The big bottle of Budweiser, supine on the scoreboard, sweating and shedding chunks of pristine ice. My brother, also supine, reclining in the dimly-lit depths of a subterranean Turkish bath, his face covered in a towel, while a be-turbaned, scrawny youth flogged his pinking flesh with a bundle of olive leaves, sporadically soaking him with a plastic bucket that sat, eternally filling, under a metal spigot. A college-aged alpha male, his facial hair just filling in, so awash in self-confidence that he made the act of sniffing every thirty seconds and wiping at his nose seem like coolest thing a human being could possibly do. That was Friday.

Holly and I nestled together in the vertiginous heights of Shea Stadium's Upper Deck, a place so high it seemed impossible that Holly in her Andean residence or the two of us on a bender could ever get higher. It was the fourteenth inning of Holly's first Met game. My brother had jumped ship earlier in the night, but the five-pound bag of peanuts he'd brought was still with us. We'd been working on it since a traffic jam three weeks ago in Pennsylvania.

Holly and I ate peanuts mindlessly and threw them to the ground in a wide radius. The remaining seats of Box 848 were now vacant of spectators. The other holdouts scattered through the area were similarly quieted, except for those who had constructed instruments out of the complimentary Shea Stadium cookie tins and the specially decorated Cinco de Mayo Budweiser cans. Some banged loudly, but a group of men in the first row were playing a soft melody, dancing in their multicolored jerseys. The excitement of the Mets' seventh-inning four-run game-tying rally had long since worn off, as had the excitement of their refusal to lose by one run in the 11th. The game, like the traffic jam in Pennsylvania, had been hung up for hours (maybe it was the curse of the peanuts) but we'd started something and now we had to see it through.

Whenever a game goes into extra innings, I feel compelled to stay. In fact, I hate to leave a stadium with the sounds of the game still echoing from within. What if this is the longest game in baseball history and I miss it? The Mets loaded the bases and failed to convert, loaded the bases and grounded into double plays, achieved first and third with no out and lost momentum. The game, I realized, was beginning to feel more like a frustrating sexual or romantic escapade and less like a sporting event. Inebriated by nothing but a moderate $6 Budweiser or two and a hot dog each, Holly and I merged into one mind, first simultaneously enraged by the girl banging her cookie tin, now affectionate toward the remaining drunken louts fighting at the top of their lungs, their language increasingly slurred, their insults increasingly irrelevant, "YANKEES SUCK!" "HOW ABOUT YOUR BRAVES NOW, MOTHERFUCKER!" "WE'RE STILL IN FIRST PLACE, ASSHOLE!" Blue veins stood out in their necks and their faces reddened until they resembled the Jumbotron graphic of the screaming Mets mascot who enticed the crowd the do the same. A toddler bounced nearby, waving his plush likeness of Mr. Met. Mr. Met himself, surrounded by a half-dozen sombreroed young girls (it was, after all, Cinco de Mayo), danced wearily on the Mets dugout. My own voice was hoarse from screaming, largely exhortations based on the fact that it was now the twentieth anniversary of the Mets 1986 World Series Win. I had also been heartily booing Chipper Jones, who we decided was the guy who had made the nasty comment about the diversity of the New York City subway. We wouldn't find out until the next day that his crime was actually naming his son "Shea", an insulting reference to his hitting streak at the ballpark. "Why don't you ride the fucking SUBWAY!" I shrieked happily from the Upper Deck, on top of the harmonious background of boos. I had been screaming for hours, like a child, like a banshee, for the Mets, for beer, for hot dogs. At times, I howled for no reason at all simply because I could. We had done the wave, not once, but twice, and the second time it went all the way around from our seats in left field to the right-field foul pole. Having had little success fomenting the revolution thus far, I took this as a good sign. We debated how many innings we would stay--fifteen? Sixteen? It was almost midnight.

Then, unceremoniously, David Wright hit a solid double, scored the lone baserunner, and we stood and cheered, stood and high-fived, hugged and left. When you wait so long for resolution it can be anti-climactic, like Mr. Big deciding he does love Carrie at the end of Sex and the City, or the government deciding that it is actually okay if gay people want to love each other. Sort of.

