MeSoFun Blog

As I so often say on behalf of my dog: Get in my belly. I take comfort in food. You know this about me. Entering 10th grade, I was 5-foot-1 and weighed 235 pounds. I still have the stretch marks. In adulthood, I've figured out how to appropriately manage my weight. I exercise like a fiend and try to eat a lot of vegetables, because I like vegetables. Preferably with blue cheese dressing. But I'm flexible on that. Here we are in Boston. My 16th move, or whatever insane number it is. We have no friends. Going to the grocery store is arduous. Going for a run is difficult. The dew point is roughly equal to the temperature. My dog is panting on the floor under the air conditioner. We have Comcast. I'm not happy. So when someone mentions apple crisp at work, my ears perk up as they did a couple of nights ago. It was jokingly suggested that we celebrate the first actual day of the GOP convention with a potluck. This is how newspapers work. We mostly want to eat. We run spell check

 T-minus 5 minutes to bowel eruption.  It isn't often that I feel the need to warn readers about content. There will be no gratuitious swearing nor descriptions of horrible violence to come in this space. There will, however, be a flashback to one of the grossest nights of my life . Avert your eyes if you are offended by the word poop. Well, it's too late now. You might as well keep reading. That's the worst word I'm going to use, though there might be some technical anatomical descriptions. Saturday was marvelous. It was the first day temperatures and the humidity were both under 80. The Wife and I had been looking for a fresh-water river into which we could throw tennis balls for Daisy Duke, our 2-year-old chocolate Lab and the love of TW's life. A tactical error was made. We went to the Neponset River, which seemed like it might not be too salty for Daisy Duke. Daisy is a water enthusiast who enjoys swimming with great vigor to retrieve items. The problem is,

 Yes, this is what I want my funeral to look like.  If there's a respectful way to mock people, I would choose to do that. I would , but I can't think of such a way. Just know that as I type about our neighborhood, this is the look on my face: bug eyes, head shaking left and right as I finally give up trying to understand what it is I am seeing. Those experiences come often in Eastie. Fifty years ago, East Boston was a neighborhood filled with Italian immigrants. I don't actually know that for a fact, but it seems like it should be the case, and Wikipedia is never wrong . There are signs of our neighborhoods old Italian roots. The market down the street sells cold cuts, olives and bread. And nothing else. On hot days, the Italians pop chairs out in front of their houses and just sit there, as if air conditioning and cable TV don't exist. It's so sterotypical a scene that I'm afraid my description of the Italians having a discussion (yelling) at each other in f

It's totally safe to text and bike, right? That's not illegal yet. Visiting a big city with mass transit was always something of a novelty when I visited from the backwoods or New Hampshire or Salt Lake City. You don't have to drive! It's relatively cheap! When you move to the big city, you get a little perspective. It's not that you don't have to drive, it's that you would never want to. It's relatively cheap but you can forget about seeing your wife wear any type of shoe with a heel on it to walk to the subway. Oddly, I sort of love driving in the big city. More specifically, I love driving under it. Driving through the tunnels is fun. And for, shall we say, "aggressive drivers," there's not much to adjust to. Just stick the nose of your car into traffic and go. And expect others to do the same. The more tentative drivers among us do not necessarily fare well. The Wife is probably still annoyed by an incident on Monday. We were trying to