Tuesday, August 22, 2006  

The Plan

The back end of a five game curb stomp ain't fun, is it?

The Yankees descended on Boston like a horde of Visigoths, raped our women, burned our crops, and fled into the night, taking summer with them. You think it's a goddamn coincidence that this morning, the very first morning after the massacre, the air was cold and crisp and autumnal? No way. Macbeth hath murdered sleep and Giambi hath murdered summertime.

Remember the scene in Black Hawk Down where the Delta sniper sat alone and scared in the wreckage of his smoldering helicopter firing and reloading as fast as he could while about a million pissed off Somalis surrounded and finally engulfed him?

I figure that's about how David Wells felt yesterday.

Poor Theo. He has a Plan, and he's sticking to the Plan, and god bless the Plan. But sometimes, brother, the Plan doesn't work, and you're left hanging in empty space, like Wile E. Coyote, and then your bullpen, which bears a striking resemblance the Island of Misfit Toys, hands you a ten-ton anvil and you and your precious little Plan come crashing to earth in a cloud of dirt and dust and pink Red Sox caps.

Truth be told, I actually agree with Theo's Plan. But I'm also here to tell you that it is No Goddamn Fun when a Plan goes south on you. Oh, I had a Plan once. You bet your sweet spanky ass I did. And I'm here to tell you, about 99 percent of what I do day in and day out these days wasn't in it. Were I to show you the Plan, now kept for historical purposes in a safety deposit box along with my earrings and testicles, you'd be amazed at how far off course we've drifted. Yesterday was supposed to be the day I got caught in a cheap motel in Reno with a multicultural bevy of questionable women, a veritable rainbow of whores, putting my million-dollar development deal in jeopardy, though it would eventually be saved when the NBC executives were literally striken blind from the genius of my submitted scripts.

Instead, I'm in the middle of Plan B, which is equally rewarding, I swear, albeit in strikingly different ways. I don't know that there's an equation whereby I can compare the love and adoration of a beautiful wife and perfect children to the booze-fueled depravity of desperately kinked floozies, but if there were, the greater-than symbol would be pointed at Clan McIntire, squarely and unequivocally. Believe that.

I'm not here to complain for a second about Plan B -- I'm just here to tell Theo that I understand what it feels like to be standing in a vast open desert, vultures circling, throat parched and skin cracked, yelling into the empty blazing sky, "BUT I HAD A FUCKING PLAN!!!!"