Today, that heaving chest of gold bullion that is the New York Yankees baseball club opened their new stadium. The funny thing is: none of their fans were really clamoring for one. The old stadium suited them just fine. I have seen a few games there over the years and I am always taken with how annoyed their fans get throughout the course of the game. The atmosphere at the ballpark is always exasperation at the opponent for even trying to win and utter disbelief if the Yankees happen to fall behind. Literally.

But the new stadium, oddly, looks just like the old one. Only new. Not reinterpreted, but copied. Soullessly so, too. What the team’s fans have gained in better food options and warm water bathroom sinks they have given up in a level of intimidation unequalled in any American sports; Yankee Stadium is a shit-hard place to win a big game. Those fans should be in Underworld IV—loud, raucous and racist…I mean, loyal. When the Angels’ Wally Joyner was hit in the shoulder with a hunting knife thrown from the stands all those years ago (look it up) it sent an unmistakable message to other teams: Yankees fans are violent, deranged and have really good aim.

Yet besides for naked greed, I cannot see what the organization gains. What they’ve lost is immeasurable: the ghosts of 27 world championships whistle through that dumpster-with-seats on those cold fall nights where that douche bag Jeter seems to camp out on second base after a double, for his entire corny career. Now? There’s a Hard Rock Café. Where their old park was crappy, but scary, the new one has all the gravitas of Space Mountain.

This past Monday New York Mets opened their new park, Citi Field. I was there. It was beautiful; small and intimate and all sorts of cool nooks and crannies. And our former stadium was a D+ student of an enclosure, built at a time when parks were pretty much standard cookie cutter shapes. I had had some unbelievable times there, some of the best of my life, but I was not sorry to see it go. It was time. We had outgrown our seats, literally and figuratively, and it felt as if the Mets were treading water. There was very little good history that we were leaving, and to be honest, it feels like a cloud has already been lifted.

It will be interesting to see how the Yankees fans react if the team misses the playoffs. They will undoubtedly blame it on the ghost of Joe D. being unable to walk across the street to a shiny new toy that will get real old real quick.

Just you watch.

I don’t know about you, but I love both kittens and rainbows so much my mouth is actually hurting from smiling so widely as I write this. It could also be that cheesesteak Lean Pocket (of course) that I burned it on this morning.

Okay, now that that is out of the way, today seems just like yesterday, save for the rain. The response to yesterday’s post was somewhat mixed. But I guess the fact that there is a response at all is great.

Yet, I was looking for a change of pace and I found it, of all places, right where I live. Imagine that.

“You will not be writing about this,” GG warned me from the other room. For much of the other morning she had been trying to convince me that she had a goatee, or a “soul patch” as she liked to call it. She has about three tiny hairs on her face, they are all blond, and it took us fifteen minutes to locate those. Yet she was dragging herself around the apartment, convinced that I had unknowingly married a female yeti a dozen years ago.  And now was my chance to make a break for it.

We spent a few minutes with the magnifying mirror and I was doubled over with laughter much of the time. We laugh a lot in our home.  At each other. With each other. You name it. I tell people who don’t know GG that my life is like I Love Lucy. Our friends already know that. They have heard her stories, seen her in action and watched as I have tried, vainly, to curtail her behavior.  

She has, at various times, tried to convince people that I am, somehow, pulling the strings. That I am the closet bully who gets my way without looking like I am. But no one believes that. Not for a second. Nevertheless, I am just so thankful to have such a gem in my life. If she were here she would say, “what kind of gem and how many carats?”

And she wouldn’t be laughing. Ruh-rizzle is right.

I have come to a conclusion that I am becoming a hermit. How did I come to that conclusion? The other night, my wife invited me out to dinner and a movie with her and some of our friends and I declined. I was busy watching MLB Extra Innings and some ghost-related shows on A&E. And then she said, “Stop it! You’re becoming a hermit.” And that is how I came to the conclusion. Just before I decided to meet our friends for dinner.

I have indeed gone somewhat underground lately because, frankly, I seem to grow a shorter fuse by the day. And trying to fight the compulsion to wait by the phone/PDA/email is only slightly more difficult than accepting that I am actually bratty with people for not calling more. I am like a lot of people I know. Especially now.

We meet for coffee or lunch in small groups, sometimes only two or three of us, and we talk about our friends who are still working and how they have become such distant tools (I’m paraphrasing here). The reality is that they probably have it worse: waiting for the axe to fall or being demeaned daily by salary reductions, unpaid “furloughs” and shrinking expense accounts. Doing five people’s jobs. On the other hand, they are getting paid. There is that. Okay…so it’s a tie.

