My 13-year-old nephew is getting into kicks. Ruh-rizzle. It’s a slippery slope, I warned him as we scanned the Flight Club NY website. Since he is already a size 13 I have been feeding him some snug 14s and the ones that I refuse to wear—I’m an adult—but he has begun getting that jones, emailing me photos, asking my opinion.

I wanted to tell him about the money he would be spending on them in the future, how his closet will be overstuffed with boxes. How he will torture himself, deciding to wear or store them (always wear them), and how, it takes a certain kind of hot chick that will even abide by that obsession.

To explain how kicks will freeze his personality as an overgrown teenager and, as the obsession grows how he will begin to dream about orange boxes as far as the eye can see. But mostly, I will say nothing.

Other than, “welcome.”

Petty bullshit. Not sure about you, but life is filled with it. Moreso, as of late. I have gotten so consumed with it, that it clouds the stuff the really matters. Today, my phone rang and it was a cold dose of reality and a long look in the mirror.

I have a friend, Lisa, who GG and I worked with many years ago. A great person—smart, nice, funny, beautiful, caring. A Yankees fan, but I overlooked that. We went to her wedding to Victor and celebrated when their son Anthony was born. She was there when GG and I first got together at a Flatiron bar called No Idea, so many years ago.

Lisa has had cancer several times over the past few years. It took her hair, it took parts of her body, even, but it didn’t take her spirit and it didn’t take her smile. Every time she kicked it, it was another victory for goodness.

But cancer is a terrible, invisible foe. And it hunted her over the years. Today, we got the call that it has nearly claimed her. Hours, maybe days, but certainly not weeks now. She was calling a few people to tell them. To say goodbye. My throat is thick with emotion as I write this.

I cannot begin to get into the spiritual aspect of this news, the mysterious ways that the Lord has to claim a wife and mother in her prime, after so much suffering and so many tears. But she is at home now with her family and soon to be at peace.

All I can do is to take a long hard look at my own self-absorbed conduct of late and feel silly and trivial and small. So small.

Ugh.

Talk to you tomorrow, okay?

Old men. Can’t live with ‘em, can’t pour hot coffee on their wrinkled heads.

So just today I was at the foxy optometrist’s office getting my pupils dilated, when Gretchen…I mean, the optometrist told me that I would be very sensitive to light for several hours and would require dark glasses to get home. Fair enough. It was very sunny, however I have some old school black shades, like Antonioni. (Sure, you’re thinking. Just like Antonioni.)

Yet rather than sit there and wait for a few minutes, like a normal person, I hop up, put my coat and sunglasses on and walk home. But, of course, I want a coffee. Ehhhhh. So I stop at the coffee place up the street. There’s a line. I am waiting behind this old dude. Late 70’s easily. Probably early 80s.

Now, I am minding my own business, because as my friends will tell you, I barely care about my own affairs, let alone theirs. Not to mention, I cannot see very well at all.

Yet, Old Man River says to me, in a voice that sounded like a waterboarded Wilfred Brimley. “Who do you think YOU are? Mick JaggAH?” He was referring to my sunglasses, obviously still on my face. Still…he was an old man. This wasn’t going anywhere. I just said, “Excuse me, sir?”

Now, he felt like a tool, his withering face beginning to turn the color of calamine lotion. He tried to recover. “Your sunglasses. You shouldn’t wear them inside. It’s rude!”

So I am standing there, feeling like I am on some sort of shape-shifting drug and getting…reprimanded by a guy who looked only enough to be wearing cloth diapers? (It’s a complicated joke, I’ll admit.)  I thought about making up some lie about having a malignant tumor or something. Make him feel awful. But I am Catholic. And God will jinx us for such folly, I just know it.

“I just came from Gret…the optometrist’s office, “ I answer, calmly. “But whatever, mind your own business.”

“I’ll mind my own business. Sure.” He said and turned back around, in a huff. I thought his response was odd. Just repeating what I had said. The tactic was very unconventional, causing me to repeat it back to him yet again. So there.

And I was glad he stayed turned, frankly, because I think that is a level to which I will not sink. Grappling with a 150-pound codger, even with my limited eyesight, was not something I want out there on Twitter. Unless he bothered GG. Then again, she would make mincemeat of him. Yoga has made her strong as hell. If she were here she’d say. “And I’d do it, too! I’d hit an old man!”

