I saw a film today, oh boy.

Howdy, all. Happy New Year, etc.

I didn't realize how long it has been since my last post. While I wish that I could say that I was simply too busy to write something, it was really more a combination of (a) not being able to get on the web when I had something I thought was worth posting, and (b) not having anything worth posting when online. And now I am busy with work stuff, and here I am. Go figure. Anyway, a few quick things:

1. I finally bought and read Philalawyer's book. I had planned on doing a full post on it, and probably will, but just wanted to mention it since it's been several weeks already. Short version -- there are plenty of sex and drugs and rock and roll stories of the type on his website in there, but it also has an interesting discussion about the legal profession. I don't agree with all of my imaginary friend's conclusions (other than the fact that he is one cat remarkably unsuited for some of the places he's worked), but the book is more than just a mere collection of amusing anecdotes.

2. Go see Slumdog Millionaire. Great story. Much less sappy than I expected. You know what will happen at the end, but you will enjoy how the film gets there and what happens along the way.

3. Any New Years resolutions? I am still working on mine, but my perpetual one remains -- I want to be less of a procrastinator.

It's coming on Christmas.

While I noted in my last post that the soundtrack of A Charlie Brown Christmas is probably my favorite, I like some other songs as well. Here are a few -- I hope at least one is new to you. Enjoy.

1. Dar Williams, The Christians and the Pagans. Amusing little number from my favorite chick-with-a-guitar-singer-songwriter. I can just picture the poor, put-upon suburbanite uncle answering the phone at the beginning of the song, sighing at the prospect of explaining to his wife why his gay niece and her lesbian lov-ah are showing up at their McMansion on Christmas Eve. Still, all's well that ends well, and the song is all about the meaning of the season for both Pagans and Christians.




2. The Pogues with Kirsty MacColl, Fairytale of New York. Sweet, sad, and haunting. "I could have been someone," indeed. Shane and Kirsty sing of love, regret, nostalgia, hate, and all emotions in between as if they really were two old lovers at the end of their drink-addled lives. The fact that Shane has outlived Kirsty is one of the truest proofs that The Universe has an odd sense of humor.




3. Robert Earl Keen's Merry Christmas From The Family. The modern American family, warts and all. How can you not love a song that includes AA, xenophobia converted by song, and feminine hygenie products?

But you don't care that much for music, do you?

As I have mentioned here before, I am a big Peanuts fan. And tonight, ABC is showing my favorite bit of holiday tradition -- not Rudolph, Frosty, or even the Who's Roast Beast. No, my friends, I speak of "A Charlie Brown Christmas." It could never be made today -- too anti-commercial, too sad, too (gasp!) religious.*

And even if it could be made today, it couldn't use the same music -- it's too sophisticated, too adult, too Not Saccharine. Listening to "Christmastime is Here" is a somewhat heartache-inducing experience for me -- it really captures the bittersweet tang of the holiday (here's the instrumental version). The entire Vince Guaraldi soundtrack is in endless rotation in my car starting the day after Thanksgiving. Who doesn't love a little "Linus and Lucy"?

*When I was a wee lad in The Ancestral Homeland, my CCD (a/k/a Sunday school for Catholic kids who went to public school) class did a stage version of it one year for the Christmas program at Our Lady of Perpetual Motion. I played Snoopy, which was cool because it meant I had no lines to memorize.

You said you'd stand by me, in the middle of Chapter Three.

Apparently I now have two Great American Novels in my head. The Muse paid me a visit the other night and I now have a second fully formed opus floating around. Now, if I could just get it on paper (as Jimmy Buffett sang), I will be rich and famous. Right?

Anyhoo, I did get the beginning done, and here it is. Please give me your thoughts/comments/suggestions/rotten tomatoes/etc. If you prefer not to hurt my feelings in public, email me. I'll probably delete it after a few days, so if you come by next week and only see a blank post, and are interested in reading it, let me know.

Enjoy. Or, uh, whatever.

EDITED/UPDATED 12/15/08: And the snippet is down. Thanks to the New Diarist for his kind words in the comments and to those who responded via email. If you missed it, and really want to read it, shoot me an email

I still believe in my friends.

I am a bit behind on this, but a close imaginary friend of mine was injured -- pretty seriously -- on Election Night. I want to thank my imaginary little sister for looking for her (she was originally admitted to the hospital as a "Jane Doe"), and then for helping her and her family once she was found, and also for keeping me and her other imaginary friends up to date on how she is doing.

