I am sitting at a Starbuck's on Manhattan's Upper East Side in early January, tapping away at my laptop computer. The following is actual overheard dialogue between two middle-aged men. One is wearing the sort of New York Giants team jacket that makes perfect sense on an 8-year-old, but looks a little pathetic on guys my age. The other is wearing a knit hat with a New England Patriots logo on the front. I should note that this coffee shop is well-heated. We don't need to be wearing our coats and our caps indoors.

Guy Number One: I can't move during the fourth quarter if my guys got the ball.

Guy Number Two: You can't or you won't?

Guy Number One: I won't. I don't want to jinx anything. So I just sit on the couch and try not to move a single muscle. The first time my wife noticed, she thought I'd had a stroke.

Guy Number Two: So you stop eating?

Guy Number One: Who can eat in the fourth quarter?

At this point the second guy sat back in his chair and nodded his head in recognition.

When I reported this exchange to my wife later that morning, she looked a little worried. "You don't do that, do you?" she asked.

"Sit immobile on the couch in the fourth quarter of football games?"

"Yes. That. And ..."

"And what?"

"Refer to football players you'll never meet as your guys."

I reassured her that I didn't -- which was actually a complete lie, but given the look of concern on her face, one that she needed to hear.

So, here's a confession: I do watch football. I'll be watching at least some portion of today's Super Bowl.

This surprises people. I am, after all, a person who was once called an "effete quiche-eating snob" on the news. A few Sundays ago my wife was chatting with a female friend of ours in Middlebury, and this other woman asked what I was up to that day. My wife said I was home watching football. Apparently our friend nodded sympathetically, and gave her that grave, so-sorry-for-the-death-in-the-family gaze. "I didn't know he watched football," she murmured, her voice tinged with sadness.

Now, please don't get me wrong. I'm not a maniac. I have never painted my chest or worn cheese on my head, and I have never in my life owned a replica NFL jersey or reclined in an official NFL tailgater chair with a built-in cup holder. The only tailgate party I ever attended was at a college football game in Princeton, N.J., when I was nine years old, and it's clear from the photos that I wasn't having very much fun. I look cold and surly.

But I do watch football on television, especially as the season winds down and the games seem to mean something. In reality, of course, the contests mean absolutely nothing -- unless you're one of the players, the coaches, or you have a serious gambling disorder. But the stakes feel higher. One year I even had a Super Bowl party for my wife and daughter. I bought vats of angioplasty-inducing chip dips, some faux sandwich meat made from soy (Yum!), and a can of crispy fried onion rings, (which were, alas, completely inedible). I also bought beer, which we effete, quiche-eating snobs usually don't have in the house. I presume a good time was had by all, at least during the halftime show -- which, just for the record, did not have a wardrobe malfunction that year.

I don't think people would be quite so nonplussed if they learned I secretly watched baseball. Baseball, after all, has a literary, quasi-intellectual aura to it, thanks in part to filmmaker Ken Burns and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, and the fact that baseball fans rarely put cheese on their heads.

Still, as far as vices go, this one is pretty harmless -- unless I start collecting official NFL bobblehead dolls. And wearing official NFL winter jackets. And, yes, publicly referring to really big people I've never met as "my guys."

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press, February, 2006.)

I don't get nearly beaten up often, but I do sometimes. I should note that I have never actually been beaten up, because I am both fast and -- when not fast enough -- pathetic. Getting nearly beaten up is an occupational hazard when you have written a weekly newspaper column for close to 15 years and run out of embarrassing moments in your own life and thus begun to chronicle the embarrassing moments of others.

Or, in one case, pretending to be a different person and asking someone who is not your girlfriend to marry you. I did not do that in this column. But I did do it in real life. It was on a Valentine's Day many years ago, which is why I am telling you the story now. Consider this a public service. This Tuesday, Valentine's Day, I would discourage all men from pretending to be (and here I am changing names so I don't get nearly beaten up again) Jed Bailey and then asking Melissa Dayton to marry you.

My girlfriend and I were at a Valentine's Day dance in college. There was a band with a lead singer who clearly enjoyed bantering with the audience more than he liked singing. This is probably because be couldn't sing. Mostly he just shouted into the microphone at a decibel that ensured everyone in the ballroom was going to have a noise-induced hearing loss without the pleasure of hearing really good rock and roll.

