And on the first day, the Universe brought victory to the long-defeated.

And so it has been done. They said it couldn't be done, they said it would never be done, and it had never been done in this way, and yet it was done. I think Curt Schilling, our friend and confidant, said it best when he said it was for Bill Buckner.

I had the excellent fortune to watch this auspicious series with a lifelong Red Sox fan. These are some of the things we observed and learned during our viewing of the World Series.

1. Manny Ramirez is totally a stoner. He is stoned. He doesn't track fly balls until it's too late. He missed hearing his name announced in Game 1 of the World Series and was pushed out of the dugout by his teammates. His eyes are always a little red and he looks chilled-out and childlike. He has fun hair. Manny Ramirez, stoner and World Series MVP.

2. Gabe Kapler is Jewish, and there really aren't that many other Jews in baseball.

3. Bronson Arroyo has the most pained look on his face every time he gets ready to pitch.

4. Terry Francona never makes a mistake, especially in his pitching choices.

5. They say and do a lot of homoerotic stuff in baseball. But nothing is more homoerotic than the moment when the team finally wins and the catcher runs to the pitcher, jumps into his arms and wraps his legs around him.

6. Fox Sports does a really good job with montages, especially the one set to "In Your Eyes" and the one interspersing the Red Sox and Cardinals with shots of the full moon and its total eclipse.

To commemorate the convergence of the lunar eclipse and the Red Sox winning, Rebecca and I went to the baseball field in McCarren Park to pay our respects to the moon and baseball. We re-enacted the final out of the game and then lay down in the infield and watched as the clouds blew slowly over and past the moon, revealing Orion and at least three or four other stars. I saw a shooting star, one of the few I have ever seen in New York. We decided to perform a ritual to ensure that the good luck and justice of this event carries over into the election next week. We wrote the name of the Moron Puppet of Evil in the dirt and knelt before the radiant moon. We made a small burnt offering and asked for the help of all the gods and forces of all the denominations of the universe to come to our aid in ridding us of the Moron Puppet. And then we erased his name, stamped him out of existence, as he will be erased and stamped out, like all the curses whose time has come to be broken.

On the fifth day of this week, we will ask for tricks and treats. And on the seventh day, if curses broken in nationally televised infields and spells cast in deserted public park infields are any indication, we will be delivered from evil.

My mother's encounter with the election seems to occuring through the celebrity exhortations to vote. That's what happens to people with landlines and listed phone numbers. She emailed me this perspective from the Boomer Generation today.

A young woman doing telephone solicitation for NOW called and painstakingly explained to me how many women died before abortions became legal. Wow, did I feel old. How odd. Perhaps, she being young, assumed everyone was young and I was too young to remember when people got abortions secretly, or maybe she just had a script she needed to cover bit by bit if I didn't offer money. The next day I came home and there was a message on the answering maching from the actor Ed Harris explaining about Supreme Court justices being appointed by the next president and women's right to choose being on the line and how I needed to vote. I was driving home from the Bronx on Monday and I heard a tape of PuffDaddy (or however you spell it) explaining that it's a matter of life or death for young people of color to vote in this election and how the politicians count on them not voting. I really hope that Ed Harris, Bruce Springsteen, PuffDaddy, the young woman from NOW and everyone else makes a difference next week. Even gaunt Clinton, who looks like he's aged a few years in a few months, inspired hope on the front page of the Times. I am truly beginning to understand how following sports provides relief and belief in the seemingly impossible. I'm pretty jaded, but have to admit, if that fucking son of a bitch wins again, I will be very depressed.

Watching Curt Schilling's commanding performance last night made us wish that he wasn't just Curt Schilling, ace starter for the Boston Red Sox, five-time All-Star, four-time top-5 finisher in the Cy Young Award voting, 20-game winner and 2001 World Series MVP, but Curt Schilling, Our Friend and Confidant.

