james mccarty yeager's Open Salon Blog

Meandering the Sunday Countryside

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 01:02:51 -0500

My eldest son Justin is on his way to Montana tomorrow. It feels like he is going off to seek his fortune. He has been away from home a bunch of times but this one feels somehow more significant. For one thing he has given me his car, an 18-year-old Pontiac Firebird with 215k miles on it. I practically need the aid of a powerful steam crane in order to get into and out of it. Recently he had been coming over for about 4 hours a day, maybe once a week for the last month. We've been talking mostly about low-key non-charged issues, and it's been very nice. We did talk a little bit about his drinking but he is basically trying to stay stopped and has done so more on than off for most of the last 9 months. Not perfectly but better than he used to.

He's going to Helena, Montana to see a woman he has known for 8 years who is a couple years younger than he. She is a zoology student at Carroll College, a school formerly unknown to me, but that just proves I'm a southwesterner by upbringing and not a real hardcore westerner. She and Justin spent last Christmas and the Christmas before together, about 2 months Christmas before last and two weeks this Christmas. He has said that he is not romantically attracted but of course propinquity is very strong medicine. And I figured out that even though that could be a difficult situation, it is probably better for him emotionally than living at his mother's and seeing her get drunk every afternoon.

So I've been learning the lesson that he has his own higher power who is as completely in charge as of his life as my higher power is of mine. Which is all the way, all the time. And that realization helps lessen my fear for him, that normal parental hope-my-kid-will-be-okay fear.

He came over in the afternoon and before leaving we waited a few minutes for my friend Peter to bring my laundry over from the wash 'n fold. Peter is kind enough to take it there after he comes to see me on Saturday mornings for our weekly anonymous 12-step conversation. I have bad knees and worse breathing so he schleps the sack downstairs and takes it over there in his car, God bless him, and usually brings it back the following week. But he will be out of town next weekend and so brought it back the next day, Sunday, today, so as to be done with it.

I was glad he got to meet Justin since Peter has been one of my best friends in anonymous recovery for about two years now, and I have discussed Justin with him several times - as well as mentioning him to Justin. So it was one of those blessed encounters that cannot be arranged but work out perfectly anyway. Peter said, "Wow, I could tell he is your son right away, by his eyes." I never thought of those as being a distinguishing characteristic for Justin and I but will accept the diagnosis gladly.

After Peter left, Justin showed me the jack and the window scraper in the hatchback as well as the humongous speaker and crossover that was already in the car when he got it. So I got behind the driver seat for the 2nd time I've driven a car in a year and a half, and began what will become the 1st time I've owned a car since 2006. And I adjusted the seat in the mirrors and figured out what all the buttons are, the way you do when you're being introduced to new vehicle. And he explained about the fuel gauge not working and what the readings ought to be for the temperature, oil pressure and battery. I observed it seemed somewhat strange to be learning from my son about a vehicle instead of the other way around.

We drove from Northwest DC down North Capitol Street and then across the 14th Street bridge and down I- 395 to Springfield, Virginia, where I dropped him off in the parking lot of his mother's apartment. Then I patted him on the back and told him I was proud of him and would try to help if he needed money while looking for work. Then he went off as if nothing was happening the way the young do.

And I haven't had the freedom of a vehicle for six years, so for amusement, or symbolism, I did not go straight home. I set off through the back roads of northern Virginia toward the Blue Ridge Mountains which start west of DC at Leesburg. And so I got to stretch the engine out and get up to 70 a little bit. I got robbed by the transit authority of close to $5 for I think less than 5 miles of toll road that didn't exist the last time I was out there - or I would've known how to avoid it. So I clipped the edge of Leesburg and came on back toward town on Route 7 and went past the intersection of Rtes 7 and 28. This is now about a 12 to 16 lane interchange.

When I landed at Dulles Airport at about 10:30 in the evening on May 5, 1972 and was met by the lovely, fascinating, bipolar Anni, I was well on my way to becoming a full-time drunk. And as she drove me away from the airport out toward the mountains with Leesburg at their feet, we passed the intersection of Rtes 28 and 7. At that time Rte 28 was two lanes and Rte 7 was two lanes. And that was almost forty years ago when I chased a girl up here and left home to seek my fortune.