The singer was not, however, the most annoying person at the dance that night. That distinction belonged to either Jed Bailey or Melissa Dayton, who had been dating and breaking up and dating and breaking up since the Mesozoic era. That evening they had just broken up (again), and cornering either my girlfriend or me to tell me how horrible their ex was.

But we also realized that Jed and Melissa were far less aggravating when they were in love than when they were (so to speak) in hate. And so my girlfriend and I decided that the only way we could salvage the evening was to have Jed ask Melissa to marry him ... using the band's lead singer as his Cyrano de Bergerac.

Our plan worked like a charm. I marched to the stage and told the singer I was Jed. I said that I wanted to make this Valentine's Day even more romantic by asking Melissa to be my bride -- and I wanted him to ask for me.

The singer did a fabulous job, announcing to the throng that Jed wanted desperately for Melissa to be his ladylove for life. If the singer didn't go on to become a game show host, he missed his calling. Then, as part of our plan, my girlfriend raced on to the stage, told the singer she was Melissa, and that of course she would marry Jed. She may even have shrieked.

Just for the record, I married that woman.

In any case, the ballroom spontaneously burst into applause for the happy couple, and for a long moment my girlfriend and I reveled in our acting skills. But it was a short moment, because all of a sudden I was jacked up against a ballroom wall with my legs bicycling off the ground like a Looney Tunes character who has just run off a cliff.

Did I mention that Jed may have been six and a half feet tall? And strong? And in serious need of anger management counseling?

I think the only reason he didn't kill me was that Melissa was assuring him that she would rather -- and here I am paraphrasing -- spend her life with a wheezing crack addict than one more hour with him.

But I did learn a valuable lesson and if you remember nothing else from this morning's paper, remember this: If you are going to be a matchmaker, be sure not to fix up two people who want to see each other eaten by sharks.

Either that or wear running shoes.

Happy Valentine's Day.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press, February 12 2006.)

I have been asked often this week if I see any parallels between the hunting accident at the center of my novel, "Before You Know Kindness," and the hunting accident involving Dick Cheney and Harry M. Whittington.

I don't. In the novel, the rifle was fired by a 12-year-old girl with no knowledge of firearms who didn't even realize the gun was loaded; in the case of Dick Cheney, the shooter (Now often do you get to use the words shooter and Dick Cheney in the same sentence?) was the Vice President of the United States who may (or may not) have thought Whittington was a member of Al Qaeda. A perfectly reasonable mistake: Cheney's boss, after all, spent most of the Vietnam War keeping the Gulf Coast safe from the Viet Cong.

It wasn't enough that James Frey made up sizable parts of his faux memoir, "A Million Little Fibs and a Few Mighty Big Whoppers." Now we know that young male novelist JT Leroy is not in reality an HIV-positive former teenage truck-stop prostitute and drug addict who turned his nightmarish childhood and adolescence into searing works of fiction. Instead, it has been revealed, Leroy is actually a 40-year-old San Francisco writer named Laura Albert -- who, just for the record, should not be confused with the terrific Vermont novelist, Laurie Alberts.

Following so close on the heels of the Frey debacle, I have to ask: How many of my fellow writers have gone completely around-the-bend crazy?

What Albert did is not precisely what Frey did, because Leroy's books -- such as "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things" and "Sarah" -- were always presented as fiction. Moreover, lots of established writers use pen names or publish under both their own name and another. For years, for example, Joyce Carol Oates wrote thrillers under the name Rosamond Smith.

But Albert took this ruse a giant step further because Leroy's work was always considered deeply autobiographic fiction. Leroy was a literary darling not merely because of the quality of the prose and the power of the stories, but because the media presumed he was a young man who had led a horrific life. Leroy was often interviewed by phone, and in voice reminiscent of Truman Capote would talk about life at the truck-stop. (For a time, the 25-year-old half-sister of Albert's partner, Geoffrey Knoop, even pretended to be Leroy in public.)

A producer of a powerful radio program once told me what an interesting guest she thought Leroy was. She wasn't sure she believed everything he said, but I don't think she presumed for a nanosecond that he was Laura Albert. After all, no one had heard of Laura Albert then. Certainly I hadn't.

This is, perhaps, why Albert created Leroy. Oh, other factors might have been involved, too, including Albert's desire to create a persona that would allow her to approach a particular gay writer whose work interested her.

But on some level it all goes back to selling books and finding a marketing hook. Beleaguered by an onslaught of digital media that has diminished people's interest in pulp and ink, some writers are getting a little desperate.

