Ranting to the world is another. Recently amidst the buzz of political push and pull, budget head and conservative Paul Ryan, Tweedle Dee’d in a speech about poor people.

The Governor said the budget cuts are meant “to ensure that America’s safety net does not become a hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens (the poor) into lives of complacency and dependency.”

Really Mr. Ryan,  a hammock? Last I checked the lower income elderly might need an occasional doctors visit. Or children under five in the inner-city just might benefit from the language programs of First Five.

Hammock? Wrap it in a bit of Christmas tinsel while you’re at it. It is not as if life might be difficult living on a food stamp allotment of 4.46$ daily, per individual.

I mean come on; the food stamp bar needs to be set lower. The cut off of $23,800 a year per family is far too high. We all know under two thousand a month for a family of four is a plush kingdom of high-end fortitude.

Gas is nearly 5 bucks a gallon.

A Happy Meal at McDonald’s is nearing six. Where is this figural Hammock?

Like Ryan, another heartless individual recently Tweedle Dum’d himself to fame. Ron Stiegerwald, a contributor for the Observor-Reporter.com, blamed the victim who was nearly beaten to death at Dodgers Stadium by two riled hooligans.

The basis for his argument: the man wears t-shirts and he thinks the Giants are neat.

His name is Brian Stow, a forty two year father of two from Santa Cruz. As of now Stow is still battling for his life in a Los Angeles hospital. Suffering severe brain damage, Stow has had portions of his skull removed to relieve the pressure from his brain.

To think the paramedic’s life is in danger because he roots for the Giants is surreal. But what is more surreal is that Ron Stiegerwald exists.

Atheists now have another reason to doubt the existence of God. If there was one, Stiegerwald would have been born without hands or a tongue and with a tattoo across his forehead reading: I am a crypt/I am in a gang/ I love the Giants / I hate Dodger fans.

But life isn’t fair.

For Brian Stow life has spiraled into the fringes of death, with his two children lilting like a row-boat in a sea of pain, and his wife wondering what side of fate her family will fall into.

You see, life will never be the same for the Stow family. If Brian pulls through, he’ll have to deal with the tedious monsters of learning memorization and compartmentalization all over again, and within a mightily defective brain. His wife will lose her intimate partner, as Brian battles with not only the physical part, but the psychological mess of things like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

PTSD and other psycho-social disorders lend themselves to biological imbalances, affecting things like relational and sexual intimacy. Anger stems from the inability to relate to others around you, and PTSD sufferers can find themselves with feelings of intense depression. In turn this creates the need to isolate and hide.

For Stow’s children, another form of abandonment can take place. The abandonment of having a father who is “there,” but “not there,” makes children feel unlovable. These feelings of being unlovable not only push children away from their parents, but foster various insecurities inducing addictions to alcohol, drugs, sex, spending, gambling, and many other fascinations.

Getting too real? I hope so.

And now we have to deal with verbal-garbage from a man whose need for popularity has driven him to a serious literary low. Congratulations Ron, you are now the Lindsey Lohan of sports writing.

I am sure Mr. Stiegerwald is willing to tell both of Stow’s children the reason for their father’s suffering. “Kids, he wore a Giants t-shirt and never should have done that.”

When was Baseball a sport governed by the gang banging world? To most of these backward types, a hat, jersey, or jacket is just about the look. Move to the bay area for a day and you will see plenty of kids rocking a Reds hat to match the red sneakers beneath a sagging, oversized pair of jeans.

Is it not Giants country? You would think. But this is not true anymore. In fact, this was never true. Baseball’s conception was at a grassroots level that promoted the middle-class worker. Our great pass-time has always been the crutch in which our fragmented culture leans upon.

Take World War Two for example. Most of our male professionals left the sport to take part in the war, and despite the lack of top notch talent, Americans still craved one thing: baseball. Baseball has always had that ability to pass the time, as three hours go by, hooting and hollering, eating, drinking, and everything else family and friends treasure during economical lows.

Why? This country is concocted by older cultures who valued the family more than anything. This is the reason the gangster era in the thirties and forties took off as it did. We hit the great depression, and the Italians, Mexicans, and Russians, through strong family bonds, built mini kingdoms within the greater kingdom.

Mr. Stiegerwald is badly misinformed believing every fan who wears a t-shirt, jacket, hat, do-rag, wrist band, and head band, to be some immature individual seeking out attention like a fifth grader. In fact I would argue the reason more people wear memorabilia today is because more of it is assessable to the average fan.

Is this the next phase of interrogation? The individuals who dress in anything less than Dockers, tucked in shirts, and tyes?

Even my tough-as-nails red neck father admits he’d adorn a Mickey Mantle jersey. Faulting an innocent person like Brian Stow for a senseless and heartless crime because he wears sports apparel, is similar to blaming the Jews for the Holocaust because they wore bircas.

When will we hold men and women accountable for their horrendous acts, instead of justifying it with some vapid fat tongued Stiegerwaldism?

Soon I hope; soon for the sake of Brian Stow, and the edict necessary to reshape our culture’s morally off-kilt sense of things.

“Why?” I said, shuffling myself two seats from the neanderthal asking me the question.

What I love about baseball is that like a nucleus it is has the power to draw two opposites onto a neutral playing ground. On Saturday, I was by default an electron because I “root for an OC b**ch like Torii Hunter.”

