The Weekly Meat

Just This

Congratulations to the 2007 World Champion Red Sox! For those who beat the "Rocks," we salute you!

Mumm's the Word

Boston is once again in the World Series — against the Colorado Rockies. It’s a beautiful thing, yes. But these clubhouse champagne celebrations have gotten out of hand. At what point did they become as de rigeur as the now-clichéd Gatorade dousings in the NFL? Major League Baseball seems to have hopped in bed with Mumm, because the bubbly is not just for World Series victors anymore.

Now you’ve got your “We Made the Playoffs!” celebration, your “We Won the Division Series!” celebration, and your “We Won the League Championship Series!” celebration as well — which begs the question: doesn’t that cheapen an actual World Series celebration? I sure think the champagne would taste much sweeter if I drank it only once (not that these guys even drink the stuff anymore — it sure looks more like swim-goggled public bathing than anything else).

Yes, I know, we Red Sox fans doth protest too much. Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather the Sox have something to celebrate than just get dejectedly hammered down at the Cask ’n Flagon before leaving for an early off-season. But I’m a patient fan (I mean, the last championship took 86 years), and I have an attention span long enough to, say, actually watch the whole playoffs to see who ultimately wins. I don’t need a celebration a week to keep me, you know, interested. But — no doubt these televised bashes are highly sanctioned by Bud Selig and his MLB braintrust (if anything with so small a capacity for analytical thought could be called that) — that’s not the way our spoon-feeding culture tends to work.

These pre-Big Dance celebrations seem just the sort of thing that would get your ass handed to you in the National Hockey League — where the only thing that matters is getting your mitts and name on the greatest trophy in all of sport. Back in ’97, then-captain of the Flyers, Eric Lindros wouldn’t even deign to touch the Wales Conference trophy presented to him and the Flyers as semi-final winners on their way to their first Cup finals in 10 years. It was a fascinatingly stubborn gesture, but the message was clear enough: we’re not finished our mission.

Unfortunately, the Big E and his mates never did get to drink from Lord Stanley’s mighty chalice (A pox upon you, Darren McCarty!), falling to the Red Wings in a four game sweep. But I have to think the lingering stink of week-old champagne soaked into skate leather would have made the collapse even more difficult to stomach.

So the dearly departed Cubbies, Phillies, Angels, Yankees, Diamondbacks, and Indians will always have the Paris of their too-eager clubhouse Festivus (or would that be “Festivi”?). And maybe some of them are satisfied with that. Maybe it’s outdated and naïve of me to think otherwise. When you make $10 mil a year or whatever, can you really be considered professionally unfulfilled for never winning The Big One? Maybe, maybe not. But I don’t make that kind of cheddar. I get judged at work on whether I succeed or not. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I do know this: no matter how often your team has celebrated to this point, you don’t get one of these for second place.

To Begin

I’m at the ass-end of my thirties, and I’ve always approached blogs with a bit of trepidation. I read them, sure — some are brilliant — and part of me has always wanted to be a weekly columnist. So why not self-publish just such a column? Another part of me, though, sees blogging as an egocentric bourgeois endeavor. "Look at me!" And it most probably is. But to stop there may be missing the point. The internet, and one of its killer apps — blogging software — is just a conduit. Much of today’s best writing is now being published exclusively online.

Still, I hope my initial cynicism guides me well. The word “essay” itself is derived from the French essayer — to try or attempt. And that I will: to rise above the tossed-off email-style commentary on pop culture, and self-aggrandizing. Maybe my vision is something of a magazine in blog’s clothing. A less self-conscious McSweeney’s.

The point is to keep the cobwebs from my fingertips; work around the full-time job in the silicon mines; and post weekly essays and various viscera on life, language, sports, art, culture, leisure, pleasure, pain, and politics (What else is there, right?). Sure, I should have started five or ten years ago — when I had actual time on my hands — but that doesn’t mean it’s too late to start now.

It’s been a long time (since grad school, maybe) since excitement over an idea roused me enough at 3 a.m. to get out of bed, and write it down, as the idea for this blog did the other night. It was the name that finally got me up. It came without much struggle, and with the sort of clarity that I generally get only in the middle of the night. The name’s an allusion to E.B. White’s great collection of his Harper’s essays, One Man’s Meat, and I’m glad I wrote it down — not simply to log the thought, but to commit to it. As the great and sometimes obtuse Philadelphia Flyers' coach Fred Shero liked to say about commitment: “When you have bacon and eggs for breakfast, the chicken makes a contribution — but the pig makes a commitment.”

As they say when the gates open down in Opelousas: "Ils sont partis!"