Today is the one American holiday that is truly the authentic guy holiday.
Say what you will, but the Super Bowl just doesn’t cut it: it’s become far too mainstream and overhyped. The commercials are super expensive. It’s just one real game. And it’s the end of a season.
Not opening day, oh no.
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For Opening Day, you get grown men waxing poetic and gushing forth about the passion of the perfect green and the earned run averages and the perfect pitch in some Rockwellian wet dream where the Church of the Field of Dreams lingers spiritually over men with big butts and super-sized biceps while everyone else watches and drinks beer.
*pause for breath*
But you know it’s true. Baseball is the true American manly pastime– the reverence of which is passed down from generation to generation like the well-worn grandmother quilt or the wedding dress. It’s relevant and irrelevant. And just like the namesake ball, it somehow has two halves that fit perfectly any way you look at them:
–the pastime element combined with the sport element
–the drinking of beer as a perfect condiment to the fact that, at its very core, baseball is…. boring.
Think about it: a sport where you have time to shell peanut after peanut and time to pee the beers you’ve consumed is not a a fast-paced sport.
And so huzzah for Opening Day! At Herr Meow’s 4-month Well Baby check, the doctor gushed about getting the baby a baseball inscribed with the words “Opening Day 2006.” We didn’t even know today was Opening Day until he commented, but that got me thinking about it and about the fact that Herr Meow –despite his Teutonic moniker– is truly a little American boy, being raised by his American dad, growing in the culture of baseball and “Take Me Out to The Ball Game” inscribed in his soul.
And that’s worth getting up and going to get myself a beer from the fridge.
A Daily Dose of Zen Sarcasm! 
Oh, it was all baseball and beer at our place yesterday.