“I don’t understand this,” I said, ” you would rather have me root for the Giants than you would the cross town Angels?”

“Yep.”

“Son-of-a-b**ch.”

“Baby.”

And that was that. Two beers in, and we were old chums again, telling life stories, and watching America’s greatest past-time. The day was a classic Los Angeles, warm and muggy, with a still-life of clouds coating the marshmallow horizon. A 1:05 game, we settled into our entire row of seats (my uncle’s season seats; we totaled only four) as four kings with beers galore and a brazen of peanuts.

Beers=Baseball commonality where there is none...

I thought I had successfully dodgered the question. And I had…well, almost…

I am deciding whether I should still be a fan of beer, considering this cup caused the earlier question to bubble back to the surface.

"Beat the Bay," was the fuel to the fire...and I am not from the bay...

“Luuuuuukkkkeee,” my cousin said with the firm tone of a school teacher, “answer the f-ing question.”

I coughed. “Bless you,” my cousin said, “ey, buy me a beer?”

I did just to shut him up. The question faded off again because 2+2=foggy brain and too much beer. Our conversations left the earlier platform–baseball–and subsided into the usual male beer-coma.  For the next few innings we watched the Dodgers starter, Ted Lily, get pounded like a crinkled piece of worn sheet medal. My cousin’s furled brow and eyes squinted in perplexed bewilderment, gave me the feelings of sweet revenge.

“And you call Hunter a b**ch?”  I jabbed, embodying a hissing rat with boxing gloves. I snickered at his depressed posture in his losers seat. His Dodgers were down 5-0, and Giants starter Matt Cain was pitching a one hitter.

“You know,” I said standing to my feet, “Cain is a lock down pitcher. If you don’t get to him earlier, you might as well be drinking arsenal. See you lada’. Say goodnight. Sayonara.” For whatever reason I said all of that like a heavy chested Philadelphian slinging cheese steaks on a smutty street corner.

…nothing…he said nothing…

The stadium became a foreshadowed metaphor to this story. I would also be dining on some crow in a matter of an hour or so. From top to bottom Dodger stadium split like the McCourt divorce. It was 7-0 in the sixth. Rivers of blue blood hit the congested 5 en route to their bronzed tannings, dog dates, and the hollyweird rat race.

Losing=a river of blue

By the 7th, all four of us admitted defeat. My cousin waived me over with the look of a secret agent to an open walkway, which was one in a million walkways, causing me to question his Jedi-like motivations. As I approached, he pointed to one of many large openings in the stadium, where an individual can exit into the parking lots. With his Dodger hat limp in his left hand, his matted hair snug against his sun-burnt brow, he asked me a question with a lazy sincerity: half-sincerity is better than no sincerity at all.

“I will tell you something personal,  if you won’t tell anyone,” he said, shaking like a wigged crack feign. The sun opened through two thighs of whiskey colored cumulonimbus, where light erupted in an over-size spotlight– my cousin glowed in its presence.

“Growing up,” he began quietly, which, considering he has never been short of crazy, caused me to shutter a bit. A locomotive of thoughts steam rolled through my cramped brain. Drugs? Divorce? Swinging? What!?

“I was a Giants fan,” he finished. His barrel chest deflated, his watermelon head hung limp on the branchy fingertips of his veiny neck. To say I was relieved would be dishonest. I wasn’t. This was as bad as confessing you had an affair on your wife with a seventeen year old she-male. You were drunk and date raped. Drug to a steaming sleazy back corner and taken advantage of. You even have the bow legged limp to prove it.

But she won’t see it that way. She’ll call you a cheat, break bottles, and burn your MLB bobble head collection.

I asked him why? He answered concise and clear headed. Which surprised me, because the news he had just revealed to me was backward and wrong damn it.

Joey’s reasons for being a Giants fan ’til the age of thirteen:

1) His little league team was called the Giants.

2) Considering his love for his hoo-hoo, Joey always fantasized taking a elephantitis pill aka Giants syndrome for obvious reasons.

3) He found Matt Williams attractive, and Kevin Mitchell sexy.

4) On the day of his birth, he was abducted by aliens and a micro-chip was inserted into his huevos that caused an itchy, burning sensation on warm days. Considering the bay area has cooler micro-climates, he felt it necessary to try and relieve the pain there. It did not work. He was only five and had no way of getting there. Had seventy-five cents in his piggy bank. So he hid in the closet and collected Barry Bonds cards, where he stuck them in his used jock strap so nobody would have the guts to discover them. Thus the heavy binge drinking.

After hearing this bitter news, I thought of toying with his emotions a little bit. But to be fair, I fessed up too. My best memories are not lived in Angel stadium. In fact, I sort of resent the fact that my favorite team is ran by the circus of Disney. Before you know it, they’ll replace the Angels red ball caps with Mickey ears.

Dodger blue on the other hand has always been the signature of middle class America. They are the great West Coast team, the Cards in the Midwest, and the Yanks and Red Sox on the East Coast. This fact buried my shame momentarily, just long enough to help me reveal my dirty little secret.

“To set the record straight, its the Dodgers. Yes, the Dodgers. I am like an Independent: bleed red, vote blue,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.

“I knew it a-hole,” he slammed, “just kidding about the Giants, you dumb shit.”

Joey has always had a way of turning the tables. Always been the loud mouth comedian. And to be honest, that is what I love best about him.

Go Angel- Blue (?).