Still, we were giddy, tripping down the long ramp-walk from the Upper Deck to street level. There were banners everywhere of great Mets moments, moments I remembered watching on television. Tonight was just another night in a long history still in the making.

I began to fantasize that the Mets, like the Red Sox, would now enter a terrific championship drought. It is already twenty years underway. In another sixty or seventy years, they would win again. I would be one of those very old people who remembered the '86 championship. I would be interviewed on the local news. Perhaps I would provide childhood photographs. I would tell once again my memory of watching the game on the high blue pile of the wall-to-wall carpet of my family's apartment in Queens, of the moutning despair as the Mets came within one strike of the losing the World Series, of the extreme focusing of will in my seven-year-old mind, of the unbelievable elation of my hope becoming action. I would tell the late 21st century of the miracle I had witnessed as a child in Queens, and then I would die peacefully in my sleep.

Back in Shea Stadium I was thrilled to find myself so young, my face so unlined, my knees so resilient, even as they pounded the concrete stadium ramp. I looked confidently forward to the howling voice of an announcer perhaps yet unborn crying "And the Mets win! The Mets win!" I love the "and," in that phrase, so poetic, implying that so much else has happened leading up to this win. Now I was with my friend, the night was warm and black, everything that would come before the Mets' next World Series Championship was now unfolding, and Holly was here, and we had been to the Russian-Turkish baths, and we had eaten lunch on the patio, and now the crowd carried us along to the subway, the rowdy, affable, cigarette-smoking crowd, their accents harsh, their makeup heavy, their swaggers wide. It was a winning crowd. I was secretly pleased to have delivered a win for Holly, as if I had pitched relief at a crucial moment.

We boarded the 7 train, sandwiched between a group of teenaged boys pretending to sell extra hot dogs from the stadium and a group of college boys talking about who had the best, cheapest weed on campus. I shuttled between eavesdropping on each group, fascinated with the specificity of their age and maleness. Among the high schoolers, there was one boy who was the loudest and the rowdiest. He made himself the center of attention by stepping in between the cars to throw hot dog fragments at exiting passengers. "EXIT TO YOUR RIGHT!" he shouted, and then splattered the leg of a left-exiter with ketchup. "Yo, shorty!" yelled a spectacled teenager at a girl on the platform. "Want a hot dog?" He howled with laughter. The train rolled its eyes.

More quietly and at more advanced an age, the college boys discussed the weed problem. It was $50 for an eighth. Someone else would sell you an ounce for $400, but that was the same thing, and the $50 weed was better. I watched the alpha-male in this group exert his authority with finesse. His say on the weed matter was final. When the 7 train got in, they would buy from his dealer of choice. Conversation moved on to the summer, to girlfriends, to fidelity. The quieter member of the group expressed his weariness of playing the field, his intention to remain faithful to his girlfriend through a separation necessitated by internships, summer jobs, circumstances of privilege I couldn't quite make out. The alpha-male grinned, took control. "I just know how it is, in the city, in the summer. I may not be looking for it, but it's nonstop." The beta male looked momentarily bewildered, you could see that the concept of action so nonstop that it would seek him out and find him was not a real concern. I believed the alpha male, for some reason, I believed that girls and decent weed and a host of other things veritably landed in his lap. He was too magnetically relaxed for this not to be the case. "I just know how it is," he said finally, shrugged and sniffed. He twitched his limbs in the way of athletic men who've been sitting for a while. I considered him with the fascination I reserve for all people who give the appearance of freedom from neurosis and self-doubt, and a measure of the contempt I hold for people who seem rather pleased to be assholes.

In the midst of the immature maleness, it hardly seemed possible we'd begun the day in a warren of underground ovens at the Tenth Street Baths. If baseball celebrated the male form in all its steroided glory, and the 7 train currently celebrated the male psyche in all its messy aggression, then the baths with their obliterating heat blurred the lines of gender, of body, of mind into one vaporous cloud. I dimly remembered the scrawny youth (he remained in my mind a "youth") motioning me to unhook my bikini top as I lay facedown on the searing hot wooden bench, the feeling of my bones pleasantly cracking, stretching, giving way as he yanked on my limbs in a most unchiropractic way, the feeling of immodesty that someone might see my exposed chest quickly burned away with the rest of my fears and thoughts, my only wish to be doused again with the icy water. In the baths, there was all manner of sweating flesh, all colors, all sizes, all ages, all reduced to its most elemental and living capacity: to release salt and water in beads of liquid that roll down to the ground like tears.