So I come home, and have to wait for three hours to even write this up. I’m sure that it was much funnier then.

Whatever the fuck that means.

I know when it’s a successful visit to the in-laws in Rhode Island, when two things occur. The first is that we manage to stay off the roads at night, when the drunk drivers prowl the streets like great white sharks off of Cape Town. And the second is that we visit Target so I can see how the other nine-tenths lives and buy what my wife likes to refer to as my “crap”.

From looking at our cart, you will come to an inescapable conclusion: there is a female who cares about her appearance and there is something else, some kind of escaped mental patient, who buys things like Welch’s Black Cherry Grape Juice and what can best be described as a Plexiglas drum of cashews. And coffin-sized boxes of cereal. And, of course, what trip to a retailer is complete with a box of Rainbow Nerds? None.

But the people I encounter are like an off-Broadway production of Monster Vs. Aliens. (I need to keep my pop culture references fresh, y’all.)

They all limp, to being with. Or have some sort of nick on a chromosome. They are red-faced and their hair is either inappropriately long or wildly short. Most are heavier than they should be, which is something coming from the man who accidentally dropped such a large jar of salsa con queso onto the floor that it created a kind of mushroom cloud of carbs.

But I will tell you this: everyone is nice. From the broken man with the pencil mustache who I told that “some asshole dropped cheese dip and just left it there” to the witless, disinterested pocket tart with the peek-a-boo top that checked us out. (After a few non-responses I thought GG was going to hit her with the two-pack of toilet cleaner.)

No matter how much stuff we buy, it is always $194. Like a Nicolas Cage movie, or something. And then we load everything into the car and head back to NYC where everyone is better looking and smarter, but are obnoxious, overbearing and annoying.

Which is better? I assume you are joking.

When I was a kid my dad would tell me that “only the good die young” which he followed up with “and your mother will live to be 100.” It always had me in hysterics because my parents had been married for over 20 years by that point and I remember a house filled with laughter, eating and me reading something or other.

Well, my dad Tony died in 1980, at 47, and, at the time, I never considered the connection because, hell, 47 was ancient to a 13 year-old. But I now see the tragic irony because 47 is young as shit. (Humor me, will ya?)

I thought of this today because, well I think of it every day, but today I read about Natasha Richardson passing away at 45, leaving two young sons and a husband. And it stopped me in my tracks, which is amazing because I don’t seem to have any sort of connection to her. She wasn’t in a movie that I liked, or a Broadway play, or anything. But what happens when a person dies is that everyone tries to talk about the person that we just collectively lost.

And then I heard about what an amazing person she was, from a variety of interviews, and I wonder about why God didn’t select Osama bin Laden or, say, Derek Jeter instead. Just as an example. But we will never know. The Lord works in mysterious ways. Look at the cross-eyed bastard who just married Adriana Lima. What happened with that one, God?

Personally, I think it to be more random that that. When it’s your time, you’re outta here. You cannot choose how much you have, but you can choose how to spend it, right? As Morgan Freeman so eloquently put in in The Shawshank Redemption: “Get busy living…or get busy dying.”

Natasha Richardson was a wonderful actress, a great humanitarian, wife, mother, aunt, friend, co-worker, etc.  And seems like she squeezed a ton out of her life before she left it. Let’s all make sure we follow suit. I am trying to.

Because I don’t care how old you are, you ain’t getting any younger. And that is the truth.

So farewell, nice lady. Good luck with whatever’s next. No joke. (For once.)

I just finished watching “24″. My wife GG has given up on it because she says that it’s the same plot every season. I agree, but still watch it because if there is one thing I love to do, it is yell at the TV, pretending as if the characters can hear me.

I know they can’t. I know it gets on GG’s nerves. But I cannot help it because I have so much fun pointing out the absurdity of the plots. As if the characters themselves don’t realize that two presidents had been assassinated in the same hour, or Jack had been arrrested and released (twice in the White House, mind you) a total of four times in two hours. But you know what? There are few greater pleasures that watching Jack Bauer threaten to torture somebody. He is balls-out on that torture stuff. Like, scary.

But it cracks me up when I say things like, “Jack just pulled a gun on that woman who pulled a gun on him twenty minutes ago!” I fear that, without that, the show would not be the same. And so I chime in. I feel like I am on that old TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000. And I need to stop it. For real.

