It takes me a long time to get to hockey. I live in the sticks of the Greater City of New York. Thankful that I’m not in Mill Basin or Fresh Meadows or Woodlawn; I’m still on a major subway line and not at the terminus of one, either. Still, I live fucking far away from Manhattan. It takes me 20 minutes to hit downtown if everything is moving well. Midtown is a pretty constant 45 minutes from my apartment. Getting to Chelsea Piers is a special kind of hell because not only must I take the 30-minute subway ride to 23rd Street, I must then either walk or hope the M23 bus is coming (it never is) which adds another 20 minutes plus to my trek.

So, 50-plus minutes with a bag full of hockey equipment on my left shoulder. That’s about what it took tonight and after getting dressed and hitting the ice, one of the guys that works at the rink comes skating on and tells us to get off the sheet and go home.

Excuse me? I pay how much to skate at this shithole and you’re telling me to bugger off before I’ve ever had a chance to play the game you scheduled for me at the asinine hour of 10 p.m. on a Wednesday night?

It wasn’t a joke, though. The rink’s GM came out behind the guy and told us all to go home and fast. The reason: the structural integrity of the pier was failing.

Seriously. What a fucking shithole.

Forget that the rinks were built above a parking garage, ensuring that the ice is heated from below during the summer months, guaranteeing that we’ll never get a good sheet until late fall rolls around … and even then, the ice at the Piers is NEVER good. I’ve skated on ponds with better ice, and I mean after hours of use. But yeah, quality of ice aside, how about quality of construction? The fucking place is only 13 years old and it’s in danger of falling into the fucking Hudson? And the money we gout to play there … where does it go? The place is obviously falling apart and there’s no way, even in this financially insane city, that we’re merely covering the costs of operation when a team has to shell out $8,200 to play each season.

So, tonight, I got to skate from the rink door to the bench before being told to go home. It took me about an hour to make it back, so I spent my Wednesday night lugging my equipment around for no reason.

I really hope the whole complex falls into the fucking river tonight. I’d like to see it tank so badly. Yeah, I’ll have nowhere to play for the moment (though I’ve got an invitation to play in Westchester and there’s a rink here in Brooklyn at Floyd Bennett Field), but it would be worth it for all of those crooked bastards that suck us dry to have to cope with the aftermath of their poorly run and built place of work meeting a watery grave.

Fuck you, Chelsea Piers. God, you fucking suck.

Tonight just wasn’t my night. Both of the hockey teams I play for each lost their semi-final hockey playoff games. We’re done. No championship bid. Same as the previous three seasons. My Frozen Four bracket is toast. I went with my Alma Mater, like I did last year (which paid dividends then), but they blew it this year. And the team I had them beating in the championship game got knocked out tonight, too. It was just a bad night for green.

So, a good hour after I left Chelsea Piers, I got back to my apartment. First thing I did was bust out the Boar’s Head and make a killer sandwich. I’ve been eating Whole Foods cold-cuts for ages because my celiac disease essentially forces me to shop there. But today, I just didn’t feel like making the trip. I went down into the subway, but it refused to come, so I went back above ground and walked over to the friendly neighborhood Foodtown.

I hated Foodtown when I first moved here. It was grossly overpriced and it made shopping locally practically impossible. Lately, though, they’ve got this “low-price guarantee” … I guess I wasn’t the only one screaming highway robbery.

Anyway, it was great to have Boar’s Head again. I love cold cuts. I grew up on deli sandwiches from the Deer Hills deli and they whipped up some paper thin BH cuts that were simply delicious. I got the kid at the Foodtown to cut me some decently thin provisions and he did a pretty good job. Nobody in the ghetto really appreciates deli meat, in my experience, so it takes a lot of compliments and encouragement to get the deli guys to accommodate my white-boy expectations … that is, not slice it slab thick.

After losing the NCAA hockey pool, two hockey playoff games at the Piers, and other of life’s little battles, this sandwich really hits the spot. Ovengold turkey, genoa salami, muenster cheese and some serious greens on brown rice bread with mayo. As my New York Post reporter buddy says about my homemade sandwiches: “That looks like a sandwich a white person would pay a lot of money for.”