On Capital Punishment:
Last meals are barbaric. If a person is considered sufficiently devoid of humanity to be executed, what aspect of his or her person are we acknowledging by fulfilling a request for steak? How can the state decide that a person doesn't deserve to live, but does deserve a lobster? Shouldn't the message be, "you killed another human being, and now you, too, must die, and you don't get any lobster?"

By providing its death-row inmates with last meals, the state implicitly recognizes that the inmate consists of multiple facets--one which is capable of enjoying a meal, another of which may have committed a capital offense. At the end of the day, it's the incoherence and hypocrisy even more than the outright cruelty that makes the tyranny of government so disagreeable.

On Casablanca:
Why did Rick let Ilsa go on the plane to Lisbon, knowing he'd probably never see her again? Did Rick love Ilsa and just want her to survive, or did he know that she really loved Laszlo, or did he know that he really couldn't love anyone, or that his love for her was flawed and Laszlo's was ultimately better for her? He says, "I'm no good at being noble," but his gesture at the end of Casablanca truly is noble--he does something that brings him no joy save the knowledge that someone he loves is better off.

Or did Rick and Ilsa just have bad sex on their one last night together in Casablanca, and realize that it must have been the absinthe Rick probably had a in cellar in his Parisian bar that made everything seem so magical there?

On a minor but persistent problem with cinema and television:
Why, why, why, must so many phone numbers on television and in the movies start with "555"? It so ruins the illusion that a separate but equally real universe into which we have an inexplicable window truly exists, and that in this universe people we know perfectly well are highly paid, often vapid Hollywood stars are in fact cops, doctors, political leaders and everypeople. I know they can't just use real numbers because then deranged people will call them, expecting to reach Brad Pitt on the telephone. But can't Hollywood afford to buy out one exchange, something more nondescript, like 867? Hollywood can afford to build entire towns, stock them with residents, and burn them. Can't they afford to buy the rights to a few phone numbers? They don't even have to buy the rights! They can hook up new phone numbers in wherever the movies they're making are set. It would add another $49.99 to the production budget, maybe less, since they don't even need long-distance service.

On relative gratitude:
After watching the final few episodes of Six Feet Under (SPOILER ALERT), I developed a new way to console myself when I feel down. It's a little mantra and it goes like this: "At least I didn't just fuck a Quaker and have a cerebral hemorrhage."

Department of Ongoing Annoyances:
The yuppies are back. They have come out of hibernation in their three-story townhouse and once again roam the wilds of their backyard. As I type, the mother yuppie and her cub can be glimpsed through the shrubbery. Not only glimpsed, but heard. The yuppie guppie has grown and now possesses a lung power that rivals his mother's, who I am convinced must perform on Broadway. This woman can project. The kid is the perfect age for whining and throwing tantrums. I'd throw tantrums too if my mother talked to me in an amplified singsong all day about gardening and named my dog Willa.

On technology:
Holly, formerly known in these ephemeral pages as "H," (a relic pseudonym from a time when I was under some deluded impression that I had to protect the innocent from their incriminating implication in my mildly illegal hobbies), is visiting from Peru. I realized with some awe and disappointment that the most important revelations of the last four months that I can report to her are that "we got cable" and "Gmail is subtly but importantly changing our lives."