We need to add that to my list of goals that I am currently trying to meet. Right below, to stop commenting on people’s Facebook pages after midnight. Because I should really be asleep by then.

And I don’t know about you, but I don’t like to picture people at their computers at 1:15 am (just to say). Why? Because I like to picture people I know wearing clothing. (Almost exclusively.) At that hour you are generally wearing what you are about to sleep in.

Except me, because I like to wear a  cape around the house. It relaxes me. And then I hang in my closet because, I don’t know if you have ever slept in a cape, but it bunches uncomfortably in the shoulder area.

Tell me you didn’t believe that. Lie to me, even.

The other night, I was flipping between a reality show called “My Half-Ton Dad” and some sort of documentary about the Nazis’ siege of Leningrad—both uplifting programs, to be sure—and I couldn’t help but think that the half-ton dad could use a nearly three-year siege to get him into shape. I fear, however, that those poor Russians, who were eating each others’ children by the time the allied forces broke the blockade, would have been on that son of a bitch like the Kardashians on a shrimp appetizer, and then the siege would have been much more like the juice fast or something. A long, cold juice fast.

This is how my mind works.  And I am like, “Write it down! Write it down!” as  don’t want to forget it or something, this bit of comic gold. So now I am writing this column instead of doing something useful. Like bathing in holy water. That might help me.

My recent trip to Europe has pricked my interest in traveling again. I have made a list of places that I would like to see. Bhutan. Kashmir. Bali. Australia. New Zealand. There are ten places in Italy alone that I am jonesing to see. I would love to make a living writing about traveling. The problem, as I see it, is that I am great at experiencing things, but poor at chronicling it through photographs. We just came back from a week in Europe and we took a total of zero photographs. We always have an amazing time, but we just never think about it. I am too busy taking mental pictures. I’m sure you do that, too. You stop and think, “Here I am, this is what I am doing, and this is how I feel.” And, for me, I am always able to recall them.

Sure they fade a bit. I still remember a beautiful September night in Prague a few years ago with GG and three friends, where we ate dinner riverside at a place called Kampa Park. And drank. And drank. And drank some more. And walked around for hours. laughing.

I don’t have a photograph to remember what we were wearing or eating. But I am sure that we looked stylish as we laid siege upon the restaurant. And I was nearly the quarter-ton husband when we left.

To add to my obvious emotional discomfort, I have been getting occasional blinding headaches, usually when I have been working on my lurvely new laptop. I figured it might have something to do with my eyesight (always thinking) and so I made an appointment to get my eyes checked.

I went to Moscot on 14th Street & 6th avenue, because they have a great selection of uncommon eyewear and I want to support neighborhood businesses.

So I get my eye test from this totally nerdy, foxy optometrist. So good-looking, in fact, that I wondered if she was from a TV show called “Cheaters” (which I have become obsessed with) and GG would be lurking somewhere off-camera with an axe or something. It was a nerve-racking few minutes, especially when she dilated my pupils and I momentarily lost my peripheral vision. I began see flashes of curly hair and I hoped that GG would calmly assess the situation before swinging. That, however, is not how this nightmare had ever played out, in my head. Like, ever.

So, afterward, I spend about an hour sorting through a bunch of frames. Normally, about ninety-five percent of all frames in a particular store are useless because, as people who know me well know, I have a fifty-pound head. Picture putting eyeglasses on a blue ribbon pumpkin. But this place happened to have a great selection for me.

Finally, I find this pair, from some really cool Danish eyewear brand called prodesign. I loved them, but there was a tortoise shell version that I really, really coveted. And the woman said that they were on back order, and I would not be able to get them until the third week of April. But the ones I held in my hand, I could presumably walk out with. Keeping in mind that we are talking five more weeks of squinting, five more weeks of headaches.

So naturally, I said, “sure, I’ll wait,” and walked out because, after all, I am a lunatic. And as I am writing this, I am developing a headache.

I hope they are worth it. I think they are. But….owwww.

