BECAUSE I SAID SO

What self-respecting columnist wouldn't write a retrospective piece in December's ultimate week? Actually, any truly self-respecting columnist probably wouldn't, but a columnist like me-well, that's something else entirely. And what a year it has been! It took some head-scratching to come up with just the right piece to end this annus curiosus.

Before declaring 2006 “the year of” anything, I ran through the obvious possibilities. Kim Jong-il shot some bottle rockets into the Sea of Japan this year. Then he blew up the world's smallest nuclear device under a mountain. That's good. Hugo Chávez up and called W “the devil” right in front of God and everybody. I liked that, too. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad-afragilistixexpialidocious has single-handedly re-popularized the Members Only jacket. But we've heard enough about him.

I thought about calling 2006 the year of celebrities behaving badly-Michael Richards, Britney Spears, Mel Gibson, the pope-but that could be any year. I pondered the possibility of labeling 2006 the year of Don Rumsfeld, but I quickly scrapped that notion because it was just too damned depressing. More depressing still was the concept of calling 2006 the year that the American occupation of Iraq pretty much assured that our place in global politics will be a lonely one for decades to come, but how obvious is that? Eventually I gave the whole geopolitical conflagration raft the heave ho.

So that left only two choices. First, there are the Chargers. As Dick Enberg (who once swiped two seats at the La Jolla Music Society in my presence) would say, “Oh my, our boys can play football!” They are manifestly the best team in the NFL-best talent, best coaching, best effort, best everything. Sadly for me, I'm not a sports columnist, and more sadly still, everyone in town who can scribble has already written about the Chargers.

But thinking about the Chargers reminded me of something that happened a few Sundays ago. My friend Elijah came to my house at about 9:30 a.m., a half-hour before the opening kickoff of the game between the then-9-2 Chargers and the not-very-good but not-overlookable Buffalo Bills. Said Elijah, “Hey, you wanna go get drunk and watch the game?” It's a wonderful thing to have friends who know me so well. Said I, “Let me grab my hat.”

By kickoff time we were seated at a downtown pub that I shan't name, at Elijah's request. I don't know what he's afraid of. I had a fantastic time. The beer was plentiful and relatively affordable, the ambience was excellent and the servers and patrons, the female ones, were sufficient to distract even me from the game (during commercials, anyway). I'm sure it makes me a pig, but seriously-these girls were mighty easy on the eyes.

I think Elijah probably wants me to refrain from naming this particular bar because a) he frequents the place, b) his people are from New York, and c) what I'm about to say isn't that nice a thing to say about New Yorkers, or about Northeasterners generally.

I'll say it anyway: Even though I know many individuals from the Northeast who I quite like, collectively I can't stand Yankees. At all. Not even a little bit. As in, I take to Yankees like a duck takes to golf. And on that particular Sunday at that particular bar where that particular team from Buffalo was getting its particular ass handed to it by my Chargers, there was a veritable gaggle of New York/New Jersey/New England-type Yankee jagoffs clogging the joint up something fierce.

Although I could have handled that fact, by itself, these weren't just the run-of-the-mill, loud-talking, conspicuous-spending, Joey-bag-o-doughnuts Sopranos cast members we all know and somehow tolerate. These were a more unique set, each of them in a tight-fitting polo shirt, replete with upturned collar; tan, pleated Dockers; two-second-old haircuts; and brazenly sporting over-waxed eyebrows. At least a few of them had shaven forearms, and I'm not kidding.

I tried to overlook them, but, as some of you might have inferred about me, I sometimes drink to the point of saying things I shouldn't. That Sunday was such an occasion. So immediately after the Chargers buried the Bills, I rose and headed to the restroom taking a path that forced me to push past several of the more offensively manscaped Yankees there assembled. I looked one of them dead in the face and said, “Excuse me there, Captain Eyebrows-I need to sneak past you and the rest of the New Kids, if you don't mind.” That was a satisfying moment for an aging Southerner transplant with an attitude.

But it wasn't satisfying enough because what I would have said, had I both the right and the ability to articulate, was something like, “I don't care what some girlfriend forced you to learn from those five queens on TLC who run around teaching slobs how to slice kiwi fruit and choose the right shade of window treatments; you have no reason to depilate yourself to the point of androgyny.” Reflecting upon my lost opportunity to thus diss the East Coast invaders, I decided just three days ago that 2006 should be remembered as the year in which metrosexuality remained trendy only among Yankee boys disliked by me and anyone with any sense whatsoever.

I am encouraged to learn from my 17-year-old daughter that in Southern California, at least, the Queer Eye fad shuffled off this mortal coil a good year or so back. Evidently, the news of its demise has not crossed the vast cultural wasteland that separates coast from coast in this country, which is fine with me inasmuch as I like being able to readily spot Yankee youngsters. Rapid identification allows me to either avoid them or antagonize them.

And thus, as this year spills into the next, here's hoping that metrosexuality continues to afflict the Northeast. As for the rest of you who haven't the excuse of being a Yankee-knock off the tweezing! It makes you look like a....