MeSoFun Blog

The oddest selfie I have ever taken. The Boston Red Sox are pretty bad this year. The local sports radio station, which lives to tear apart struggling local teams, has been having a field day. The Red Sox are for sale! Their manager shows up late for games! They're moving the team to Vermont! Ahhhhhhhh! And that's just NPR.  The Red Sox are an inescapable part of living in Boston. Though I was kidding about NPR, a few weeks ago the local NPR station (WBUR) did spend 15 minutes breaking down a Red Sox trade. Usually, NPR announcers can't pronounce players' names correctly. It's a different kind of town. Around 10:30 p.m., during a rain delay. That's what has made the tradition to city life a difficult one. It's a different kind of town. Obviously, I've  had some trouble  getting myself,  my dog  and The Wife  acquainted . One thing we were not prepared for: Humidity. July and August are pretty miserable months just about anywhere, but to have them as your...

There's a lot of stories about Boston. There's a little dog park up the hill from our condo that's about an acre of open land. At the top of the hill, there's a large rock with a plaque that tells of the park's history as a military for the British in the 1600s and the Americans in the late 1700s.  A more recent story involves skunks. To an outsider, "Boston" and "skunks" seems like a contradiction, but they're everywhere in Eastie. I saw one within my first few nights of living in East Boston. You see them only at night, in fact, but you see them relatively often.  The Wife heard a story at the dog park up the hill about the skunks. Supposedly, the skunks were brought in by the city to control the rat population. Maybe they've had success with that. I have yet to see a rat in Boston. Join the smelly side, Daisy. There is, however, another mammalian in East Boston, and it was always likely they would meet. Daisy Duke is an affable chocola...

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 ...

You should really all have Mass Hysteria bookmarked by now. www.massiveeffect.blogspot.com This is the square in the center of our neighborhood, convenient to the T (our subway), Burger King, Dunkin' Donuts, a Chinese place and little else of interest. I could never understand the classic essay template. Start your essay with a thesis statement. The second sentence should be a supporting statement for your thesis. The third sentence should be a second supporting statement for your thesis. Then, if you're still following along, your second paragraph should be  exactly the same  as the second sentence of your essay. I didn't know anything about writing at the time, but I knew it was ludicrous (and just bad writing) to repeat the exact same sentence. But our tenth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Gelhar, was old-school. Or just plain old. Her teeth stains had teeth stains. She was a modern-day equivalent of a nun teaching in a Catholic school. Form is all that matters, not the tho...