To be Daniel Okrent for a week...

OK, I've finally found another job I want. At least for a week.

If you've seen the incomparable Ken Burns "Baseball" documentary or read the New York Times the last few years, you know the name Daniel Okrent. And if you've ever played fantasy baseball, you owe him thanks.

Okrent created Rotisserie League Baseball back in the late 1970s. He was one of the best talking heads on Burns' ode to our national pastime. More importantly he is an accomplished writer and editor.

He has written a blog this week for Paris Review's website. As if I needed yet another reason to want to be back in Manhattan...

'The American Sphinx'

Forgive my absence for a few days.

Low back pain. Doctor. Please don't let it be a kidney stone. Good news. Inflamed sciatic nerve. Really? At (almost) 33? Oh, well. It's not a stone. Thank God.

Watched for the first time since its 1997 premiere the Ken Burns Thomas Jefferson biography. Our third president is an enigma, indeed.

One can't help but admire Jefferson. One also can't help but marvel at his contradictions. The author of the American Scripture, the Declaration of Independence, who never freed his slaves. The man with an organized mind and cluttered, chaotic personal habits.

Joseph J. Ellis calls Jefferson the American Sphinx. That's as apt a description as any.

I am always moved by the story of Jefferson's reconciliation with John Adams during the last decade of their lives. Their letters are elegiac -- moving and monumental.

Perhaps this spring or summer I can return to Virginia, to Monticello, to the house Jefferson never quite finished. I would love to stroll the campus of the university he designed and dream again of living the scholarly life.

I stand in awe of his intellect and am frustrated by his public (that terrible embargo) and private acts. And, yet, I forgive him somewhat, too. Even the great Jefferson was a product of his time.

Of all the great moments in the American experience, surely Jefferson's and Adams' deaths on July 4, 1826, 50 years to the day after the signing of our Declaration, soar among the stars.

If Washington is the father and Lincoln is the savior, Jefferson, then, is the soul -- encompassing both the light and the darkness, the good and the bad, the great American dilemma between ideals and reality.

Seventy-two days and counting...

Yes, folks, the countdown has begun.

Why, you may ask? Well, my first love will return to me in 72 days.

No, it's not that dark-haired little girl with the big blue eyes that broke my heart so many years ago. It's the national game, my favorite pastime, that delicious little obsession called baseball.

I know what you're thinking. "You're crazy, man. Baseball is a spring sport. Why are you talking about it at Christmastime?"

Well, friends, that's just the way I roll, as the youngsters say.

Tell you what made me think about it, in all seriousness. Monday night I opened the mailbox to find my UT baseball season ticket application.

"Yes!" I said to myself. "Feb. 22 isn't that far away. I can make it until then."

My cousin Jordan said it best at dinner the other night.

"I hate the next few months because you can't watch baseball. I mean, I love football, but it's not the same."

No, it isn't, Jordan. But, the little orange ticket application stirred the soul just a bit. Waiting 72 more days won't be so bad.

And, if it is, I'll just pull out that Ken Burns documentary and bide my time.

All I want for Christmas is three strikes, three outs and three times three innings of play.

April's a long, long time...

It's starting early.

Came home from work last night and flipped on the TV. Basketball here, steroids news there, blah, blah, blah. Even TCM let me down.

I eventually threw in the Ken Burns documentary and watched the episode about the Black Sox scandal of 1919. But what I really wanted was a real, live game to watch.

April, and baseball, is a long, long time.

Unless I change my mind, I have my big 30th birthday bash planned. Well, I'll do the usual gathering of family and friends, but my big present to myself next March is going to be a trip to Florida, to spring training, and as many games as I can afford.

The Tigers play in Lakeland and the Braves hang out in Orlando at Disney's Wide World of Sports complex. Those should be easy enough.

Was hoping to get another UT baseball trip planned to somewhere fun, like Tallahassee, where Dewayne Lawson and I caught the Vols against the Seminoles last February. But the Big Orange isn't traveling this year until the SEC schedule. The best options there are Athens and Columbia.

My friend Kurt Pickering e-mailed a great little story the other day. Kurt is a longtime season ticket holder for the Nashville Sounds AAA club. When he moved 250 miles away to Georgia to take another job, Kurt renewed his tickets anyway.

He says he made it to exactly half of the team's home games during 2007 ("Thank God for weekend home stands.), a feat that puts me to shame. I'm often dissuaded from going to Kodak to see the Smokies because of the 20 minute drive.

Anyway, the Sounds are having a big bash for Kurt in January. He's been named that team's fan of the year. I'm planning to go. Nothing puts a smile on my face quicker than someone's insane passion for the game.

So the temperature is refusing to make up its mind, the dreary dregs of January and February loom before us, and the national game, and the fond promise of spring, is a long time coming.

Now I know why bears hibernate for the winter. This sucks.

'The War'

There is a moment near the end of the first episode of "The War," Ken Burns' brilliant, haunting new documentary on World War II, that sears the soul.

A vet is recalling a moment on Guadalcanal. The fighting became all but guerilla warfare --- close, continuous, hand to hand. Days into the battle, his squad came to rest during the night at a lonely spot in the jungle.

Behind him, the marine heard a gunshot, then a gasp for breath. The wounded man began to moan. It continued deep into the night.

Weary, the marine thought, "Just go ahead and die already. We need the rest."

In the morning, he discovered that the wounded marine, who passed away shortly before dawn, was his best friend.

"You can't imagine," he said, "what it does to you thinking that you wished that your best friend would die."

And so it goes, human stories of this variety, for two and a half hours. "The War" is as stunning as it is honest. Burns chooses to tell the story in microcosm, using the citizens of four towns in California, Minnesota, Connecticut and Alabama. What Burns has created is a stunning indictment of the cruelty of war, but also a reminder of the heights to which human beings can rise.

Critics are yelping that Burns doesn't represent everybody; the holier-than-thou New York Times review all but accuses Burns of jingoism.

They miss the point. A television documentary is limited. It simply can't tell everyone's story. And Burns is a master of telling uniquely American tales --- baseball, the Civil War, jazz. He's not attempting to put forth an exhausting piece on all facets of the war, but rather America's four year chapter of this very bloody affair.

Thinking back to the marine's words, one can't help but be proud of that so-called Greatest Generation. They whipped the depression and, when the time came, they whipped fascism and militarism too.

At its heart, "The War" is a soldier's story. It isn't about MacArthur, Eisenhower, Monty or Patton.

It's about the guy in the jungle, haunted by a buddy's death.

What a story it is.

"The War" airs nightly this week on PBS.