Curt Schilling pitched so well, even though his ankle tendon was sutured to his ankle skin and bleeding through his sweat sock. Curt Schilling thoughtfully wrote "K ALS," to mean "strikeout ALS" on his shoe right near the bloodstain, because he knew the television cameras would focus on it and he wants to promote the eradication of Lou Gehrig's disease. Curt Schilling, when he was interviewed after his six solid innings ensured a Red Sox win, actually sounded sincere when he invoked the Almighty as a factor in his stellar performance on the mound. When the game ended, we were sad to see Curt Schilling go. We wanted to keep him around a while longer. He seemed like someone who could help us with our problems, help us to take charge, play through the pain, and deliver. Someone we'd benefit from being around. He isn't very much like any of our other friends, but we wondered, what if Curt Schilling was one of us? What if every now and then the buzzer would buzz or the telephone would ring and it would be Curt Schilling, Our Friend and Confidant?

"Hey, it's Curt Schilling!" we'd say. "Come on in, Curt."

"Hey, guys, look who's here--it's Curt Schilling, 5-time All-Star and 2001 World Series MVP."

"Howya doin', Curt? Have some wine."

"Oh, I'm sorry, Curt, I forgot you were a born-again Christian. Let me get you a nice, nonalcoholic Perrier. There you go."

"Have a seat on the couch, Curt. You'll want to get off that bloodstained ankle of yours. I bet it hurts, having your tendon stapled to the outside of your ankle through your skin. How did you pitch so many solid innings?"

And then Curt would tell us about how he did it and we would better understand how to be mentally tough.

We'd make him feel at home, we'd remember not to offer him alcohol, we wouldn't make fun of God. We wouldn't bring up his creepily, predictably patriotic "Letter to America" in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. We'd accept Curt Schilling for who he is and put aside our differences so we could learn from him.

And then we could tell Curt all our problems and he would tell us how to solve them, because he would be Curt Schilling, Our Friend and Confidant.

Go drinking all night with some Scots (and Brits and Irish) who are perfectly willing to hear you pontificate on the politics of your fucked-up country in a midtown diner in the pre-dawn hours. Make sure one of these Scots is an old, dear friend you haven't seen in years. Your faith in everything will be renewed, just as the Scots (and Brits and Irish) are chorusing together to the Proclaimers song they have programmed into the jukebox. At least some people are still sane, even if they live in the British Isles.

In the back room of the bar in New Jersey last night, a hoarse-voiced man was singing about the impossibility of love and the inevitability of pain, the kind of pain that does justice to metaphors about the bottom of the ocean and the blackness of the night. In the front of the bar, on a flat-screen TV, the impossible was happening, and the fans of the man who sang for the impossible and the team who played for the impossible ran back and forth between the front and the back of the bar, screaming themselves hoarse for both.

Because: If a team from Massachusetts can beat a bankrolled team in pinstripes, and maybe go on to beat a team from Texas, maybe a Seantor from Massachusetts can beat a pinstripe-bankrolled man from Texas.

Because: I owe the Red Sox a karmic debt from 1986, specifically the day I realized that if I hoped for anything hard enough, my faith could become a will so powerful it could reach across the borough of Queens and send a ground ball through the legs of a first baseman and keep my hope alive.

Because: I only later realized that the greatest day of my sports fan career was in fact the worst nightmare of many less fortunate sports fans, that victory in battle comes at the expense of someone else's suffering.

Because: Without defeat, we would not understand victory. Without pain, we would not know joy.

Because: Red is the color of commies, and anarchists, and blood, and rage, and love, and only in a system so inverted that up is down and war is freedom and oppression is justice and endless violence is safety would red be the color of states full of people who swallow supersize lies with their supersize fries.

Because: If this is possible, then anything is possible.

Because: For the first time in such a long time, I BELIEVE.

GO SOX.

