, killer songs. The band’s best album, Rumours is on my short list of all-time great releases. At their musical peak, Stevie was right out front, wagging her finger and accusing guitarist/paramour Lindsey Buckingham of douchebaggery in virtually every song, most of which they actually wrote together. Watching a video of old Fleetwood Mac shows is like watching the Salem Witch Trials. With sultry keyboards.

Witnessing a true heavyweight forced to sing backup on a song about short skirts and lip-gloss was something that I will never forget. Why? Because it was so humiliating, it actually rendered me speechless, which could, in some circles, be seen as a good thing.

Dear Nerd,

Hi, how are you? I am fine. Thank you for asking. It’s nice to see that living with your parents all these years after college hasn’t spoiled your suspended adolescence. You still clearly have issues when talking to women, especially attractive ones. And, for some reason, you seem to hate everything Apple has ever released. Of course, that’s just before you scurry out like messenger-bagged ferrets and buy whatever it is that you were just trashing.

Heard you were squealing the other day about the iPad. Howling about how it doesn’t do this or that. Blah blah blah. The web was buzzing with your four-eyed pontifications and stupid tampon jokes. It doesn’t take pictures or something about multiple applications being unable to run. I’m not sure. Truthfully, I stopped listening at “It.”

The thing is: I think I speak for most everyone else here not named Beau or Jeff C. when I ask you to stop lecturing us, while you sit in your tent in front of an Apple store, so you can be the first to buy one and prance around your friend’s apartment when you get together for video game parties. Or whatever it is you nerds get up to when the rest of us are having fun with humans.

I mean, seriously: If there was an app that would allow you to sodomize your iPhone you would. (You know you’ve thought about it, dude.)

I have a new MacBook that is loaded with a trillion applications, 90% of which I have no idea how to use. Guess what? Who fucking cares. I write, surf the net, take three pictures a month. And I love my computer. But is it good? I have no idea. Still, if you try and talk crap about it and I’ll spray bathroom cleaner on your RealDoll.

To millions of us, the iPad looks pretty incredible, and I am very excited to get my bear paws on one of them. But so what if it can’t do five things at once? Isn’t that what you have a computer for?

All your back-biting, back-stabbing and backseat driving is doing is ruining it for the rest of us. All so you can act so superior, lecturing a world of simpletons about why the new thing we are so enamored with is actually crappy. Unbeknownst to us.

Hey, I want to sit on the couch and surf the net while I watch TV. I want to be able to watch a movie on an airplane. I basically want to have fun and not worry about what it cannot do. A year ago the thing was a pipe dream to most of us, anyway.

Is it too much to ask for you to keep your opinions to yourself? Answer me nerd, or I’ll tell your mother. And then you’ll get grounded for sure. Or worse.

No Comic-Con next year.

“The best writing, for me, comes when I have sustained an unpleasant shock . . . or insults and abuse from a group of academic colleagues. Then I write to affirm my own dignity, humanity, and autonomy.”—Howard Zinn

I’ve never been a big fan of impartiality, which is why I would either be the best judge in the world, or the worst one—depending upon how you see things. It’s also why Howard Zinn dying the other day has gone over in my world like a lead balloon.

Howard, 87 when he suffered a fatal heart attack, was a true champion of the left but far outflanked even some of the heftiest lefties in his repudiation of the federal government. The fact is, he was so far left of the left wing that he would’ve needed a GPS tracker just to thumb his nose at those pussies.

In 1980, Zinn wrote a book called, “A People’s History of the United States,” which was basically the world as he saw it, his opinion, making the title that much more audacious. His was an uncompromising worldview and morality was not to be bartered. If something was wrong once, it was wrong in  every instance.

Virulently anti-war, Zinn spent a half-century lashing out at the United States war machine that, as he saw it, drove the country blindly into armed conflicts that were none of our goddamn business. He stuck up for the oppressed: minorities, immigrants and women. And continued to rail against corruptors in every parts of society.

Critics said that he warped the facts to fit his theses, and that is probably true in some cases. But no one could say that Zinn was unqualified to speak on such subjects.

A decorated World War II fighter pilot, Zinn dealt death upon German soldiers and, to his horror, French citizens, and that might explain his disgust at the Viet Nam war. He traveled to Hanoi 40 years ago this month, during the height of the Tet Offensive—which, I’m told was no fun—to gain the release of two POWs. He was a lion of the Civil Rights movement, teaching at Spellman College and mentoring budding activists and really good authors like Alice Walker.

