MeSoFun Blog

Perhaps I should have put on deoderant, after all. The night started innocuously. A couple of beers at home. Then I put on my headphones and walked for half an hour to Hadlock Field , home to our local Class AA baseball team, the Portland Sea Dogs. What is a Sea Dog? I'm really not quite sure. Allegedly, Maine has seals. I have yet to see a seal here, but I'm not exactly looking for them. I was feeling anti-social and sat out in the bleachers, figuring I had a decent shot at snagging a foul ball. Sidenote: In fact, I caught a ball from the left fielder, who threw his first warmup toss over the bullpen catcher and over the fence, into the first row of the stands. Also, I could drink a beer in relative seclusion and listen to "This American Life" on my iPod. I'm not, in fact, 102 years old. A few innings into the game, a couple moved into the stands. My stands. But the guy had a Minnesota Twins hat on, so I was cool with it. In fact, on my way to get a beverage, I s...

You will get a second blog today. This isn't good enough. Normally, I find time to pre-blog when I know I'm going to have a busy night at work. Not that I blog at work. That would be a misuse of time. I usually do a quick spell check. If by "spell check" you mean "all of it." And so, with 17.5 seconds left in an NBA game that none of you and possibly none of our tens of thousands of readers care about, I'm coming to you live. As it were. It's around this time you begin to question your career. Yes, sports journalism sounds awesome. You get to go to games and stuff. They don't tell you about the late nights, pretty much every night. There was no warning about working every Friday and Saturday night for the fist five years of your marriage. Not that TW minded all that much. But nobody wants to hear complaints about work. It's a lot like everybody else's jobs, except the widgets we're working with are box scores and terribly worded stori...

A quick introduction before I get swinging. I'm Jim. I live in Portland, Maine. We're 100 miles up the road from Boston, 4.5 hours from New York City and in the center of all the culture that is New England. It's beautiful here, with ski slopes an hour away and water everywhere. The thing is, I never do anything. I've filled my gas tank three times since Thanksgiving. Over the course of two recent weeks, the only places I went in my car were: A. The grocery store; B. The gym to work out; C. Work. Wheeeeeeee. I don't reckon that'll change much. I'm doing the P90X of blogging. I'm going to blog every weekday for 90 days. I imagine that will get old tomorrow. But I'll give it a shot. So the other night, I did something I haven't done in years. I went to see a concert. It was these guys. ---> In a sense, it was these guys. A local bar does a thing on Tuesday nights where they have a band come in to play a show. It's a different band every week...