As you may or may not have noticed, for some time now I’ve been globbing about baseball. But if you glance at the date of this entry, and then look at the prior one, you’ll see that lately my output has been pathetic. This does not mean I’ve stopped caring about the Athletics or lost interest in the standings. I’ve just been distracted. I might well have predicted that sometime relatively late in the baseball season my attention would be diverted. I might even have commented earlier about this, tied it into my baseball analysis, even thought out loud about what real fans do when baseball gets pushed aside.

But I’ve felt guilty. I feel I ought to be thinking about slugging percentages, but I’m not. I am ridden with, if not altogether wracked by, guilt, for having lost my focus. But I see now that I have no choice but to shift gears. I know this will come as a shock, perhaps even a devastating loss to the legions of you who have been closely following my baseball commentary. But while I’ll still be going to games, reading about the A’s, perhaps even writing (wistfully, as about a lost love) about the A’s occasionally, it’s time, finally to face facts. For the newbie fan, at least, life sometimes gets in the way. Please don’t hate me. It’s just the way it has to be right now.

My present preoccupation, the matter that has distracted me from stolen bases and ballpark meat products, is ME. The happy news is that I am one of my favorite people, and so there’s little chance I will grow bored of writing on the subject. I hope you’ll be as interested in ME as I am, and I will work very hard to keep your attention.

ME is not exactly the same as me. For example, I am one human being. I write, I lawyer, I spend time with my wife and dogs. I eat ceviche. ME, on the other hand, is an enterprise, a venture. It’s made up of me, plus a gang of publishing and media professionals, supportive family members, bankers, attorneys, &tc. Together we are about to launch a product – a book called Life, Death & Bialys: A Father/Son Baking Story. (The interesting and potentially confusing thing is that the subject of the book – the product – is me.)

Another thing you probably already know, but is worth mentioning, is that there are a whole lot of books out there, and so ME has its work cut out for it. If I were someone very well known – say George Clooney or 50 Cent or the Unibomber – I could fairly well count on people noticing if I wrote a book, and paying good money to buy it. But because I’m me, and I cannot realistically have any expectation that you will either notice that I have released a book, let alone spend your hard earned money on same, I have to do what I can to get your attention, to, in a sense, wave my hands around and jump up and down and make sounds like a howler monkey might make. As this is my fourth book, I am not at all embarrassed or shy about the need to act in this way, but that doesn’t make the process any less time-consuming.

I won’t actually start waving or jumping or howling until the book actually hits the shelves (September 6th), but, as noted, the prep for this takes insane amounts of time and energy. For example, just yesterday I spent most of the day buying plane tickets to the many cities in which I’ll be speaking in the next few months. Also I haven’t been sleeping very well, worrying whether I’ll have anything of interest to say when I arrive in these cities. In the past few weeks I’ve spent hundreds of hours doing such things as updating my e-mail lists, thinking up witty questions that might entice radio hosts to invite me to appear on their programs, shopping for attractive (but also absorbent) shirts to wear in public. I even had to go to LA to talk to a very nice agent (part of the national ME team) who is attempting to elicit interest in my book from movie people.

I've even produced a song, Podcast, Podcast with pictures, and will soon release a movie, all, while entirely worthy and interesting in their own right, ultimately designed to attract a little attention to the book. (All of same can be found on the home page of my Website.)

So, you can see why I (i.e., me) might have to let go baseball and other diversions for the time being. I’m not particularly happy about it. I’d much rather be thinking about the A’s, who happen to be three games out in first right now, who happen to have just swept Seattle. But I have my obligations. I’m a writer. I want to have an audience. I feel my book is worthy of some attention. So I’m doing the mature thing and switching gears.
I hope you’ll forgive the crass commercialism. I hope you won’t think me a bad person. I hope you won’t think me a traitor, non-fan, hopeless amateur, when it comes to my team. I hope you’ll read my book and see that it’s for a good cause.

More about ME shortly