Actually, they're getting very desperate. Especially fiction writers. As both a novelist and as a reader, I find the degree to which our culture has grown enamored with reality profoundly disturbing. We don't simply want to see poor suckers on some island eating leeches in their pathetic quest for fortune and fleeting (very fleeting) fame; we want no-holds-barred demeaning, scatological confession. We want to learn all we can about the truck-stop prostitute.

As a result, it's no longer enough to be moved by fiction. Perhaps we're no longer even capable of being moved by fiction. We want the hardcore fix of real pain -- not the imagined stuff we get in a novel. That's a big reason why memoirs sell so well (even, apparently, made-up ones) and are in such demand from publishers.

Now, are the books attributed to JT Leroy less accomplished because they were not written by a former teenage male prostitute? Good heavens, they're more impressive. They're testimony to what a fine stylist and storyteller Albert is.

But would her books have found a home with a publisher in the current climate if they had not been presented as the work of a writer whose short life had been one demeaning tragedy after another? Hard to say. Would they have achieved a cult status? Probably not. Soon we will see a movie based on the Leroy stories.

I'm sure Albert is embarrassed now. But there's a fitting lyric in the Broadway musical, "Wicked:" "The most celebrated are the rehabilitated." And so while we might condemn Albert today, we will read her tomorrow.

And then, no doubt, we will watch a film about her alter ego and the way she duped the publishing industry. I can already see the title: "The Novelist is Deceitful Above All Things."

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press, February 19 2006.)

When I need a new career because people have stopped reading novels -- and, alas, someday people really will have chosen podcasts over pulp -- I am going to become an animal communicator specializing in interspecies telepathic consultations in person or by phone. I am only half-kidding.

Last month I saw an ad for an animal communicator in a magazine and decided to give her a call. Why not? I have five cats, and heaven knows I've no idea why they think turd hockey is fun or they'd rather pee on my boots than in the litter box.

The animal communicator's name is Jane Grillo, and she lives in Wells. She is not, as far as I can tell, a lunatic. I might be a lunatic since I called her, but she sounded as reasonable as a mental health counselor -- which, incidentally, she will become when she gets her degree from the Antioch Graduate School in Keene, N.H., in 2007.

"When I was a little girl, I remember talking to animals. All kids do. They talk to them, and get answers," she told me. "But then we shut down that part of our intuition as we grow up."

Her point? "This is not a gift for special people. It's available to anyone who wants it."

She talked to three of my family's cats for me ... over the phone. Sort of. I held the telephone, and the cats slept. This in itself seemed to be a great benefit to the job of animal communicator: When I call people on the phone, they're usually awake. Occasionally our cats thwapped their tails a bit in their sleep when Grillo was telling me what they were telling her ... telepathically. But otherwise they seemed pretty oblivious.

In any case, Grillo told me she learned the following: My family's cranky, overweight Volkswagen of a cat, Ella, admires our daughter's dancing and views herself as a bit of a ballerina herself; BK2, our former barn cat who has a hissy fit whenever we pick him up, is claustrophobic -- and embarrassed by his phobia; and our regal dowager who doesn't eat much anymore, Dorset, views eating as a chore and is easily distracted. Moreover, she is intimidated by her wolfish cat siblings.

Consequently, over the next few days we started reassuring Ella that -- despite the reality that she is shaped like a pumpkin -- she is graceful and winsome and lithe. I told her (often) that she was the prima ballerina of cats.

We let BK2 know that we understood his nervousness and that it was nothing to be ashamed of. I told him that I, too, would be frightened if an animal eight times my size picked me up and held me close to its chest. Good grief, look at the fuss Fay Wray and Naomi Watts made when King Kong was grabbing them.

And, finally, we began to keep Dorset company when she ate, so her brothers and sisters would not wait like vultures for her to grow bored -- even though this alone necessitated a leave of absence from work because people build solariums in the time it takes Dorset to eat a half-can of cat food.

But here's the thing: It all seemed to make our cats happier. Demonstrably happier. Ella stopped snapping at us, BK2 was less skittish, and Dorset ate more.

Now, it's possible -- perhaps even likely -- that our cats have been behaving better lately because we humans have been paying more attention to them. At least I have. It might have nothing to do with the literalness of our (and I love this term) interspecies communication, and everything to do with the mere fact that I'm no longer viewing them as throw pillows that shed.

We'll see. Either way, I might have found a new calling. After all, I have a phone.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on February 26, 2006.)