There is a lot of interesting flap about Kerry's remark in Wednesday's debate regarding the fact that the Moron Puppeteer of Evil's daughter is a lesbian. Like most flap, it illustrates our confused zeitgeist on the matter. Is Lynne Cheney ashamed that her daughter is gay? Is Mary Cheney insane or does she just like the $100,000 paycheck? Do gay Republicans hate themselves? Is the Moron Puppet of Evil gay and involved in an S/M relationship with Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and the rest of his administration? Does Kerry really support gay marriage and just can't say it, so he has to lamely say he'll leave it up to the states, just so some undecided gay-hating Ohioan without a job will vote for him?

Is anyone who obsessively talks about anyone else's sexual orientation secretly fascinated with their own sexual orientation? YES.

This is the viewpoint I have come around to on what I think of as the invasion-of-privacy matters: anyone who makes it a crusade to control someone else's body or sexual behavior is obviously obsessed with sex. Anti-choice? I have one question for you: "Why are you so obsessed with my vagina?" I'm sorry, does that question make you squeamish? Uncomfortable? Well, that is how I feel about your fascination with my vagina. If you want to know about vaginas, there are books with very detailed diagrams you can read. Also, there is porn, though I've heard it can cause viruses on your computer.

Anti-gay marriage? I have one question for you: "Why haven't you indulged your craving for hot same-sex action?" Obviously if you want to make it illegal, you must be so afraid that if it weren't illegal, you would do it. Do it already! Eat out another woman! Take it up your tight white male butt! I'm sick of hearing about it. I have other things to do besides talk about the sex lives of people I don't even know. If you need to feel better about your sexuality, Dan Savage is an excellent sex columnist who helps lots of people to feel good about their particular desires, whatever they may be.

Who are the real perverts--the people who do what they want to do or the people who are so obsessed with it they talk about it all day long? Who are the real child-killers--the people who expel a twenty-celled embryo from their internal organs or the people who kill and maim the wanted, loved, existing children in other countries every single day and make money doing it?

The abortion debate and the gay marriage debate--both of which are oxymorons, neither of which should exist at all--are complicated and yet simple. They are about controlling people's sexuality, but they are also just about controlling people. Much like the Taliban, the ruling class in this country doesn't live by the rules they impose on others. While the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice was out beating young girls with sticks for exposing their titillating ankles or whatever, they were watching pornos in their spare time. Similarly, there have always been gays in America's very highest offices and most conservative ranks. There have always been vocal anti-choice fanatics who are secretly availing themselves of the choices they would deny others. That is the problem with these "debates"--they are forums not to come to some kind of national consensus on whether it is "okay" to be gay or when life begins, but to call into question the very humanity of the people whose choices you are debating. The abortion debate is not about children. It is about controlling and punishing women for being sexual beings. It's about hate and fear of something powerful we do not fully understand--sexual desire and the creation of other human beings. The gay marriage debate is not about whether being gay is a choice, or who or what is a marriage or a family--it is about uniting people in hatred of something they do not understand, or more likely, fear of something that they themselves might be.

These so-called debates are also about privacy. And the people who say that the government--or anyone at all--can or should tell someone what to do with their body or their heart or their lives have no respect for anyone's life or privacy. Which is why it is so absurd, offensive, even, that the Cheneys would assert that the details of the lives of their family members are in any way "private." They have politicized the private lives of millions of women and gay people--now they want us to respect the private lives of their own political family? If they Cheneys don't like people bringing up the private lives of their family members, maybe they shouldn't be trying to legislate other people's private family lives.

It's always disgusted me when politicians try to declare their children politically "off-limits." The true meaning of privilege is that you get to decide whether your life is "political" or not. Poor people, people of color, people in countries the United States invades or bombs or secretly funds right-wing insurgencies in--they don't get to choose whether their lives or kids are "politicized" or not.