If you are looking for a compelling recent documentary, check out, “The People Speak,” a collection of Zinn’s writings read by celebrity activists like Matt Damon, Morgan Freeman, Viggo Mortensen and Dina Lohan. (Just kidding on that one.) It was released just before Christmas.

I guess that’s all that’s left to say, although I could probably go on for hours. Howard Zinn, a pretty dangerous guy to those prescribed to the conservative orthodoxy, lived a good long life and hopefully, he died knowing that he left the world a bit better than he found it.

Although some of you may disagree, I think he was an amazing and courageous American. That’s my opinion and, as Howard would probably say, you are entitled to disagree. You’d just be wrong.

Right, Howard?

This one hurts. So badly. Breathtakingly painfully. I know to you non-sports fans it all sounds so ridiculous; like a bunch of guys sitting around in funny jerseys yelling at the TV. And, in the grand scheme of things, who cares? It’s just a game. I respect your opinion, but if you say that to my face, we’re through.

Sadly, this is what it means to be a Vikings fan. Not just losing, but throwing the game away. Would it have been better had they lost 41-0? Yes, absolutely it would have. Because then, I would just have accepted that the better team had won and moved on. But that’s not what happened.

We handed the Saints the Ball five times and they won in overtime, after three terrible calls by the referee to move them into field goal range. They late hit our quarterback several times, and he still moved the ball up and down the field on them. Their QB is a runt and their coach is a punk and I will enjoy watching Peyton Manning carve them up like a Christmas ham.

The Vikings played so carelessly on offense, that I am actually having trouble envisioning myself going up there next season for a game. I will, of course, but it is going to take a few months to get over this one.

Over the course of my lifetime, I have learned to embrace the dark nights like tonight. Another bag of coal, another notch in the belt of my suffering. Because when the Vikings eventually win the Super Bowl, I can say that it was all worth it. In the way, I’m like an opus dei, only a Vikings fan.

Nevertheless, tonight just sucks so badly, so viscerally that I am welcoming going to sleep. The fact is this: Another year, another choke.

Some things never change.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are Andy Richter. A funny guy. Really funny, actually. But, due to your own poor decision-making, and the worst luck this side of that lady who got kablammed by the Cat in the Hat Thanksgiving Day parade float a decade ago, you are sitting alone tonight in a darkened room. And you are crying. Sobbing actually.

If the story has a silver lining….actually, what am I saying? There is none. That bad taste in your mouth that will never wash out, no matter how much bourbon passes your lips. And there will be a river of it over the next few months, Andy.

Fifteen years ago, you came to national prominence as Conan’s sidekick on The Late Show. Out of nowhere. Pudgy, beady eyed and always on the verge of sweaty. No one would ever look at you and said, “Get that man on TV.”

Nevertheless, you had a few great years together, and your chemistry with Coco—as you sat side-by-side, like a couple of college roommates—was pretty incredible.

Then you quit. You felt the need to strike out on your own, for some unknown reason. Perhaps you met an agent at the gym, or something. I don’t know. Then came The Andy Richter Show.

It lasted about as long as it took me to write this sentence. Poof. And you went home. Thud.

Then the miracle happened. Conan called. He was getting the band back together for The Tonight Show. You were going to be his sidekick, his comic foil for twenty or so years. Holy smokes, Andy! The rest of your adult life was laid out before you, like a red carpet. It doesn’t matter that Coco moved you from his side to a crummy podium, where you shoehorn in funny asides now and again. Who gets this lucky twice in one lifetime?

Okay, besides for you and the former announcer for Jay Leno’s unfunny, uninteresting, un-everything version of The Tonight Show, Stuttering John Melendez, who may himself rise like a modern-day Lazarus.

Then disaster struck and those NBC morons decided to force Conan’s hand. He did the right thing, you know. Leaving with his dignity. And leaving the show to continue to wither and die. But he’s a smart guy, like you, and the third time’s always a charm. Conan may find another spot and decide to bring you back in from the cold.

And it’s cold where you are, Andy. Freezing actually.

Well, it was nice for awhile to believe that the U.S. could muster enough decency to ensure that every citizen had access to health care. And that our country was going to stop kowtowing to drug and insurance companies.

But that’s over, thanks to the voters of Massachusetts, who elected a guy that makes Mitt Romney look like Abe Lincoln. I respect the fact that they voted, but I cannot help but think that some of them voted for fear instead of hope (right out of the GOP playbook). The irony is that they, too, are without jobs and health care and have children who go to bed hungrier than they should. So when they will wonder what happens when they get sick, and a job doesn’t materialize, even after six months of looking, I would like to fill them in:

They’ll die. Maybe not right away, but sooner than they should. Because there is no Plan B here. There never was. Ask Scott Brown. He’ll mumble something about fixing the broken system and then go about the business of lining his pockets with campaign dollars from the health care lobby.