Tonight I kept on going past Rtes 28 and 7 through fields that were completely lightless forty years ago but are now thoroughly dotted with the illumination from homes and buildings so that you would think those ex-cornfields were a city now, even though it is only a suburb. And I went down to a twisty road I remembered from long ago past Great Falls on the Virginia side that cuts off a triangle from Rte 7 over to the 495 Beltway right by the American Legion Bridge.

Once I crossed the bridge i was back in familiar territory, cis-Potomac Montgomery County where I lived for twenty married years. And I went in River Road thinking of the times I had taken the boys various places, and went past their middle school, these men now 29 and 25. And it seemed to me that after such travels the destination most appropriate for my first vehicularly-enabled evening in years and years would be the 8:30 anonymous recovery meeting at the fabulous Club Del Ray in downtown Bethesda - right by my younger son's former high school. So I went there by the roads more travelled.

I had been driving close to an hour and a half and was desperate to get there because my right hip was hurting. Old bones are not built for young men's cars. But I don't plan to take any long trips. This car has a radiator leak requiring refilling every couple months, as well as an oil leak. I figure if I get to one extra recovery meeting a week it will be doing its duty. Maybe I will even go to Mass once or twice. Haven't been to Mass since my mother's twin's funeral in 2006, although I like it when I go. The Church hierarchy infuriates me on numerous grounds but going to Mass is always soothing.

The Sunday 8:30 is Peter's meeting for which he obtains leaders and reads the announcements, so I knew I would see him there. And lo and behold I also saw a couple guys I have not seen in years, but they are as sober as ever - one with 12 years next week, the other a similar amount. Maybe 20 people all told there. It used to be smaller before Peter began bringing it back through the simple expedient of getting leaders to come in who are not regulars and are therefore able to free us from listening to the same people all the time.

The leader had 20 years and spoke of the craziness of addiction, how she was backstage at a concert meeting the famous band and all she could think was, “I want a drink, I want a drink.” She was so crazy she even noticed how crazy she was. I have had a few of those myself, and it is good for me to remember how far I can go off the rails if I do not pay attention to working the 12 steps and staying in touch with other people who are on the same path.

I told them when I shared about fearing for my boy, and letting go of it, and trusting his higher power and mine to settle things properly, and how much that does not come naturally. And I said how grateful I was that I had been led in the door, and allowed to get sober, almost against my will. Now it is my will to stay sober but it sure wasn't when I started out. But by exposing myself to grace, and to other seekers, I learned how to live my life rather than throwing it away on a daily basis. And I finished by saying that I was glad when I got to go to meetings now, instead of wondering how many I "had to" go to.

So Justin gets the freedom of looking for work in an economy where he is up against mostly high school graduates in Montana, instead of mostly college graduates in DC - during the worst national unemployment since 1938. That helps take some of the blame off him. And I get the freedom of going to more recovery meetings - since the car wasn't trustworthy to drive 2,000 miles, he left it. I'll miss having him come around to see me. But I imagine, because we were getting along so well, he and I will talk on the phone more frequently than we were doing before he started visiting. And that is not a bad partial fortune for either of us.

Paul Nicholas Yeager 1948-2010

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 04:06:07 -0400

by James McCarty Yeager

This is a memoir of some of my time with Paul Yeager. Both psychically and chronologically Paul was my closest cousin on my father's side. Since we were both 1948 firstborn babies after our fathers had gotten home from the Pacific war and found and married their girls, we had intuitive ties right from the beginning. Even before Paul's family moved back to Houston from New Orleans in 1962 I had visited him there and seen him as Puck in his 8th grade play, Midsummer Nights Dream, looking like just about the only kid up there who knew what he was doing.

We didn't know each other much in high school but, when we would see each other at family gatherings, we would talk to each other about music, leaving unsaid how horrid family gatherings are as being so obvious as not to require discussion. We both listened to the radio constantly and had strong opinions we could exchange on rock & roll, rhythm & blues, even jazz. Also he was on the famous and feared Jesuit High debate team; when I tried debating for my high school during senior year I remember seeing him at a speech tournament impressively reciting Rudyard Kipling's Gunga Din in full, ripe Cockney accent. He was Caliban in The Tempest, his junior play; he stole the show with menacing firmness.

In the fall of 1966 we started riding to the University of St. Thomas together every morning. Radio blasting, we'd whip down San Felipe in Paul's six-cylinder green three-on-the-floor Mustang. (He sure had wanted an eight!) We rode together every day for two years, trying to make it in time for 8AM classes, and usually riding together back home around 2PM. We would occasionally stay on campus until evening if we had play rehearsals or there was a dance or a party; but our fathers liked us home for dinner (i.e. demanded we be there) so such long days at St. Thomas were not frequent.