I'm sure there are plenty of parents in Baghdad, whose kids endured pain far worse than fifteen minutes of national scrutiny, who wish they could have declared their children politically "off-limits." Of course, when your kids are the "collateral damage" in a war "to make the world safer for freedom and democracy," instead of merely the objects of a debate about their humanity, there's no time to make a case for their right to determine their own destinies, or marry, or plan their families. If you're a politican running for national office in America, the way your kids live their lives is up for national debate. If you're a citizen of an oil-rich country with a complicated history and an even more unceratin future, it's not the way your kids live their lives that's subject to the fickle tides of public opinion and ill-informed political decision-making, but whether they get to live them at all.

And now let us pause, briefly, and remember a time before Homeland Security, a time before this was the homeland, before this land was the center of our empire, a stronghold from which our empire could invade other countries, kill the people there and get away with it by calling them "savage," or some new, more modern word for savage, like "terrorist," and then profit from the resources in those other countries. A time before interstate highways, before Wal-Marts, Duane Reades, Starbucks, before malls, before split levels and raised ranches, before suburbs and exburbs, before McDonalds and McMansions, before baseball, before bombs, before the Superbowl, before Britney, before Chevy, before Mormons, before strippers and strip malls, before Microsoft and Viagra and frequent flier miles and cubicles and holiday weekends and health care plans and retirement plans, before reality television and internet porn and a widespread panic brought on by carbohydrates that greatly surpasses that brought on by terrorism, before celebrity journalism and demographics, before obesity epidemics and portion control and supersizing and downsizing and of course, SUVs, a time before anyone enjoyed all the gifts America has given the world, democracy sadly not among them.

In that time, all this, all this, these rivers we traverse daily, because our city was built on a series of islands, the mainland of this nation of red states and blue states and swing states full of people who can't make up their minds who to cast their uncounted votes for in three weeks time, the parts of this country I've never seen but heard are unbearably, heartbreakingly flat and truly, truly full of corn, so much corn, endless corn, the parts of this country bursting with enormous nature, nature on steroids, trees so big you can walk through them and mountains so big they are always capped with snow, and cliffs so high you can't hear the ocean crashing into them, all this, all this, all this, was someone else's home once.

Until a man with three ships came looking for something he could get for cheap and sell back home for more. Until a man came looking to turn a profit. No wonder we made it into a beautiful story--it's the only beautiful story we seem to understand.

Maybe we are not wrong to stop and observe, if we are truly willing to observe, the day he was born. He was very important; he was the first of what we all are. Maybe it is not that simple--maybe there is a difference between a colonist and and immigrant, between a merchant and a laborer, between commanding a fleet and riding in steerage, between coming with swords and guns and coming to escape them. There are many ways to make ourselves less uncomfortable about inhabiting a place first emptied by genocide.

If we are a young empire looking for an auspicious beginning, a man with three ships is not a bad place to begin the myth. If we call him an explorer, if we call his invasion a discovery, then our military can be peacekeepers, then we can spread democracy, we can make the world safer, we can open new markets. Then every time somoeone gets to work or bleed or die for someone else's profit they are participating in something old and great.

It would be much more difficult to begin with who came before the ships, because then we will have to explain what became of them. So we begin with the ships.

But if we observe, truly observe, the circumstances of the ships' arrival, we see encoded there like DNA all that has happened since, because it is simply still happening. Ships sail for distant lands every day, empty and hopeful. And they come back full of something rare and valued in our land, something that can be sold for much more than it was bought for, and the collateral damage of this profit margin is vast and human.

These transactions don't trace one simple route around the globe, no silk route or spice route or misbegotten westward ho. But they are following the same route, in more ways than one, through all the places it leads.

Spice. Silk. Smallpox.
Oil. Yellowcake. AIDS.

Yes, the beginning of the beginning of this is well worth observing. Today, and maybe tomorrow, too, let us observe it.

