I live in Fall River, Mass., if you want to put a pin in your map.

I have never been to a New England Patriots game. The last time I went to a Boston Red Sox game was in 1976. I have never been to a Boston Celtics game. In fact, I have never seen a basketball game.

I attend a large, gluttonous Super Bowl party every year, but only for the food and liquor and because they raffle off cigars at halftime. Once, after consuming a gargantuan amount of beer and steak tips, I fell asleep during the third quarter. That was maybe six years ago. I do not remember who played in the Super Bowl that year.

I cannot name three NFL quarterbacks or two MLB pitchers or any pro basketball players.

I have friends, $12 an hour guys, who are financial wizards when it comes to sports.

"Well," they say. "The Red Sox could hire Huerta for $30 million and get rid of Arlington and save $7 million and then pick up that kid, Funkenheimer, for $3 million and get a good infielder for maybe $8 million, and they'd still be $2 million under what they spent last year."

The guy making the above calculation is driving a nine-year-old Chevy and his wife will have to die before she can get a $20 haircut, so she'll look good in the box. Amazing how a guy can find $20 when his wife's dead. If my wife were dead, I bet I'd have $50 on me right now.

And that, of course, is the point. Most of my friends use sports to construct an alternative universe where there is no wife, no kids, no pesky 8 percent pay cut, no mortgage and no boss — a topsy-turvy world where the unimportant stuff means everything and the important stuff doesn't exist.

So, the government is taxing you to death and you're thinking about the Cy Young award. You haven't had a raise in three years, but you're worried about who will start as catcher in the All Star Game. Driving home with your wife from an employee Christmas party, in the cold starry night, just the two of you, you turn on the car radio and catch a little sports talk, which is just like political talk radio in that its mainstay callers are the kind of people who used to have to leave their houses to irritate much smaller groups of listeners.

I know guys who, if they knew as much about Shakespeare as they do about baseball, would be tenured college professors making a nice buck for not teaching. Instead, they know the lineup of the 1964 Boston Red Sox, and they are driving a florist supply truck for a living.

There are, of course, women who are as abjectly bound to sports as any man, more than there were when I was a boy. I suspect that increased career opportunities, financial responsibilities and the pressures of single parenthood have driven more women to the big game and away from their own lives.

Here in the Second Electronic Age (the First Electronic Age culminated in the invention of the electric can opener), we can be sure of four things.

The first is that sports encourage you to believe that there is something more important than your own life and that this importance can be accessed by you, despite your precarious lifestyle. The second is that reality shows make it easy to believe that there are many people dumber than you are. The third is that never-ending political screeching, accusation and hatred, broadcast constantly, makes you feel that you know "the real truth." The fourth is that Internet pornography allows you and the other boys in the Accounting Department to believe that you are initiates of sensual delight.

As for me, I have at last written a sports column and can now refer to myself as a "former sports writer," a good thing for the resume.

And, I can return to a lifetime fascination with pancakes, seeking them out and eating them, looking for the best.

This, however, is not a way of escaping from my life.

Pancakes are life-affirming.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com