We liked being mistaken for brothers at the university so we could say, “No, our fathers are brothers, we're not.” I remember his being introduced to photography in the student publication darkroom by Steve LaCroix, now a Basilian priest in Canada. There is a great photo of Paul taken by Steve in the 1967 yearbook, the one the rednecks at St. Thomas subsequently burned because they said it had too many pictures and not enough words. It shows Paul in the light of the enlarger peering into where the photo was about to be. Paul has the hugest grin on his face like he has just discovered magic; as, in fact, he had. That was his very first time in a darkroom anywhere.

Paul hung out with the film folks in Mrs DeMenil's new Media Department whereas I was an unreconstructed English and History guy. Paul did do better than I in Fr. Lee's “Universal Themes in Literature” class, however. Lee credited Paul with working out the appropriateness of Odysseus' turning down the gift of immortality from a goddess. Death was too natural a part of life for Odysseus to reject it, Paul believed. Paul said Odysseus thought it right to be human and limited rather than join the gods in living forever in their arbitrary and capricious manner.

So I was with him as he was turning into a photographer and an apprentice filmmaker at St. Thomas. He also continued to act in plays, having the great good fortune to be directed by Charles Krohn. Much later Charles and Chesley's children and Paul and Janice's were high school friends. Catholic Houston isn't too big, even when you're post-Catholic. I remember Paul best as Filch the pickpocket in Brecht & Weill's Threepenny Opera in the spring of 1968. Few lines, one song, good stage presence.

Paul was relentlessly curious and conversation with him would include not only music but also acting, painting, film, photography, philosophy, literature, poetry, psychology, politics, architecture, sociology and history. We had a large circle of friends that overlapped and then larger ones that did not, with remarkably little jealousy that I recall. We weren't together all the time but more times than not we were.

Then I went off to Toronto for my last two years of college while he stayed at St. Thomas. In the summer of 1969 I first met Janice when Paul, Janice, Alice Kelley and I went in Papa's red GTO convertible to see the 4th of July fireworks at Hermann Park. We parked on the esplanade on Fannin Street and had a great view.

After college (class of 1970) we both volunteered at KPFT-FM, the Pacifica station that was being founded that summer much to the dismay of the Houston establishment. It was never clear whether the Klan twice blew up the KPFT transmitter at the order of the FBI and the Houston Police or merely with their connivance. There I saw Paul teach himself the meticulous and detailed craft of sound technician: recording, editing and overlaying taped sounds to create the ambience of real radio, which is so hideously labor-intensive that hardly anybody does it anymore.

In 1971 while I was in graduate school in Austin I came home many a weekend to join him doing the overnight Saturday night radio show on KPFT. We loved playing music that crossed periods and genres in a way that would come to be called “multiculti” but to us was based on musical principles. We would go from an Irish folk ballad to a Britten symphony to a rock & roll tune and have them tied together either by lyrics or modulations or tempo, something you could hear that told you there were similarities here you might not have noticed.

For the first half of 1972 I lived with Paul and Janice on Pinedale between Main and Montrose in a house built in the 1930s (Hollywood Spanish my father would have called the style.) We had no proof but Paul and I believed it lay on one of the parcels of real estate which our grandfather would have sold from a tent he erected every weekend way out on the edge of town almost to Rice Institute, with a flagpole in front to attract the punters, before and during the Depression. It tickled both of us to think of grandfather (whom neither of us knew because he had died when Paul was 8 months old) having seen those huge overarching trees on Pinedale when they were saplings, and that house when it was unassembled boards, brick and tile. The media center in that house consisted of an ancient, used black and white TV stacked on top of an ancient, used color TV; you could get a picture on one, and sound on the other, but not very well on either...

Everyone who knew Paul a long time, and quite a few who only met him briefly, soon discovered that forbearance did not come naturally to him. Yet over time he invested a great deal of intellect, effort and practice in callings requiring that tolerance for organic development which goes by the name of patience. Whether it was interviewing or script-writing or animation or cooking or long-distance motorcycling, he would keep banging away it at, no matter what setbacks occurred, until he got somewhere with it. I consider this persistence a triumph for one whose instinctive setting was hair-trigger.