As people who know me can attest, I have made fun of Brooklyn quite often. At various times, I have referred to it as buck-toothed, smalltime, lame, distant, oafish, uninspired, lawless, unimaginative, over-confident, filthy dirty, grim, annoying, cloying and its residents as delusional, arrogant, clueless, low-expectation-having, tragic, sensitive, humorless, pseudo-hipster, defensive and, let’s see, cab-driver torturing cast members from Rent. Only without the singing talent. I could go on. But I won’t.

Because after today I will never disparage Brooklyn again. I have too many friends that live there. And, even though everyone knows I am kidding (and I am really just jealous) they do get upset. And then GG gets upset. And I get into trouble. And I don’t want to get into trouble any longer. It is bad for my health. I’ve been told. Actually, warned might be a more accurate term.

Last night I was out with some of them and they were lobbying me to find another whipping borough. Queens, they said. Queens kind of sucks. I thought about it, but decided against it. For one, the Mets play there. For another, Queens doesn’t go around talking about itself like it is cool. I checked: queensvegan.com is an available URL. Jump on that, someone.

Forget the Bronx, Staten Island or Jersey: I know scary people from those places with names like Link and Spider. I must know fourteen girls from Brooklyn named Jenny, Jenni or Jen. All the guys are either Matt, Mike, Steven and Ben. Lots and lots of Bens. Unless they plan on choking me with their skinny ties or hitting me with lead-filled fedoras, I think I’ll survive.

So, therefore, I have decided that it is either Brooklyn or nothing. I look over to the couch and GG’s green eyes are burning holes in my forehead. And she is actually cracking her knuckles. It’s clear: nothing wins again.

Congratulations, Brooklyn!

I’m at 40,000 feet, flying a BCN-LHR-JFK trifecta, cribbed up in a newfangled business class seat and chewing on sour winegums like Bobby Brown on a four-corner three-pack. (Is there anybody from Chicago out there?)  It is dark in the cabin, with the only light seemingly emanating from my laptop and the new Bond film, which is oddly bloodless, considering it featured Olga Kurylenko, who was excruciatingly hot in The Hitman and yet runs around in yoga togs in this movie.

The woman would get topless for a Latvian cereal commercial and the Bond folks were like, “No, Olga no! Keep your shirt on!”  Consequently, the film annoys me. But I watch out of the corner of my eye nonetheless.

So I’m sitting here thinking of a way to articulate something that has been heretofore elusive to me. Namely this: how can I feel so good, so confident with the economy ensuring that rejection is around every corner? How can I be so sure that there is actually light waiting after so much darkness? I guess it’s because I finally feel unshackled from a situation that pounded the self-confidence from my judgment.

I had a dream the other night about those people and woke up with gritted teeth and a sore jaw. The gift I have been given is the work I have done since is for me and no longer hit with the dummy stick.

And the other night, while I was walking through the rain-soaked streets of Barcelona with my luminous birthday girl, and eating, drinking, laughing and just living, man, I realized that I’m so the lucky one in all of this madness, because I have reached my age and, upon reflection, I have never acted in a way to discredit my reputation. I have always treated my friends like I would Fáberge eggs, offering support and treating them gently. (Feel free to call bullshit on this one, anybody.)

Another thing: a job’s a fucking paycheck. I used to pretend that it was more than that. That work had a sort of spiritual quality, that the Eureka moment of a good idea is nourishment for the soul. But it’s not really. The nourishing stuff is being the man (or woman) that your folks prayed you’d be when you were born: honorable, honest, dependable, caring and kind.  And the writing and creating that you do for love, not money.

I have always hated bands like Radiohead because I thought it was pretentious that they released songs that sounded like guitars porking violins (yes, I just said that), all the while saying they were in search of art. But now I sort of get where those university boys are coming from. Except they are rich and I am sitting here wondering why I am sitting here—in business class, home from a week in Europe. Dazzling amounts of lunacy it is.

I have learned this and other valuable lessons over the past few months. I learned that I’m really and truly happy for my friends’ success, which is an immense relief to me. And that I have no problem hearing “not right now” when I know my talent justifies “right now”.

Either Verlaine or Rimbaud said this, and I’m not interested in impressing you by claiming to have read it anywhere other than at the Picasso museum two days ago. But I remember what he said and it makes so much sense: “Sincerity is inseparable from pain.”

And apparently, Olga Kuylenko is inseparable from her clothing in the new Bond flick—two painful truths that I am dealing with at this very moment.