NEXT, WEATHER. BUT FIRST
Sports plays a fairly big role in my life, and I feel like I have to make excuses for it. All my artsie friends (I do have non-artsie friends, no really) turn their noses up at sport as if it's some kind of opiate-of-the-masses or something, like it's One Life To Live or The Price Is Right or whatever daily outrage is on the cover of the tabs this morning, like it's all bread and circuses serving no real use. You and I know that's a load of horse hockey, but whenever I try to explain it, their eyes just glaze over and they cut me off to talk about their hangnails or which local director is schtupping whom or something clearly more important. (Fuckers.)

But I do care about the Leafs, even now that I don't live in Toronto anymore. I suffered silently through their abortive playoff limp last month, and I weep for their lack of foresight today.

I care that the Curtis Joseph era is over, and I wonder how much it's going to take to replace him. I know how badly Toronto needs to win a Cup (that would be about as badly as the Red Sox or Cubs need to win a World Series; Phil Mickelson, Anna Kournikova and Susan Lucci have no clue), and I can't believe that they let the best goalie they've had since Bower & Sawchuk (or at the very least Mike Palmateer) just walk away because Pat Quinn wouldn't blink. The guy is in his prime. Why you all couldn't suck it up is beyond me. Mike Richter or Ed Belfour are not going to be as good or as reliable.

And in other news, I'm also pissed about the World Cup. I hate the Brazilian team, with their whiny one-named prima donnas who have no use for the team aspect of the sport, as if the whole otherwise glorious and lovely pageant of multiculturalism and togetherness this year's tournament displayed especially well was really little more than a backdrop for these spoiled little morons to show off how hot their turds are.

And Ronaldo, that little whiny wimp, he's the worst. That episode earlier in the tournament where he was going to kick a corner kick, but when someone on the other team lofted the ball to him, he went down as if he'd been shot by snipers merely to draw a penalty, was as poor a piece of sportsmanship (and very in character, from what I've seen and heard over the years) as I've ever seen.

You wanna know why soccer won't catch on in North America? Ultimately it's because that kind of cheating is endorsed and celebrated by the game. Even hockey now considers faking a cheap shot to be itself a penalty. In soccer, Ronaldo, and there were others (though none so egregious), routinely get away with that kind of crap. (He succeeded in drawing the penalty, and got later only got fined something like half a day's pay for not apologizing. That to me is being rewarded for cheating.)

(If your eyes haven't glazed over yet, I'm assuming you at least have a clue what I'm going on about.)

Sadly, Ronaldo is the best player in the game right now, and with that mantle comes responsibility. He wants the title of greatest player since Pele? No fucking chance. Pele was (and still is) a statesman. So, in their ways, were Cruyff, Beckenbauer and Chinaglia. Even Maradona at least played along with that whole hand-of-God business, and tried to be discreet when all his drug and marital problems went down.

Like I said a billion words ago up there, I know how much everyone really cares about this stuff, especially now that we don't have to think about it for another four years. But I'm a little sad with how the tournament ended, especially since it was so fun to watch and discuss the next day, all bleary-eyed, with people I had nothing in common with before and probably won't again, at least until hockey season starts.

Anyway, it don't matter anymore. See, I have a new toy.

A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD
It seems there's a new piece written somewhere every week of some kind or another about weblogs or blogging or online journaling or whatever, and they're coming faster and furiouser than ever before now (the articles, I mean). I feel like such a veteran, having been throwing various shades of pasta con caca at this space for a whole year and a half now. Back then, I was the only one with a -- whatever you call one of these thingys, and now there's over a thousand of them in New York alone (according to nycbloggers.org, there's at least ten who use the same subway stop I do). That just seems a bit ... dense. Then again, I do live a block from Times Square, so everything's a little dense. This sure ain't Saskatchewan, Toto.

Anyway, I had a point. Right.

If you really want to see what all the bloggywoggy fuss is about, don't just read what I'm writing here (tempting as that may be; it is true that I painstakingly and successfully manage to capture the alpha and the omega of life as we all know it every day, but hey, don't take my word for it). Go to the NYC Bloggers site and check out how unbelievably diverse New York is, and then think about how big the rest of the world is, and how spectacularly we're covering it and learning from each other.

Unless that's how you wound up here, in which case, um, hi. Sorry the place is a mess. Want a beer?

I HAVE A FRIEND WITH A PROBLEM...LET'S CALL THIS FRIEND 'ME'
How does one stop being a doormat? I have no idea. To stop doing nice things is the hardest thing in the world. You have nothing to fall back on, and you risk total alienation, which is the one thing you fear most in the world. Do I have enough strength to become a hermit and tough it out? Do I have the social skills necessary to crawl out of my hole in 6 months (or a year, or five years, or whatever) and pick up where I left off, or better yet, move up in the food chain a bit, to where people aren't so needy and infantile? Is there such a place, even? Am I pushing a rock up a mountain here? I can't believe that. If I did, I'd leave New York and move to Saskatchewan, put my life savings into a little farm and crank out books that I didn't care if anyone read 'em or not, and someone would discover the place in a hundred years or so with me face down on a table with 8 billion pages of liddeture all piled around me like a little house built inside the first one. (As romantic as that idea sometimes sounds ... ah, no.)