It's Friday night and I've declined socialization to wash my hair and tend small fires in my house. Very small fires--the one under the coffeepot, the one in the incense holder, and the one that rests in the ashtray. Smoke is curling pleasantly around the room and I'm ignoring my just-washed hair in the hopes that it will behave. It misbehaves when it thinks it can get my attention, and so if I want to make life better for both me and my hair I must ignore it. This is a principle of training dogs that I think can be applied to hair. We can't get a dog around here because 1) we are irresponsible 2) it is cruel to keep dogs in a concrete jungle and 3) I already shed more hair than a person and a furry animal combined. So I am reduced to domesticating my hair like an animal consciousness I must subjugate so we can coexist.

I'm ignoring the presidential debates as well. In fact, I am ignoring the entire presidential campaign. I will cast my vote at the Swinging Sixties Senior Center on November 2 and then go back to ignoring everyone who lies to me. I have decided to stop listening to people who lie, or at the very least people who have stupid hair and tell boring lies, which will include the government and news media. See, there are people called artists, and they at least make an effort to make their lies, and usually their hair, interesting.

It's just too frustrating to me that even in the best-case scenario outcome of this bullshit election, the world will still be so incredibly fucked up. Either this horrible fascist asshole is going to keep fucking it up worse than he already has, or this less fascist but still corporate-owned moderate pussy is going to attempt to mitigate some of the fucked-up ness while still fucking it up in a myriad of ways. Oh, wow, I can thank this corporate-owned moderate pussy, if he wins, for being benevolent enough to let me control my own non-corporate owned pussy. Thanks, John Kerry! Also, I would like to say that I think it's great that when you were at boarding school, you learned to read.

John Kerry briefly won a respite from my loathing by actually finally saying something resembling an actual statement of the truth when he found the balls to publicly interpret the CIA report (otherwise known as exhibit #347 that BUSH LIED ABOUT EVERYTHING) as evidence that BUSH LIED ABOUT EVERYTHING. He said something direct, coherent and true. It must have been very scary for him, but also thrilling. I wonder if he felt truth like a white light in his veins when he said it. When I say something that is really true, I feel truth like a white light in my veins.

While I am too cynical to get truly excited about John Kerry winning this election--relief is the best I can hope for, I am excited about inventing a derisive nickname for John Kerry, and using it to deride him for the many ineffective, pussy-whipped, please-don't-think-I'm-a-liberal policies he will attempt to enact while continuing this unjust war. If he is not the Moron Puppet of Evil, what will he be? I won't jinx him by nicknaming him before all the votes (except those of the tens of thousands of black people already purged--again!--from Florida's rolls and God knows who else's, Rock the Vote! Unless you're black! In which case, hope you don't get arrested!) are in. John Kerry, I look forward to loathing you and your sellout moderate Democrat neoliberal hypocrisy for the next four years.

I love movie previews. I love the green screen with the words: The Following Preview Has Been Approved for All Audiences by the Motion Picture Association of America. I love the very rare red screen that denotes that the preview itself has been rated "R." What does that mean? Do these previews have bare butts or four-letter words in them? Does some preview artiste cut a preview so good, they tell the studio, "Look, I've got a red screener here, but I promise you, I earned it."

I love the special male voice that seems to announce each and every preview. What will happen when this one man dies? Who will do the previews? Have you ever, ever heard a woman's voice on a preview? Can you even imagine a female voice saying, "In a land without law...in a time without heroes...to save his family...one man...will make...the ULTIMATE SACRIFICE."

I love the format of the preview. I love how the preview itself has a first, second and third act, just like a movie that is two hours long instead of two minutes. I love how they give away everything in the preview, poaching all the best lines and funniest parts so when you actually see the movie later all the best parts give you a weird deja vu.

Back in the days of VHS, I used to love the previews you'd get on a rental video. Sometimes there could be a total of ten previews. First there would be the "Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You," set of previews, and then "Coming Soon to Videocassette." Now previews have given way to special features. Special features are the opposite of previews. Instead of showing you all the best parts of a movie you've never seen, they show you all the parts of the movie you just saw that weren't good enough to be in the actual movie.

