Earlier this week, I received an email from one [name later redacted] that I below reproduce in its entirety:

Josh Newman is an unmitigated knob. What a narcissistic, little poser bitch.

I must admit that, finding the message in my inbox, I suddenly felt oddly flattered. Not only did something about me, a complete stranger, stir up in [name] the desire (or perhaps even the need) to send off such a charming missive, but my online persona apparently irked him sufficiently to even whip out the thesaurus in search of the perfect ‘knob’-preceding word.

Still, warmed as I was by his effort, I must admit that [name]‘s work fell a bit short of my high hate mail standards. I’m lucky enough to receive a piece or two every couple of months, and some of them are really, remarkably, treasurably good. Sure, [name] might lack the biting wit (or perhaps simply the intelligence) to really tear into me in Shakespearean style. But, at the very minimum, he could have at least put some effort into structuring the email properly. I mean, consider how much more effective it would have been if written in the second person and ended with a complimentary closing:

Dear Josh Newman,

You are an unmitigated knob. What a narcissistic, little poser bitch.

Drink bleach and die,

[name]

Sure it’s a hate letter; but it’s still a letter. There’s an etiquette to these things.

Heading to Rite Aide to pick up a few last pre-trip essentials, I passed a group of black high school girls on their way home.

“Hey mister,” one of the girls shouted, “for a white boy, you got a pretty cute ass.”

In response to one reader who suggested that blogging about my love life effectively rules out a future in politics:

Exactly.

Confirming my fear that Kraft Velveeta Shells & Cheese (which I secretly enjoy immensely) is the white-trashiest of macaroni and cheeses, the back of the box I just prepared is emblazoned with: Velveeta. Ain’t No Substitute.

Despite my initial plan to stay in LA only through today, I’ve since rearranged my schedule, and will now be sticking it out in the smog capital of the world through December 20th. Which leaves me, first, in a bit of a bind from a clothing perspective – my Tumi rollaboard barely fits four or five days of clothing, so expanding the trip to fifteen will leave me recycling clothes at a rather alarming rate. (“Didn’t you wear that sweater yesterday? And Tuesday? And last Monday, Thursday and Saturday?”) Second, I fear sticking around for such an extended stretch may push me dangerously close to my absolute Los Angeles lethal overdose limit.

Sure, LA has its upsides. Warm weather. Beautiful beaches. Vacuous, surgically enhanced, bottle-blonde aspiring actresses (“Like, ohmygod, I was totally Juliet in my high school’s “Romeo and Juliet” too!”). But after a few days, the downsides begin to grate on me. A thirty minute minimum drive from anywhere to anywhere else. Monotonous, vaguely run down, bizarrely never-ending suburban sprawl. Really, really bad bagels. And a complete and total lack of cultural life. (“Why go to the symphony when so many films have great orchestral scores!”)

And, worst of all, film people, nothing but film people, as far as the eye can see. In New York, running an indie production company is quirkily cool. Sort of unusual. Here in LA, nothing could be more painfully run-of-the-mill. I get the sense that, say, a tax accountant could do tremendously well at bars here. (“You add long columns of numbers all day long? That’s so exciting!”) In fact, for the duration of my trip so far, I’ve been introducing myself as a forensic diver – you know, the guy who has to fish up the corpses whenever the cops or the FBI are investigating a death in the water. Business has been slow in the East River, I’ve been telling people, ever since Giuliani started cracking down on crime. Which is why I headed out to LA; jet ski accidents, I’m sure, are the future of the industry.

Of course, even the cachet of such an illustrious imaginary career can’t save me; it’s hard to schmooze it up an LA night club when you spend most of the evening huddled in the corner, clicking your heels, thinking of New York City, and chanting softly: “There’s no place like home… there’s no place like home.”

Today being the first real snow of the season, I did the only sensible thing: constructed snowballs from the snow on my windowsill, and pelted passersby on the street below.

Her: So, you always get what you want?
Him: Pretty much.

About a year back, I made the rather poor decision to purchase two custom-made suits. Actually, in most senses, the decision was quite a good one. Those two bespoke suits have since become my favorites, drawing frequent compliments and holding up better than any other suits I’ve owned. The problem, however, is that I’m now ruined for life; I’ll never be able to go back to buying suits off the rack.

In fact, I can no longer even really appreciate my other, previously seemingly fine, suits. While I’d love to toss them all and start again from scratch, the dictates of cost prevent me. Instead, I’ve simply been going through and upgrading those older suits slightly, adding to them the most important mark of hand workmanship: working sleeve buttons.

Sleeve buttons? I hear you ask. But it’s true. Ask any student of the sartorial and you’re likely to hear him wax on thusly (this particular waxing being taken from Tom Wolfe’s The Secret Vice):

Real buttonholes. That’s it! A man can take his thumb and forefinger and unbutton his sleeve at the wrist because this kind of suit has real buttonholes there. Tom, boy, it’s terrible. Once you know about it, you start seeing it. All the time! There are just two classes of men in the world, men with suits whose buttons are just sewn onto the sleeve, just some kind of cheapie decoration, or – yes! – men who can unbutton the sleeve at the wrist because they have real buttonholes and the sleeve really buttons up.

Strangely enough, though, adding that key touch isn’t at all a pricey endeavor. For less than fifty bucks a suit, your local tailor can operationalize your buttons, giving you a look that says “purchase Armani? How terribly plebeian!”

Now if only there were some similar sub-$100 trick to bump my one-bedroom apartment onto par with the Trump Tower’s penthouse suite.

That time of year has once again rolled around. Opening pitches have been thrown and fans everywhere have whipped out their calculators to figure the odds of the Yankee’s left-handed batters bunting off inside pitches when the team is down by three in the fourth inning and there are two outs.

Or something like that. From what I’ve observed, people who love baseball, who really love it, are numbers people, and the sport provides endless statistics to compute, consider and compare. Frankly, I don’t really care. I mean, I like baseball; I love to head out to the ballpark, and I’ll catch games on TV. But I can’t list the Yankee’s batting order, much less the ERAs of their top pitchers, and I suspect most Americans can’t either. Yet baseball remains, indisputably, our national pastime, as quintessentially American as Apple Pie and hating the French.

After brief consideration, the reason becomes obvious: liquor. There are few other sports that you can follow as well as baseball when completely and thoroughly piss drunk. Cross a certain threshold and hockey, basketball or football games just move too fast. But in baseball, there are plenty of strikes, balls, crotch-scratches and tobacco-spits between anything exciting happening. Even once you’ve reached that precarious point of drunkenness in which, when you turn your head quickly, the world seems to lag a bit behind, you can still handle baseball.

Which is why the start of the baseball season is a happy and patriotic time for America, a time for us to reflect on the American way of life, at least as represented by pot-bellied guys running around a dirt square wearing stretch pants. A toast! Three rude cheers (hey ump, can I pet your seeing eye dog after the game?) and a big swig of Bud Light.