greybean.com

All right… So, welcome to the new, much stripped-down greybean.com: version 4.0 lite. You’ll notice a few things. First, this is the only real page of the site. As I put together other pages (a page of photos and some downloadables’ll probably first, if anything ever is), I’ll add them. You’ll also notice that the, uhh, ‘bean’ (as in greybean) page no longer exists. She’s gonna need to provide some content if she wants to motivate me enough to get it up on here somewhere. My plan is to use some blogging technology like MovableType to streamline her updating process, but we’ll talk about that another day. Also, you’ll notice that the popup window is gone and that the site now stretches to fill your browser window. Isn’t that nice? The idea here is twofold: 1. I want the site to be as easy as possible for me to update in the hope that that’ll make me update it more often. We’ll see if that happens, eh? And 2. I’ve simplified everything to the point that all of the information that was hidden behind various menus, and navigation schemes, and invisible layers and blah, blah on the old site is all plainly visible on this page at all times. Nice.

Now, here’s what’s happened since the last time I made an update:

My dad died (start with the big stuff first, I guess–and we’re going chronologically here), the Yankees became the first team in major sports history (hockey isn’t a major sport, let’s face it) to lose a best-of-seven series after leading it 3-0, the Red Sox won the World Series for the first time in 86 years, bean turned 27, I finished my first full semester of college (3.12 GPA, by the way), we got a brand new Toshiba HDTV (and it’s soooo pretty), Washington, D.C. got a major league baseball team for the first time since 1971, we had a New Year, I transferred from Paier to the University of New Haven (as a Graphic Design major and Multimedia minor), we bought a new car (and it’s pretty too), my title at Tommy K’s got even longer (it’s now ‘Director of Web Operations and Marketing Materials Development’), the NHL became the first major sports league (wait, I might’ve just contradicted myself, but, never mind) in history to cancel an entire season (and it canceled it twice, basically) and I turned 27.

So, you didn’t miss much.

All right, now, for my current English class (which meets in seven hours and thirty-two minutes, by the way), I have to write a sentence for each type of transition conjunction. Since I have to do it tonight, and since I’m doing this tonight, I figured I might as well do it here. As Professor Davis prefers, I’m gonna try to ‘fill both buckets’ on all seven. Here we go:

1. Jimmy’s mother is a fat, fat woman, and his father is about as dumb as a three-hole punch.

2. Sometimes, after long nights of cow-tipping and other assorted tomfoolery, Cassandra smells very much of old cheese and stale feet; nevertheless, she seems to be quite popular with the boys.

3. Just last week, Uncle George took his trusty sledgehammer out to the barn and beat his nephew to a bloody pulp; consequently, we won’t need to set a place at the Thanksgiving dinner table for cousin Stan.

4. I might be able to stay awake long enough to finish writing these sentences, or I might wake up to the awful sound of my alarm clock with my cheek pasted to my notebook with drool and three sentences left to be written.

5. I wouldn’t mind seeing Hogarth mauled by a pack of wild boars, for he is a reprehensible man lacking any sort of moral center who, not incidentally, demostrates a complete indifference to the customs of regular bathing and modern dental hygiene.

6. I’ve never really liked anchovies, nor do I usually enjoy eating any sort of fish—or any other meat, for that matter—which still has its hair.

7. Jenny isn’t a very pretty girl; moreover, looking at her for any prolonged period gives me a queasy, churning feeling in my gut.

Okay, there they are. Hogarth. I love it.

Oh, I almost forgot: have any of you heard the radio commercial for Intelligent Energy in, I believe, New Jersey?? It’s on New York AM radio all the time lately. The thing about it is that their telephone number, no joke, is 1 (877) I’VE GOT GAS. I’m not kidding. They even have a little jingle: “1 877, I’ve… Got Gas!” Wow. It’s almost as bad as Master Bait & Tackle. Almost.

Lastly, I should’ve posted something about this a long time ago. I’ve never been able to come up with the right thing to say, though. I guess instead of trying to come up with something to say here, I’ll just leave you with a paper I wrote for Dr. Rinaldi’s English class last semester:

The Game’s the Thing

Over the past few years, my dad and I watched plenty of baseball together. In fact, most of our relationship revolved, at least superficially, around the sport. Having lost my dad less than a week ago, rooting the New York Yankees on to victory had become my escape from the grief I knew I should be dealing with instead. The fact that the Yankees were on a cakewalk to the American League Championship over the Boston Red Sox, together with my hope that my dad, wherever he was, was getting the same enjoyment from these games as I, had made it at least a little easier to tell myself that everything was okay.

With one swing of Bill Mueller’s bat, all of that may have changed.

My dad and I had a rocky relationship when I was younger. I was a stubborn and immature brat. My dad, on the other hand, was just plain stubborn. We butted heads often and never really had very much to talk about. I guess we agreed to simply coexist in our house for most of the first nineteen or twenty years of my life. But somehow, in my twenties, baseball changed all that.

