MEATSPACE

I am siked as all hell for today's sure-to-be-memorable Yankees opening day - unbelievably, hilariously, terrifyingly featuring the widely-despised Carl "Meat" Pavano on the mound, after raking in $20 mil or so in two years of hardly pitching and becoming a running joke for how hated on he is by not only the fans but by the other Yankees!  I wish I had time to go back and definitively document the press on him from his bruised buttock, his secret cracked ribs, relying on his mom to defend him to the press, his lazy whining, his hating on Tyler Kepner, etc... 

It's been a truly bizarre, psychologically bruising, dare-I-say LOST-esque run for dude, and Joe Torre seems practically Dharma-esque (or Locke's dad-esque?) in putting him in this incredibly pressurized situation where he seems destined to fail in the worst way possible.  AND, this past Friday, right on cue, dude was publicly and harshly dumped by his improbable model g/f for the sake of some retarded publicity for her fucking Maxim pictoral:

"I've given up too much for him. Carl hasn't been there at all for me," she said. "The time when I needed Carl the most, he hasn't been there."

Obviously hurting, Allemand described their relationship as being "as bad as Carl's pitching!"

Ouch!

The 23-year-old Allemand's next move is to pose for the men's magazine Maxim in a jaw-dropping pictorial.

Allemand, who maintains her own sexy Web site, www.giaallemand.net, has also called it quits with Pavano on the Internet.

On her private MySpace page, Allemand once claimed to be married, showed off pictures of Pavano and described herself as the Yankees' No. 1 fan.

As of yesterday, that MySpace site called Allemand single, and all the pictures of Pavano had been removed.

Can you imagine how fucking intense Pavano is right now?!?  I can't wait to see how the crowd (the game is at the Stadium, of course) greets him.  Part of me is rooting so fucking hard for dude to come up huge here and redeem himself and have an awesome comeback player of the year-type year, but I feel like so much of that is Yankees fandom/Italian-American solidarity/typically dumb optimism - I mean, the Bronx is not The Island last time I checked, there is no magical 'fresh start' for Carl Pavano, is there...?  Are we fated to repeat our failures forever, or are we free to change ourselves?  Etcetctectc, this game has intense metaphysical ramifications which I eagerly await -