The thing is, crap like Twitter and Facebook make hermitism easier. I have been spending far more time chatting with folks online and meeting new people. It is like that scene from Titanic, where we’re all of those people in the lifeboats, freezing our asses off, but waiting for the rescue. Meanwhile, many of our salaried buddies are like those passengers still on the ship, listening to the band and thinking, “hey, it could be worse,” just before the hull bellies up and the thing sinks like a stone.

In answer to your inevitable questions: yes, I am pretty sure that they make medication for my problem and no, I am not planning on taking it. We’ll discuss it further when you don’t return my call for two weeks.

UPDATE: I think that I just survived my first near-intervention from someone who read this and thought it sounded fatalistic. Good grief. What the fuck’s a guy gotta do to get some pity around here? We’ll talk tomorrow about rainbows and kittens. I swear to God.

It’s Easter morning in Rhode Island, colder than a well-digger’s ass, and I am writing this waiting for brunch at some schmancy Brown University private club, the kind of place where they carve roast beast and drink white burgundy.

Afterward, we will head back into the city and resume our lives as happily married infidels. I emailed a friend this morning to tell her that the plastic-legged midget from my high school had resurfaced on Facebook. I should add that I had told my friend about said midget in her birthday card, in between telling her stories of how special she is to me.

I finished off my email this a.m. with the pleading, “Wait, is this bad?” when I know full-well that it is bad. But ours is a forgiving God. And he knows that I am overall a nice person, despite my dogged naughtiness.

I am making a New Year’s resolution not to ridicule everyone who is different from me. It was a tough decision, but I am committed to staying with it. This time will be different.

On the upside, since it is already April, and resolutions can never be retroactive, I have eight more months of terrible statements and outlandish behavior.

Thank you, God.

Legendary child-hater Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss has a great many fans. Overall, most people are drawn to one of three stories: Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs & Ham and How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

Although I have always liked those tales and appreciate the dexterous storytelling, my favorite has always been the title story from “The Sneetches and Other Stories.” Anyone remember that one? The “Sneetches for Dummies” version is this: sneetches were skinny, bird-like and lived on the beach. Like a pack of Brazilian models. They came in two varieties: star-bellied and not. Society generally favored the star-bellied ones. (Naturally.) And the star-bellied sneetches knew it. Like Kanye.

So, some guy moves into town with a machine that can put a star on a sneetch’s chest for a tidy sum of three dollars. The idea goes over gangbusters with the star-less critters as it evens the playing field, in terms of popularity. But the O.G. star-bellied sneetches become upset because the star is no longer exclusive. Luckily, old boy comes back with a star-removal machine that costs…ten bucks.

And so you can imagine what happens: sneetches start switching back and forth, bankrupting themselves and eventually lose the ability to tell the difference: all sneetches become equal. Happily, the sneetches ended up being cool with that, shoving in the shyster’s face, especially after he had opined, “you can’t teach a sneetch.” Go to hell, Sylvester Monkey McBean. Go straight to hell, you snake-oil salesman.

But the story is relatively short, almost tossed-off and certainly angrier than some of the others. (With the exception of “Massacre at Whoville.”)  To me, it feels like a brandy soaked Dr. Seuss was presenting a mocking parable about conformism, and how others’ perceptions about what constitutes cool affects ours. When it is decreed that the stars are must-haves, everyone wants them. Once they fall out of fashion, everybody will dump them. To conform once again.

Now I’m thinking, “Does this mean men are going to be wearing those linen suits with short pants again this summer—or out we done with that bit of affected silliness?”

Only Dr. Seuss knows and he ain’t saying. Because he’s dead.

Have a great night!

George Bush will ever resurface.

A true DJ uses a laptop or an iPod.

I will live to see the day that a midget is elected president.

There is anyone better at anything than Prince.

I will ever understand the appeal of a show like “Lost.”

We have seen the last of Eliot Spitzer in public office.

I will have a better dog than my first one, Hero the dog.

A salad is ever a meal, unless it contains bacon or, at the very least, cheese.

I will ever get tired of the mid-afternoon nap.

GG’s behavior, or her hair, will ever cease to amaze me.

Gwyneth Paltrow’s straight male fan base will ever recover from her topless scene in that Shakespeare movie.

Candy will ever fall out of favor in my world.

Publishing will ever be the same, after the next round of closings.