So he built several careers out of craftsmanship and tamed part of his spirit in the process. This is not just not bad work, it is very good work and I honor it in him. His stubborn public loyalty to Janice was admirable and steadfast. He had particularly strong relations with all three of his children, special intimacies in different areas with each of them and almost a distinct language. I suspect their attitude to him was like mine to my father (and my children's to me): he was a formidable and admirable man on some levels and could infuriate you on others; and many a day you didn't know whether to shoot him or hug him.

In the last year of his life he was interviewed about the federal trial and appeal process my brother Scott underwent as a consequence of pioneering commercial broadband internet access while at Enron. Paul's narrative of the context, events and malfeasances of the Enron Task Force's prosecutorial practice is clear, logical and compelling. In all the audio documentaries he had made at KPFT-FM and in his long film career at Houston's PBS outlet KUHT-TV, Paul had always shown an ability to keep a story on point and moving ahead. His theatrical movie scripts did the same but never saw the light of day, alas. His animations showing how networks work were so powerful that one time Scott was looking at one of them on his laptop waiting for a plane to take off and a man came over from two rows away to say, “What is that? It's fascinating.” His use of imagery had, not for the first or last time, attracted a complete stranger.

But in his Enron trial analysis he is truly judicious and restrained. His explanation is clearer than the books or newspaper reporting that grew out of the Enron Broadband trials, and is worth seeing. It is at ungagged.net. The rest of the website seems to take the tack that everyone else in Enron was also unfairly targeted, but my sense is that innocence has only been established for Broadband participants and that the rest of the non-Broadband Enronistas are kind of hiding behind Scott.

I would have liked to have discussed that with Paul along with a lot else. He and I sent emails at least once a month for years, on politics, arts, jokes, and especially music. By the time he died I was probably about as deep into the blues as he was when he was 40, so I never really caught up. But we had fun listening and discussing. I have a little stack of books I had been hoarding for the last year to send to him; a book on Houston railways, with photos; a history of how Wyatt Earp came to be a legend; and a Spanish mystery novelist. And I feel blunted and incomplete that I didn't get it done in time and now will never be able to offer him gifts of the mind again, at least not in this life. Sure, it's some consolation that I at least had the intention; but not much.

Once I left Texas for good on May 5, 1972, there was never a time I returned when I did not see Paul, often staying with him and Janice especially in the decade and a half since my parents died. He made the best BBQ I have ever eaten in my life in his back yard for a party after the reunion of the Class of 1967 of the University of St Thomas during Memorial Day of 2007. (That wasn't our class but they were the actors, writers, philosophers, painters, musicians and art historians we looked up to in freshman and sophomore years and so, to some extent, were more congenial than many of our contemporaries.) Took him 24 hours to get it just right, and he did. That was the last time I saw him.

I vividly remember spending time over the years in his various offices at Channel 8, on West Alabama and then at Marquardt either reviewing scripts or looking at parts of films and animations and being asked to critique or make suggestions. It was always challenging and worthwhile to put the work in because the easy answer was almost never what he was looking for, so it called upon my resources to discern what parts of his narrative it would be most effective to prolong or accentuate. Paul always made it feel like he was pushing his best into being just a little bit better, and so maybe you could try to keep up with him. I didn't see that as arrogant or condescending in him, or even competitive; but as an invitation. If I could get a laugh or a “that's funny!” out of him for a remark, or a “that's good!” for a suggestion, it felt like our collaboration had improved us both. And that's the hardest feeling to let go of.

Paul and I both learned John Donne's famous “No man is an island” sermon in high school, though I don't know that he performed it and I do know that I didn't. It says something about if a promontory be washed away in a storm, then Europe is the less. So am I the less for Paul's transit. For forty-four years whenever I wrote something Paul was always in the back of my mind as a prominent portion of the audience I hoped to entertain. I shall have to do so not just at a distance now, not just around the curvature of the earth, but out beyond the known universe into “that bourn from which no traveler returns.” I join with all of us he left behind in saluting him.

Easter Monday Meditation

Mon, 5 Apr 2010 10:04:59 -0400

This is the day the Lord hath made;

let us be glad and rejoice therein.
--Ps 117:24

The Easter and Passover stories are several thousand year old assertions that human history has been visited by the Divine. Something greater than human power – call it, say, the inherent order of the universe – has been at work and still is. The notion, “We are not alone,” precedes the post-nuclear fascination with extraterrestrials; when desert-dwellers from Ur, Mongolia, or Pueblo stared at the prehistoric night sky, they began to formulate man as a fully spiritual being, rather than as a physical being with a shard of spirit within.

