"It's great to be young and a Yankee."

Sorry for the delay on this, I'm in the homestretch of packing. It's 1:18am now. The movers are coming sometime between 12 and 2pm. So in my mind, that means I have around 12 hours left to put the rest of my apartment in boxes, reverse drill everything off the walls (maybe save that one til after the sun's up), do one last clean and conduct any other last rites with Deion Sanders.*
I just looked around my apartment and realized 12 hours may not be enough time. I'm gonna have to revisit this game recap in a bit.

To be cont...


2:59AM


Ok, made a lot of progress. It's weird how you become so used to seeing stuff in your home that it loses its singularity. I'm doing these run throughs to see if there's anything left, and I'm pretty sure I got everything, and then I notice a framed picture on the wall of my bathroom--the back page of the Daily News when the Yanks swept the Padres to win the World Series. ("THE GREATEST!") and a laminated 'Go Yankees!" sign above the mirror, that I got at the 2003 WS (not the greatest).

There's the "Exit" sign above my door that my mom hated and I loved because it reminded me of "American Psycho." The Giants pennant directly above the fireplace. A flattened Stoli bottle on the kitchen wall. An "Enter Sandman" poster next to the fridge. (Yeah, I did a really thorough job the first time around. Nope.)

Kinda sad. Particularly leaving the Yankee Stadium bathroom. I can't believe I painted that thing 5 years ago. (Right before the 2004 WS. Finished it the day I adopted Mariano Rivera--the cat--which also happened to be the 19-8 game against Boston.

For a little while after I became Mo's new mom, I was a little resentful that, coincidentally, the Yanks didn't win an ALCS game after that. But then I remember that he's also the coolest f'n animal in the world.)

Man, the end of an era. No more "stopping by Dorrians on my way home." No more running downstairs to the corner to my favorite pizza in the whole city. No more 84th street Deli guys asking me 364 days a year, at any hour of the day, if I "just got of coat check working." No more spending the lion's share of my nights (and days, I guess, outside of work) somewhere on 2nd avenue.

Ok, all these are very terminal-sounding, especially since I'm moving 5 blocks and 2.5 avenues away. It's just different. I'm just getting a little sentimental, either because it's my last night of not sleeping here, or because, in fact, I haven't really been sleeping. Or the most likely scenario, it's a manufactured nostalgia because evidently I'll stop at nothing to put off packing and have a deep-rooted desire to set the movers into seizures when they arrive and see my progress. I don't know, one of those reasons, anyway.

So to sum up, because I'm sure this is all fascinating to everyone who was under the impression "Tuesday, July 28: NYY @ TB" would touch on some revelant baseball topics, here's the final calculations for the place (The P&L report for D.S.):

• 4 different employers (What, I didn't like any grass to grow under my feet. I'm staying put for a while. I hope, anyway.)
• 5 boyfriends (each spanning the same time frame of late summer/early fall to late winter/beginning of spring...known in some circles as "the offseason." The argument could be made that there's a method to my madness..)
• 4 ALDS appearances
• 1 Super Bowl
• 4 premature Ranger playoff elimations
• 0 historical political, cultural, or social milestones that I could muster up even a modicum of interest in, or that has so far affected me in any way whatsoever
• 1 blown perfect season that has profoundly impacted me as it has a stranglehold on the Best Day of My Life status and distinction
• 5 winters without heat
• Around 3000 trips up or down the 5-flight walk-up. 200 of them have probably been today

We had quite a run, Deion. After all my OCD cleaning of you, it'd be a nice gesture of reciprocity if you could just freaking pack up yourself, yourself.

So, the Yankee game. (If I knew how to do that "jump" thing on blogging, I'd have done that.)

The Yankees looked messier than the Arnold house after Kevin threw a house party, on the Wonder Years. HOW were there only 2 errors logged for this one?? Maybe they were just showing replays or something, but I felt like every time I looked at the TV, there was a ball sailing over 1st or a ridiculous Mets impersonation in the outfield.

(I really feel like Swisher is the most dramatic epitome of being-hot-shit-and-then-getting-a-little-too-lax. One day I'm going to go through his stats, and look at the games where he was on fire, and then check out his performance for the game immediately following it. Why can't Elias provide us with THESE types of trends, instead of informing us, by way of Kay/Sterling that Jeter is batting a career .496 in games within the temperature range of 55 to 78 degrees, that fall on Thursdays in June?)

"Fatso struggling. I guess I should just make this an auto text." --Kevin

I'm surprised it isn't an autotext already, actually. "Yes" is a preprogrammed autotext, which kills me because how long does it take to write Yes? The answer would be "less than the amount of time it would take to pull up the autotext."

Yeah, CC got SHELLED. The worst I've seen him pitch since the beginning of the year. The score should have been even higher than it was because the shots that the Rays were roping off him were bullets all over the place. Like they were a little league team warming up before a game with some pepper drills.

Fortunately, the Sux were equally as disastrous and dropped a home game to the O's in 11 innings, and even managed to record more E's than the Yanks. We've been lucking out with these instances of NY-Boston double losses. If they keep playing like that, the Sox aren't gonna lose one day and start nipping at our ankles again. Or worse, we play like that against Boston in a few weeks, and we're back to clawing our way back up again. Shudder...

I'm gonna chalk this one up to "getting it out of their system." Kinda like when me and my college beirut partner would be playing and one of us would throw some embarrassing air ball about 17 ft left of the table and the other would immediately yell, "Tourettes! Good, you got it out of the way early." So, maybe the Yanks were just cashing in their bad beirut shot. Better now than later, I guess?

OR, and I like this possibility even more, maybe they purposely played half ass so the Rays would start creeping closer to the Sux in the Wild Card.

4am now. Since I've already determined this game was either a give-away game, or a collusion conspiracy, I don't think it warrants further coverage beyond:

• Cano is a defensive adonis
• Swisher played like DJ Jazzy Jeff
• Tex played like Adam Banks on the early Mighty Ducks
• ARod may or may not be demonstrating early signs of Memo Paris-syndrome with his new flame. (At least this one's quasi normal and devoid of salacious scandal)
• Jeter is playing as well as, if not better, than his 1990 run
• Damon's arm is atrocious and somewhere Chuck Knobloch is jumping up and down pointing at the tv screaming, "SEE! It WASN'T psychological and I WASN'T the only one!"
• Posada is getting kinda bad at passed balls, but it's like there's an inverse relationship between his defensive agility and his offensive production
• Despite all this, the Yanks are the best in their league.

And tomorrow they're going to do a reverse-swish. Which sounds like some kind of high dive move, but is really the practice of playing like mashed potatoes one night and then immediately following it up with a raw carrots kind of performance the next night. (That made sense to me, so I'm officially calling it a night. Writing-wise, anyway.)



*Deion Sanders=my apartment's name for the 5 years I've lived here. The numbers in my address include: 3,1,7,83,5,2. All prime numbers. (Yeah, 83.) Prime Time= Deion Sanders. I guess my apartment naming system is not much different than Michael Scott's mnemonic device for remembering names.