Gmail has many special features that other kinds of web-based email do not. First, it does not have stupid ads or pop-ups or items about celebrities. Instead, it runs ads down the sides of your emails that are sensitive to the text within them, so if you mother waxes poetic about wanting to fly free of her earthly encumbrances, there are corresponding ads for hang-gliding lessons, or if your father emails you pictures of the treehouse he and your brother are building for your cousin and mentions that all that's left to build is the ladder, there are ads about ladder safety. Mention you're depressed and there are creepily apt ads for anti-depressants. The ads accompanying an email discussion I had with an editor about an essay I wrote on Martin Luther King yielded an offering for another King essay apparently available for plagiarism at a website called "DueNow.com," an inducement to shop for "By Any Means Necessary Malcom X merchandise NOW at SHOP.com" and the promise that Verizon's online listings could find "Civil Rights" in New York City.

Another Gmail feature that has brought me simultaneous pain and amusement is the GChat function. I have long been an opponent of instant messaging, finding it to be the lowest form of communication between humans, like being on the telephone (one of my other least favorite activities) but without capital letters. But since the aforementioned artist formerly known as "H." moved to Peru, it has allowed us to communicate on several occasions without the notoriously unreliable cellphone-to-Andean-mountain connection. GChat also allows me to keep tabs on my soon-to-be-married friend, who is in law school and is busy performing a series of tasks far beyond my limited grasp, i.e., coordinating a day in the lives of 185 people and preparing arguments for the legality of gay marriage that go far beyond my offering of "The Government Are Perverts, Throw Bodily Fluids at Them!"

Meanwhile, other acronymous technologies are also enhancing and ruining my life. It was long ago agreed among the inhabitants of this apartment that we would get HBO for the sixth and final season of the Sopranos. At the time this was agreed (during the fifth season of the Sopranos) the sixth season of the Sopranos seemed impossibly far off. 2006 was a laughable date existing in the imagined territory of the second half of the decade, a time when we'd be in our mid--or even late!--twenties and everyone we knew would be in different phases of disarray, triumph, ruin and graduate school. True to our prediction, much had changed by the time the sixth season of the Sopranos premiered. Bachelors were masters. Boyfriends were fiances. Lovers were friends and vice versa. Things were changing all around us and so it was time: we ordered a premium cable package and spent an extra $5.95 for HBO OnDemand.

Since this service was installed in our home, I have experienced a heady addiction heretofore only read about in gritty poetic memoirs of heroin abuse. I spend much of my time watching HBO television, and the rest of my time fantasizing about watching HBO television. A quirk of HBO television I never noticed, but certainly one that makes it all the more perfect, is that the characters on many HBO television shows smoke marijuana almost constantly. I have a tendency to mimic the behavior of characters I see on television (within reason, of course--to to the point of drinking martinis while wearing a silk dragon kimono for example, but not to the point of acting out lawsuit-inspiring pranks like the impressionable young males who watch those shows on which grown men enact elaborate pranks) and so I now spend even more time watching HBO and smoking dope. I know many people would say that this is not a productive use of anyone's time, but I beg to differ. My life has more meaning, purpose and focus since we got HBO OnDemand than ever before. The only other time I felt myself so transformed, so comfortably orbiting a feature of consumer culture was that day over two years ago when iPod came into my life.

The only problem with the simultaneous arrival of the twin technologies of HBO and GChat, is that it's hard for me to sustain my attention on one when the other is calling to me, resulting in apologetic lines of non-dialogue such as this one.

"10:37 PM: sorry, El! I wandered away, ate some Udon noodles, got stoned and watched three episodes of Entourage. One thing led to another. I hope that's not bad GChat ettiquete. I don't really understand this medium of communication. It's like an email, but also like a movie script. You can read the chats--they are stored. It's like the government has already recorded them and transcribed them. I better go!"

With all these opportunities to virtually socially stimulate oneself and make social faux pas in one's own home, it's no wonder that I nearly had a meltdown when I exited into a world in which the famous potheads are real and the celebrities, too, are made of actual flesh.

On power tools and powerless tools:
In other news, I went to the suburbs to help my family build a treehouse for my nine-year-old cousin yesterday. I got three splinters and my whole family used power tools together. It was a wonderful, bonding experience. Watching a child handle a power drill for the first time is a sight not to be missed. When I got home, I had even more fun with a pair of tweezers, conducting the latest procedure in a series of ongoing hand surgeries. It was once again confirmed that I am a Jew, and if you prick me, I do in fact bleed.