I have ever had more “K” entries in my address book.

Knit ties and fedoras will ever look like anything other than a costume.

I will ever enjoy looking in the mirror.

Al Qaeda has had such a robust recruiting class, as of late.

Obama has even scratched the surface of what he is capable of.

The Vikings will ever win the Super Bowl. Sadly.

I have enough true friends.

I will regret a word of this. Except, maybe, for the one about the midget.

I have tried. Really. I think I could be fairly good at it. I do. And I have two friends who make good twitterers, twitterosos, even. But every time my Blackberry beeps I see another three-line message and it makes me crazy.

Facebook is one thing: there are a lot of people, and a lot of photos. I like photos. Because if someone puts photos on Facebook, they are usually of folks who are having a good time. There are no “Aunt Mary’s Wake, ‘08″ photos floating around. And, of course, my friends have really cool friends.  Even the friends of theirs that I hate so viscerally at times, they are still relatively cool and usually attractive. For Judases. No, I’m serious.

But, with Twitter, I feel the nagging to update, to keep pace with the thoroughbreds of cleverness that my friends (okay, it’s Larry and Mary) are. And I cannot. Not just because they are far pithier and succinct than I (but that is certainly part of it). But because I am busy on Facebook, updating my stupid page and looking at pictures of my cool friends. Not to mention, giving the evil eye to their sketchy ass friends that I grudgingly tolerate.

No, I’m serious.

Heckler with Jamie Kennedy is a brutal documentary about hecklers, critics and angry bloggers. He shows up to interview people who criticized him—and there are plenty because, let’s face it: the guy is no Jim Carrey. And he knows it, but still makes people say it over and over. Tons of uncomfortable moments. Like tons and tons of them, especially the scenes where he confronts some of the most pathetic reviewers and reads their vituperative comments back to them. Most squirm, but some are unrepentant. 

The thing is, it’s not like Kennedy has a leg to stand on because most everything he has ever done has been really been weak. So he sits there and occasionally is left speechless. But I guess he is extremely courageous to do something like this.

They have a ton of great interviews with geniuses like Patton Oswalt and David Cross—and a wild scene with the late beyond-great Bill Hicks—as well as some crazy encounters with hecklers in comedy clubs.

Anyway, it’s all over Showtime and you should check it out.  So there.      

I have just read an article in The New Yorker that was so long, I thought the magazine was actually filibustering. It was as if the issue had chained itself to my leg, to protest me “reading” the new Life & Style. The story was about author Ian McEwan who all of my British friends love, but whose prose leaves me cold. And, incidentally, who is certainly not on my Facebook Top 5 Favorite Ians (Ian McKellen, Scott Ian from Anthrax, Ian “Three Lions” Broudie from the Lightning Seeds, Ian Gillian from Deep Purple and, let’s see, Ian Rankin, that Scottish crime novelist.)

I love The New Yorker, though, because of its audacity,  in the face of this unmitigated publishing industry disaster, to still run 25,000 words on as man who clearly wants to be left alone. You know the only reticent writer that deserves that many words? Salinger.

Yet, nearly every issue, there is a real drawn out feature story, about folks even less interesting then McEwan. It is kind of like you are at an all-you-can eat buffet, and the manager offers, “Oh, you like stuffed shrimp? Here are twenty. Fatso.” Kind of like that.

But it is that editorial belligerence and dogged determination to cater to folks like us—mixed with a most heavenly body copy—that set the magazine apart from everything else. The downside of such an approach is when, like me, a person decides to read a story about someone that they are not really interested in and wind up in an abusive relationship, as I did with that issue.

McEwan would not leave me alone. Peering at me, from the magazine rack. Chuckling in low tones, like he just made a witty, but overlong remark about the effects of mercury poisoning on Descartes, or something. Five pages in and he was going for a hike, five after that he was, amazingly, going for yet another hike. It was like “Walkabout,” but with an old guy and no naked chick.

The story was magnificently written and flawlessly edited, as always, but I don’t think that even the guy’s family wants to read that much about him. I find reading about writers is a difficult challenge because, no matter how approachable they seem, the writer is always visualizing what he is saying on the printed page. So aware of the power of language, that they will color any story in any manner they would care to, merely by behaving in a certain manner.

Ian McEwan clearly cared to present himself as the personification of a plant that produces a single bloom every 18 months or so. If his intent was to get people to leave him alone, I think he succeeded. For me, that would only take nine words:

“Come on over. Maury’s got paternity tests on. Again!”