I cannot really remember what it was that spawned our baseball-based relationship. I remember my parents taking me to a Yankees-Red Sox game at Yankee Stadium in the summer of 1987. The Yankees won that game, 9-1, behind the pitching of Bob Tewksbury and a first-inning three-run homerun by Don Mattingly. We sat high in the third tier seats above Dave Winfield, where fly balls to right field would disappear below us only to reappear shortly thereafter, their trajectories having been redirected, as if by magic, back to the infield. But that night wasn’t the beginning of my dad and me getting closer. I was just nine years old then and had very little understanding, or even interest, in the game before me. It is upsetting for me to think now that I was at a game in which the likes of Don Mattingly, Dave Winfield, Willie Randolph, Dave Righetti, Wade Boggs, Jim Rice, and even Oil Can Boyd played and I was too young and clueless to appreciate it.

I remember a May Saturday in 1993 when my dad was still an appliance repairman for General Electric. One of his customers had given him tickets to that afternoon’s Mets-Braves game at Shea Stadium. He came home from work at about noon wearing the face of the victor. Getting anything for free was always a victory in my dad’s eyes, and free Mets tickets certainly were the spoils. Whether I would want to attend the game with him was not even a question. Over the years since that game in 1987 I had become a pretty serious baseball fan and I was familiar specifically with both the Mets and the Braves as their games were televised in Connecticut. We set out for Shea Stadium at about 12:30 knowing that we would probably miss the first three innings of the game. The problem, we realized quickly, was that we had not the foggiest idea where Shea Stadium was located. Many hours of driving through rain and traffic later, and after a detour through New Jersey (on the off-chance that Shea was somewhere near the Meadowlands), we arrived in Flushing during the seventh inning. We had listened to the radio broadcast of the game for most of the trip and we had heard John Smoltz allow six runs in 5.2 innings and the ace Mets pitcher, Doc Gooden, allow just one run while, amazingly, going 3-for-3 with a homerun as a batter. By the time we arrived at a rain-soaked Shea Stadium, with the home team leading, 6-1, all but a thousand or so Mets fans had already left. We missed most of the game, and all of the action in it, but we were allowed to watch the last two innings from whatever seats we pleased and we certainly had a good story to tell people.

It was not until more than five years later, however, that my dad and I really got to be close. My dad was a Mets fan and I had been a Yankees fan for as long as I could remember. In 1998 the Yankees had a magical season, winning 114 regular season games (an American League record, at the time), and going on to sweep the San Diego Padres, 4-0, in the World Series for their twenty-fourth world’s championship. Some time during that year my dad must have realized that the Yankees were a way to get to know me better. It might sound incidental, but I am of the belief that sports allegiances are part of what define a man or woman. More and more I noticed my dad, rather than following the Mets as he always had, watching Yankees games, reading about the Yankees in the paper and commenting to me about the goings on of the franchise throughout the year. By the time the playoffs started in October we were watching the games together as if we had been Yankees fans together for all time.

Over the last six baseball seasons of my dad’s life, we spent a lot of time together in front of the television, watching Yankees games. Most of our conversations included something about the most recent Yankees game and the exciting way they had won it (“good game yesterday,” my dad would say), or the excruciating way they had lost it (“the Yankees got skunked”). I even got to take my dad back to Yankee Stadium for a game last summer. We sat in the upper deck in right field (above Raul Mondesi this time), and watched the Yankees beat the St. Louis Cardinals, 5-2.

For me, the hardest part of my dad’s time at Hospice was that he lost interest in the Yankees. We had a lot less to talk about and it was the thing that made me realize just how bad he was feeling. I think he almost came to resent the Yankees because they reminded him of a time not very long before when something as trivial as baseball had been able to hold his attention in the face of however bad his cancer was making him feel.

As the Yankees jumped quickly out to a 3-0 lead against the Red Sox in a series in which they were the underdogs, it felt like my dad and I were still sitting together on my parents’ green futon, rooting the Yankees on to another improbable victory. But, a Bill Mueller single against Mariano Rivera last night tied the game up for the Red Sox and they went on to win it in twelve innings. It is now the twelfth inning again, and it is again tied, in game five. With each inning that the Yankees do not score they are asking their very mediocre pitcher, Esteban Loaiza, to pitch two more good innings on the road against the frightening Red Sox offense. The Yankees’ prospects for tonight do not look good and with each new day their prospects for the series look worse and worse.

I guess it was silly of me to use the outcome of sporting events as a way to avoid grief. I guess it was silly to think that just because the Yankees were winning against all odds, my dad and I were still invested in these games together. I guess it was my silly way to ward off the loneliness I feel now, watching them without him.