The internet is a funny thing, isn't it? I've never actually met G (the injured person), but I have known her for a long time. And I feel closer to her than I do to many people I know in the Not Imaginary world.

Anyway, nja, thanks for all you have done and continue to do. And, G, I miss you and can't wait to talk to you again.

When love walks in the room, everybody stand up!

"IT WAS INEVITABLE: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love..."

And thus begins Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez's masterpiece of unrequited love (and young love, and old love, and eros, and platonic love, and . . . well, you get the picture). One of my imaginary friends recommended it to me after I mentioned reading One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Reading it, naturally, reminded me of my own unrequited love for The Inappropriate Crush Girl. An unrequited love that still bubbles along after a decade or so. Oh, sure, it's usually at a low and manageable level, but the point is that she is still present in Jackson's mind.

So, do I read the story of Florentino's certainty and patience and faith that his love will eventually win out as a tale of hope or a tale of caution? Do I bide my time until the moment that I show up at the funeral of the ICG's husband in 40 years to state my case?

I keed, I keed, as Triumph the Comic Insult Dog likes to say. No, Dear Reader, that will not happen. I made my intentions known to her once, and, frankly, that was one time too many as far as I am concerned. So, unlike Florentino, I will hum along with life as it comes, knowing that she is Not Mine. And if this love ever does decide to become unrequited, I know that it will happen at the most inconvenient of times. Because the Universe, after all, has a somewhat cruel sense of humor.

Richard Nixon back again.

I am in electoral mode today, as you can see. Misty water colored memories are seeping up, and I thought that I'd share a few.

The first election that I remember was 1972 -- Nixon versus McGovern. (By the way, the finest book on that election -- and my personal favorite book by Hunter S. Thompson -- is "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72". Thompson's Rolling Stone colleague Timothy Crouse's "The Boys on the Bus" is also quite good -- his book covers the boys (and they were all boys then) who covered the campaign. Good stuff. But I digress.)

1972 was the year that Richard Nixon, filled with rage and paranoia and the blackest bile and resentment-filled gut that Washington has ever known (yes, even worse than Dick Cheney) laid the seeds of his own destruction. Watergate, baby. But all that came out later.

Anyway, 1972. The Democrats, torn apart by the war in Vietnam and social issues, have a long drawn out primary campaign. Over the course of it, Senators Ed Muskie, Hubert Humphrey, and George McGovern rip each other and the party to shreds. Muskie started the campaign as the presumptive nominee, but faltered early. Alabama Governor George Wallace killed Muskies chances when he won the Florida primary. In fact, Wallace could well have won the nomination with a combination of racial resentment and blue-collar angst (he also did well in Northern states), but he was put into a wheelchair in an assassination attempt. Humphrey tried to muscle his way into the nomination with support of the party's old guard and big labor, but was outfought by McGovern in several states -- most fatally in the huge winner take all state of California. McGovern and the liberal insurgents had seized the reins of the party, and McGovern became the nominee.

Then, after everyone from Ted Kennedy to Abe Ribbicoff turned him down, McGovern picked for his vice presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton, an unvetted alcoholic who had been in mental institutions for electro-shock therapy. When the news of Eagleton's mental issues came out, McGovern said that he supported him "1000%." At least until he didn't, and replaced him with Kennedy's brother in law Sargent Shriver. And the minuscule shot he had to beat Nixon was gone just like that.

But I didn't know any of that. My experience of the election that year was of GOP swag. For some reason, I was driving with my dad one Saturday in the fall, and we must have been talking about the election. (I do remember that at some point he explained to me that Sargent Shriver was not in the Army -- he just had a funny first name.) So, dad impulsively pulled his Galaxie 500 into the parking lot of the county Democratic Party office, and we discovered that the place was closed. (On a Saturday in October. In The Ancestral Homeland. Looking back, this makes it obvious that McGovern was so toast.) So, we went around the corner to the GOP county office and picked up all sorts of buttons and posters and bumper stickers. I have to admit that CREEP was pretty good at their design:


My father and my uncles were all union guys who hated Richard Nixon, but couldn't believe that the good old US of A was losing a war to a bunch of god-damned pinko gooks in pajamas. And who didn't understand why no one seemed to want to get a god-damned haircut anymore, or why their kids laughed at Glenn Miller. So when the Democrats put up a guy who was for "Acid Amnesty and Abortion," and who after seizing the nomination, seemed like he was stumbling around from mistake (the Eagleton pick and dump) to mistake (the guaranteed income pledge) like a drunk at closing time, they probably held their nose and voted for Dick.