But if this is the human condition it cannot be argued about, it can only be accepted or rejected. The existential insistence on personal, felt truth as the guide to authentic life is a restatement of age-old stories of spiritual transformation. And stories are not arguments but are themselves experiences adduced as metaphors for other experiences. Complicated, sure, but mankind has been doing this kind of thing for over 30,000 years – ever since, long before cave painting developed, we began scratching lines on bones to tell the story of the phases of the moon.

My parents have been dead for more than a decade but their avatars still come visit me occasionally. Just at the end of Lent my father appeared in a dream disguised as Gene McCarthy, while my mother came to an AA meeting as a woman in her 80s named Marian. I love having these visits as they enable me to honor my parents in all their gloriously imperfect complexity as part of the present, not just part of the past.

Today I am thinking that perhaps my mother taught me theology and my father how to have a spiritual practice. This is mildly reversed in that my father was the one with the theological training in his youth while my mother was the first one in our family to enter recovery via Al-Anon, but I think I am on to something.

In the last two years of her life I would address all my envelopes to my mother as “Eileen McCarty Yeager, Theology of Joy and Hope, 3123 Bluebonnet, Houston TX 77005,” as though that were the name of the institution she belonged to, the name of the house where she lived, the name of that to which she aspired – indeed she occasionally embodied it.

I think my mother needed the comfort of definitions more than my father did – or else that was all she was left with after surviving the elemental forces of her life. For on their darker sides Mama was the anxious one, Papa was the angry one; though Mama had her share of anger and Papa his of anxiety.

Mama's theology was wonderfully concrete: “Look at that sky, children; look at that grass, those leaves, those flowers, those birds; don't tell me that's all an accident.” And in that voice I can of course hear the echo of her Mama, Josie Dunn, from the prairies long ago. And I can see part of the urges that made two of my siblings healers and all of us teachers of one kind or another. “Look at this!” and “Pass it on.” These injunctions were implicit in Mama's enthusiasms.

Papa was, oddly enough, not any more analytical; his experiential-based observations grew out of immediate situations and almost never referenced the past, or those abstractions which nourish theory. Perhaps Mama believed in logic as a shield against irrationality of self and others; probably Papa saw it as a tool but with its own limits of not being able to include everything.

So he ultimately sought, and received, less consolation from his spiritual practice of prayer, meditation, conversation, reflection, writing and fellowship, than Mama got from her theology where she tried to work out by rule where the truth lay and how you could find it. But then I don't think Papa was looking for surcease from the emptiness of the spaces between the stars; he was just trying to get to dinner time without doing every self-destructive thing that might occur to him between now and then.

Mama I think wanted the structure of certainty whereas Papa was content with the motion of progress. They were both open to growing along spiritual lines, but Papa trusted his place in the cosmos better than Mama did hers. Some of that is personal temperament and some has to do with the sexual politics of the era, but it also comments on their relationships to their Higher Powers.

One of the earliest Al-Anon remarks to enter family lore was what Mama's first sponsor, Mother Mazinga of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, admonished her: “Eileen, you are not the Fourth Person of the Blessed Trinity.” Which was two-edged: you don't have to do everything you think you do, and anyway you haven't got the power to do everything you think you have to. So change your ideas, was the point. Stop trying to control things, even for the better.

But it is harder to get Al-Anon's message of freedom, in my judgment, than it is to get AA's. The AA people either get it or die, whereas Al-Anons either learn to get free or else stay miserable; but their misery doesn't kill them. At least not as immediately as alcohol does AAs.

It is liberating to me to think of my parents in counterintuitive categories: Papa, who looked so certain, as the supplicant; Mama, who seemed so tentative, as the prescriber. But Papa got it that not-knowing is the ultimate condition, rather than something to be conquered. And I think Mama did receive the consolations of philosophy, such as they are. Those cathedrals of thought impressed her with their extensive architecture and ponderous authority, and she was reassured within them.

Like all dichotomies this one only works if you hold it at the right distance; don't look too close but don't get blurry either. Of course they were both seeking God as S/He might be found and had the wit to check out some paths where other pilgrims had reported sightings. And we children, now ourselves grown old and fallen away though we may be from the formal institutions of faith, have retained a sufficiency of the real rewards those structures promised, but so often failed, to deliver.