I got into songwriting because I didn't think I had enough feel for human nature to actually write coherently for long periods of time about someone and make them real yet. Which was true. (Name one 19 year old with enough emotional maturity to write a book with coherent multilayered realistic characters, that's actually done it. Pynchon, maybe.) Also, I wrote a book that really deeply stunk, and I thought, if I'm going to write something that craptacular, I wanted to know how bad it was the same day and not after eight months of toil. You know.

But now I've spent the last ten years writing songs about people and I'm finally pretty good at it, and the realization that I'll have to put the same effort into learning to write fiction properly isn't quite the inspiration I was hoping it would be.

I have the suspicion that I'm only a decent writer because I work at it, and not because I'm a natural. Some people were born to write (or dance or make furniture or run for public office or dunk a basketball). My true talent is somewhere, and I have until I die to find it and perfect it. Until then, I'll keep making records and books, because it's something I don't suck at anymore. Also, I have to admit, writing is still the funnest thing I've ever found to do, even after all these years.

I truly love you, sweet language, even though I do you wrong sometimes. May we never part.

Now shut up and get me that damned pizza.

VAUGHN PASSMORE
I've been listening to my old friend Vaughn Passmore's record, Someone Else's Dream, for the last month or so and, for the most part, it's as amazing as I hoped it would be. You know, for a singer-songwriter, the guy always loved his big wide sounds, and in this record the guitars and keys are layered perfectly, heavy but not overbearing, jumpy but not jittery, holes and spacings left intact despite the fact that he's been recording and re-recording this album since before I first picked up a guitar, and I'm on my third record with the better part of a decade of touring and bush-beating under my belt and he's just now pressing his first hundred, so the thing sounds so overproduced in places it's kind of sick, but by god those first four songs (at least up to the sample-looped, Arlene Bishop-fronted "The Best Way To Say Goodbye," which is so out of character it scares me) run and scream and whimper perfectly. I especially love how the loping melancholy of "2700 Miles From Disneyland" has become an angry little ballad about wondering where all your plans went wrong.

Of course, all ever really I care about is how good the songwriting is. These songs have been battle tested and polished to a sweet sheen, and any production issues I may have with it don't really matter. One of the reasons I got on with Vaughn as well as I have over the years is that he's got a great feel for not overstating a lyric, and his utter lack of fear when it comes to ripping something out of a song if it's not working, no matter how neat it may be. And that commitment to perfection and feel is what shines through most on this record. The only real disappointment (aside from the fact that he doesn't have a website or an affiliation I can even link to, though you can get to him through Bobby Dazzler) is that I know how many good songs he threw away to get to this point.

When he and I were putting together my last record, he always thought it best to lead with your best songs on a CD, and here he does. But given all this, I'm glad he sent along a copy of the new Stratochief record as well. It's got two of my very favorite Passmore songs, "Tennessee" and "Diamond in the Drawer," which is such a hermetic, well-written country song about falling for a married woman that Travis Tritt or someone should do the world a favor and record a crappy version of it and Vaughn can take the ensuing check and turn pro for real. Not to be prescriptive or anything, and as always, as I say not as I do, but -- I'm just saying.

It's also real sweet to hear the rhythm section I used when I was back in Toronto now backing Vaughn. Damn, they're good. I don't think he meant it this way, but I'm hearing their continued collaboration as a total internal check to make sure I don't let the occasional mediocrity of this town (okay, there's nothing occasional about it; the attitude of a lot of the people in this town can suck the excellence out of you without eternal vigilance) get in the way of what I'm trying to do, which is make really good records, time and everything else be damned. I can promise you it won't take the, what, eight years that Vaughn's record took to get to daylight (Boston worked faster, fergawdsake), but Someone Else's Dream reminded me that I'm right to take the time it takes. And I know in my heart that when I start on the next album, which is going to be a real rocker, I either have to find better people here in New York than I'm currently playing with or I'm dragging my ass back to Toronto to play with Terence Bone and Duncan McBain again.

THE DROOLING BEARS OF SOUTH STREET

Yesterday, I wandered in to work, battle weary and insomniacked from late night music work followed by overnight World Cup idiocy (that's idiocy on my part - I have no business taking the three hours I have shoehorned into my schedule for sleep and blowing them on a sporting event, no matter how good the games are) to find that the line-art drawing of a New England resort farmhouse (I'm assuming that's what it was - no one else knew neither) on the wall of my office had been replaced by this doctored picture of the New York Skyline.

Bob Kommel, a cat I work with, made this piece for his own office a bunch of years ago, and it's been sitting in storage ever since, and he pulled it out yesterday and decided arbitrarily to stick it in my office, and damn but I'm glad he did. This thing is incredible. Look closely at it; the bears (and walrus, and seagull) have all been clipped out of magazines and glued into the landscape, and not only do the shadows all line up (the light source in all the combined pictures comes from the same place), but -- okay. Look at the grizzly climbing the Brooklyn Bridge. The curve of the bridge fits into where the shadow of the bear's back would be. It's amazing, and it's not for sale, but with Bob's permission I'm sharing it with you. I think I'm going to go with it as the working album cover. (The album still has no title. It'll need one. I don't want this to be the self-titled one. The songs aren't that personal. Well, okay, some of them are. Still. Title. Think. You too.)

News to come. Life continues. I have found some peace in my recent solitude, but today is the longest day of the year, and I'm going back outside. There's people I love out there, and I must find them before they get too drunk to tell me the little pep-talks and you-rocks I sometimes need to hear.