Sometimes I pick out a story arc in my own life and announce it to myself like a preview. Or I make little montages of myself falling down in my head and set them to music. When viewed through the preview format, every moment in life seems significant, or at least amusing.

A preview is art unto itself. It is the art of the idea of art. There is this amazing short short story I read once, about the artistic process of someone who crafts a truly great preview out of a truly shitty movie. It made me respect previews and the people who make them all the more.

All I want is to someday go to a movie theater and for the previews to never end. Two hours of previews. Heaven.

Until then, I have found something almost as good. In case you didn't already know, they have all the previews.

Earlier this week, when I read on the covers of other subway riders' copies of the Daily News and New York Post (having sworn off all news media until after the election as a precautionary measure against apoplexy) that Jay Leno will hand over the reins of The Tonight Show to Conan O'Brien in 2009, I felt an unexpected pang. You see, while I don't watch television and I certainly don't watch non-fictional television, Jay Leno and I have a special connection. He once mocked me in front of our entire country.

If you are new to this blog and therefore the peculiar facts of my existence, a brief summary of What I Do For Money: I spent my angsty suburban adolesence partying very little and doing all my homework. Now that I have come to my senses with regard to organized education (a waste of time and money during which you are indoctrinated with lies!), it seems only fair that I should be able to parlay my misspent youth into some filthy lucre, or at least enough lucre to feed and shelter myself. I do this by putting the three remaining brain cells that still get smug satisfaction out of factoring a polynomial to work as a self-employed private tutor.

Way back in 2003, when I was just starting out in this small business venture, I still deemed it acceptable to travel by commuter rail to outlying suburbs to make money. I thought it might be a good idea to place an ad in the local papers of my unfortunate adolescent homeland, a.k.a., Long Island. I have since realized that tutoring within city limits is more interesting, more lucrative and a shorter commute, though there is something very special about the kids in suburbia that no Upper West Sider will ever be able to match.

So I called up Anton Newspapers to place an ad in all eighteen community newspapers of Nassau County, advertising myself as a "Regents and Test Prep Tutor." I painstakingly read this ad to a man named Gerry, spelling out every single word, and paid $156.00 for four weeks of advertising. When the bill arrived, complete with a tearsheet with my ad circled in marker, it revealed that I had been advertised to the good people of Nassau County as a "Test Prep tudor."

I called Gerry, who claimed to be "fixing the ad on the computer." This should have been a warning sign to me, as the previous week, during my initial phone conversation with Gerry, when I inquired as to whether my ad would also appear on the internet, he admitted that he 1) didn't know how to use a computer 2) had "never seen the internet" (and therefore had no idea what format internet ads appeared in and 3) had no email address to which I could email the correct spelling of the ad. Sure enough, the next week, the ad again ran as "Test Prep Tudor." This would have been amusing if the next day at my then-office job, a co-worker had not come in and jokingly asked if I was the tutor with the misspelled ad Jay Leno had showed last night on The Tonight Show.

Apparently they have a running segment on stupid ads and misprints of all kinds, on which MY VERY OWN AD (name and phone number blacked out) was derided on NATIONAL TELEVISON by none other than JAY HIMSELF. YES. They even highlighted the word "tudor" with a little spotlight, then proceeded to mock me as they mocked the woman on the street who could not identify the picture of Abraham Lincoln.

At the time, I was rather irate. I wrote this short warning to the people who had wronged me:

"A message to Donna, Gerry, and Anton Newspapers as a WHOLE: LOOK OUT. You have awakened the sleeping dragon of my rage and I will not stop until vengence is mine. Jay Leno has defamed my good name and you will suffer the consequences. I haven't been this mad since I was repeatedly called to jury duty in Nassau County after thrice proving my Brooklyn residence."

I have been defamed. I only hope to one day be infamed, if that is the state of being infamous. Being famed, I've always thought, would be not unlike having a continous paranoid schizophrenic episode. Everyone on the street knows who you are, but you don't know who they are.