It sure was grand to see my parents again, reborn again, reinhabiting my thoughts and reanimating my spirit, on the feast of the Resurrection, as the year turns fresh and green again...

Free London Review of Books Articles Online

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:10:41 -0400

The magazine that has replaced the New Yorker in my personal pantheon is the London Review of Books. (And let me acknowledge my undying thanks to Dr. H. Catherine Walter, a fulltime Quantum Mechanic, for turning me on to it a few years back.)

In honor (or honour) of its thirtieth anniversary the LRB (we're on first inital terms by now) is making the entire content of the current issue available online. Usually you have to be a print subscriber to access all articles.

So go take a look. Check out any writer you care to investigate; they won't all be there, but whatever there is about the ones that are will prove rewarding (if only to argue against)...

No, they have never published me, nor have I ever made any money off them.

pre-woild-serious ramble

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:10:12 -0400

the frost is on the pumpkin, snow is on the land, rain filleth the firmament and baseball is going to be played in november. this is not a travesty, it is a crime.

the commissioner of the owners of baseball is derelict in his duty at best. the season started late this year because of some cockamamie idea of his. this time it was an international baseball tournament which, like all international baseball except the blue jays, ought to be played during winter ball so it doesn't interfere with the delicate rhythms of spring training, much less push back the end of the season beyond indian summer. (like all used car dealers he thinks the problem is marketing, not the quality of the product.)

extra levels of playoff and the wild card were introduced by that same invertebrate pseudo-commissioner whose bumbling tinkerings with the game have masked his inability, or unwillingness, to protect what matters. but in his drooling incompetence the owner's commissioner forgot to shorten the season (say from 162 back to the historic norm of 154 games) so as to leave time to play baseball during actual, genuine baseball weather.

because even the venal collection of millionaires that owns baseball is incapable of creating any more summer climate in north america than god allows for. trying to stretch it leads to weather disasters such as were seen in this years' league series and last year's woild serious.

i personally am holding out for three rainouts and a snow day just to publicly humiliate baseball ownership's greed. here's a clue: if baseball players made more money from the extended season and playoffs than ownership did, would the extensions have happened? you don't think so either? i rest my case.

meantime i have to be for the filthadelphia filthiex even though they are the principal rivals of my noble, doomed washington nationals. (whose unjustly-fired ex-manager manny acta, a fine baseball mind as well as an adult human being and a class act, has just hooked on with the cleveland indianx, for whom i will cheerfully root in the 2010 AL.) usually you want to beat the team that beat you. but in this case following that rule would mean rooting for the disgusting NY yanx. not none o' me.

now, in truth i was for the yanx one time. it was late in about 1984 to 88 when the oriolex had to be my team even though earl weaver wasn't there anymore. in september there was a team ahead of the o'x in the standings that needed to be beaten for the o'x to advance. the other team was playing the yanx and, despite every fibre of my being emitting tortured screams of the souls of the damned in hell, i rooted for the yanx: for one game, maybe two. then the o'x fell back into their usual post-weaver mediocrity and there was no tactical need to adopt the putrid bronxians.

for the record, there are no circumstances, conceivable or inconceivable, under which i would ever root for the yanx in the playoffs, much less the woild serious. not that people in new york aren't entitled to. they are. (although i do look askance at guys from phoenix wearing yanx attire.) but i can't do it myself. not only has steinbrenner's profligate and self-centered stewardship been uniformly disastrous for baseball as a whole, but although papa s's ego needed no inflating, it obscenely bestrode the public face of yanquidom. and then there are the NY fans, as blatantly provincial as any southerner, all the while pretending to vast and mostly unmerited sophistication. they are best exemplified by that rabbit-toothed ex-mayor giuliani, called by jimmy breslin 'a small man in search of a balcony,' whose in-office malfeasance and neglect directly caused the deaths of those firefighters on 9/11 behind whose heroism he continually hides.

besides, i always prefer my championships earned, rather than bought. they are just more tasty that way. as for foxic TV and the repetitively redundant and redundant repetitions of tim mccarver, thank god for jon miller and joe morgan on ESPN radio. so here's to champagne along the schuylkill river this year, same as last, and to tears, salt tears in the bronx. and to a three-day nor'easter along the way...