We watch... so you don't have to.
Nice Bat, Boy
Perhaps I've been watching too much Ed, or anyway was watching too much Ed before the season ended, but I've picked up this interesting habit from Tom Cavanagh's wonderful yet irritating everyman: Whenever I'm thinking, and there's one available, I fidget with a baseball bat.
Now I don't live in a very athletic household so I don't get a lot of chances to play with baseball equipment. But sometimes there is a bat around and I find myself swinging it and practicing that funny Mark McGwire grip where he curls his pinky around the bottom of the bat. It helps me think, it gives me something to do while I'm thinking, and it looks cool. Well, no, it doesn't look cool, I look like an idiot holding a bat, since I've got about a hundred pounds on Babe Ruth. I look more like John Goodman as Babe Ruth.
One day Dawn and I were out driving and there was a bat in the front seat. I started playing with it (not swinging it -- we were in a moving vehicle after all). Trying different grips, tapping it on my shoulder, weighing it in my palm.
"Can I tell you something?" my lovely wife asked. "It's really sexy to see you holding that bat."
Another man might have been excited or flattered by this. But then another man might not have been holding his six-year-old son's teeball bat. She might as well have said to me, "It's sexy to see you toying with your undersized manhood."
Now when I hold a bat I find myself twisting it in my grip, giving it the mother of all Indian rope burns.