And those emergency rooms that the less-fortunate Republican voters use as their primary care physicians are falling apart from overcrowding, too, and now there will be no money to fix them. That’s over. As are affordable drugs for seniors like my mom, and maybe yours as well.

But I’m sure that they took all of this into consideration when they decided to “send Washington a message.” That idiot Brown called it a “shot heard ’round the world.” The only problem is that the gun was in the voters’ mouths and they didn’t even know it.

I realize now that we will never have true universal health coverage in the richest nation on earth. Because if Obama couldn’t do it, we might as well give up on it and go back to the game of haves and have-nots, that we seem to play so well.

This isn’t an ideological issue; it’s one of morality. I can’t help but think that we are better than this. Sadly, one of those moments that would fundamentally change the way the country treats its own has been scuttled by ignorance. And I have to tell you: I feel sick about it.

Thankfully, I have health insurance so if I feel worse tomorrow I can see a doctor. Which is more than I can say for some voters in Massachusetts.

Well that was fun. Back home, in my hotel room, after the Vikings finished cleaning their cleats on Tony Romo’s teeth, 34-3. I am hoarse and exhausted from screaming and howling for 60 minutes straight.

There were some nail-biting moments early, but mostly, the Viking did exactly what they needed to do: take the wood to their shiny opponents and let the crowd rattle the Cowboys, destroying their ability to effectively audible.

That transformation took about five plays, when Vikings DE Ray Edwards engulfed Tony Romo and threw him down, like a rag doll, stripping the ball, while 70,000 of us screamed our approval.

There were a lot of “ouch” going around yesterday. And we were on the giving end, for once. Just as I had hoped would happen; believed would happen, even.

Now, I head home and the team heads to New Orleans, as a touchdown-plus underdog. The same experts that didn’t give us a chance against the Cowboys are already eulogizing my team. No chance, again.

Fair enough.

It’s the night before the big game, in Minneapolis. Usually I am a bundle of nerves, but today not so much. I am staying at the Cowboys hotel and their fans are littering the lobby like…litter. Lacquered, leather-jacketed, frosted tips and French manicured— and even the women look phony baloney.

The intensity of a rabid fan base is scary and can help a team build momentum in a big game. But Cowboys fans on the road? Yeah, not so much. They can barely stand to walk three blocks from the hotel, huddled in the lobby like grinning dopes with epically terrible haircuts and cellphones that play Toby Keith songs.

A few weeks ago, after that Bears debacle, I fetched my cross from the closet and began dragging it around the apartment during one of my more pitiable diatribes, about how my teams always choke in the clutch and how that made me a loser.

GG told me to zip it. She says that I project negative energy and that my fear of the Vikings screwing up is projecting failure upon the team, sometimes causing it to mess up. Not me alone, but the sum total of all of the team’s fans—hundreds of thousands of people just as negative as me. It’s an interesting point.

I have been filled with fear and dread before and during Vikings game for my entire life. Unless I am seeing them live and in the Metrodome, I do not enjoy any part of the games other than an occasional successful outcome.

The book “Fever Pitch” by Nick Hornby could have been written about my own childhood; everything down to the cover image, of a small boy, standing at a sporting event with clenched fists. Wiki the plot. I’m too lazy to synopsize.

I have to give GG credit where it’s due; usually her contribution to sports commentary is repeatedly saying how ugly and cheesy Derek Jeter is. And she’s all mine.

This time just feels different. To begin with I am here with my friend Mikey, who has seen his (and yours too) share of sports failures. His dedication is nearly heroic. I came from NY to Minneapolis. He came from the UK. For the second time in five weeks.

We’ve been drinking and eating steak and I am like, fuck the fear. I am planning on having fun tomorrow, regardless of whether we win or lose. The crazy thing is, I actually believe that we’ll win.

I’m calm and I’m confident. For once. I have never said that aloud before—because I considered it a jinx. But I’m done carrying superstitions around, too. (So GG if you’re reading this, you don’t need to wear the Helga horns at yoga.)

Home and playing in the most chaotic, cacophonous sports venue in the US, a place so loud that it breeds a kind of insanity, the Vikings just have to go out and do their part, play within themselves and play like men and make the Cowboys feel every bit of contact. That is what I have always implored them to do. My new rallying cry? Just win, baby. Do that and I promise not to fear the worst.

One win and everything changes, right in front of my eyes. I believe it will.

Believe it or not.