Mom

Last Thursday, we unknowingly entered a whirlwind and on Friday afternoon, we came out the other side, stunned, hurt and crushed but worst of all, Mom was gone.  The suddenness of our loss seems cruel and arbitrary; it reduced us to anguished tears and tumbled us into an abyss of grief from which we must somehow make our way.  Ironically, I think the woman most capable of leading us from such darkness is no longer with us.  This post is my tribute to her, a love letter of sorts, an appreciation of Mom and the gifts she gave us, a way for me to share all the things that made us love her and laugh with her.

She asked me to call her “Mom” almost immediately upon our first meeting.  Deb brought me out to her home “in the sticks” --- Lippitt Estates in Cumberland --- not long after we began seeing each other.  Dad gave me the first-degree like any Dad would but Mom trusted me right away.  I soon learned that I was not special in any way --- she easily trusted and gave up her heart to just about everybody.  (I’ve heard that she was the Neighborhood Mom in Lippitt’s and this should not surprise anyone who’s known her for at least five minutes.)  So, she was “Mom” for me, always, never Helen.  She treated me as one of her own and welcomed me into her family and for that, I will always be grateful.

Mom was that Mom who goes to your kids’ baseball/softball/football games and is annoyingly loud.  Professional athletes often say they dislike that guy on the other team because he’s such a fierce competitor until he’s traded to their team.  That’s Mom: you want her on your team because she cheers so hard for your son or daughter (and their teammates) that it makes you cringe.  (Ask Deb how often she used to tell Mom to tone it down.  Does anyone know if she was ever asked to leave by an umpire or referee??)  Here’s something, though: she attended MY baseball games and cheered just as hard for me as she did for the kids. 

There was her driving.  If you’ve ever been her passenger, then you know the feeling of sheer terror that I will describe forthwith.  “Hell on Wheels” is appropriate, I think (she had a pro football pick ‘em team one time called “Helen Wheels”).  It’s an understatement to say that she drove fast on the highway and always in the fast lane.  For those of you who thought Mom never used bad language, always substituting “bananas” or other French words instead, then you never rode with her.  First time I ever heard Mom swear was in the car.  She sometimes tailgated, using the travel lane as a passing lane, cursing the driver as she passed him or her by, and swerving back into the high-speed lane.  If I was beside her or in the back, I white-knuckled it all the way, my hands cramped up and my feet tired from pressing a non-existent brake pedal by the time we safely reached our destination. 

Conversely, I know I drove her crazy when she was my passenger because I rarely drive faster than the posted speed limit by more than 5 mph.  I use the (middle) travel lane and the left-hand lane only to pass and rarely pass slower traffic.  Her frustration (and Deb’s, too, to be fair) would sometimes escape her: I’d hear murmured French (“…eh, banan”) or a satisfied “Yes!” when I finally did pass that tractor-trailer I’d been behind for the past two miles.

When Mom and Dad lived in The Villages in Florida, they had a golf cart to get around the community.  First time I’ve ever been on two wheels in a four-wheeled vehicle.  I’ve heard the story about my nephew Ethan being thrown from the golf cart while out with his Grandma (he was unhurt, no worries). 

Mom’s idiosyncrasies and peculiarities are near-legendary.  She was a good sport about being the butt of jokes and she often piled on herself.  There are so many --- here’s my list (you probably know some that I don’t):

• Ziplock™ bags (she would often label the contents of these)
• Twist ties (stored in a Ziplock™ bag with the words “twist ties” written on it)
• Brewing coffee (only a 500-word blog post or a tri-fold laminated pamphlet with a flowchart would serve this topic any justice)
• Sleeveless tops
• Chocolate-chipless chocolate chip cookies
• Ordering breakfast out (her instructions were very specific and she was not shy about sending something back)
• Re-using lightly soiled paper plates (“Mom, they’re single use!”)
• Used paper towels everywhere
• Powerfully loud sneezes, usually a series of them
• Obsession with backing into parking spots*
• Clean trash (I kid you not)
• Dynamites
• Mashed potatoes (the best ever)
• Best-smelling laundry ever (Mom taught me everything I know about laundry…I loved when she did ours during the times she stayed with us.)

*A favorite story of mine:  when Deb and I were on our Caribbean cruise, our cruise ship was captained by a woman (apparently the first ever such captain, as I recall).  One morning, we were enjoying the breakfast buffet as the ship was arriving at a port of call and an announcement was made that the captain would be making the unusual maneuver of backing the ship into the dock.  I looked at Deb and our eyes met --- we were both thinking the same thing.  I mimicked someone backing up a car, hands on the wheel, looking over the backseat and said, “Moud zee, don’t tell your father I scratched the boat.”  We both had a fit of giggles, crying, snorting, and hiccupping --- we could not stop.  I felt everyone in the room staring at a couple of crazy people sharing the perfect inside joke.

The punch line: later that day, returning to the boat from an excursion, we noticed workers painting scratches along the hull at the waterline.  Can’t make this stuff up.  We told Mom this story when we returned home and she laughed right along with us, the good sport she always was.

You may know of my nerdy love of music and near-manic collection of same.  Yet my favorite music is not an mp3, or a cassette or a record.  That music is what I hear when I am in the house with Deb and Sarah and Mom.  They are in the kitchen and I am in another room and I hear their laughter, their girly giggling at something, anything (usually at Mom’s expense) and it is the sweetest music I will ever hear, bar none.  It never failed to make me smile, or laugh, even though I was too far away to hear the joke, or the time Mom misheard something someone said (this was usually her telling on herself), or described an incident of her road rage or told how she opened a bag of marshmallows that she bought seven years ago.  Those memories --- and your own memories will serve us all well on those days when you’re feeling a little down, your boss is being less than nice, or the New England weather is making you miserable.  I will miss that a lot.

Mom was a…ok, let’s say this: she was a collector.  We have all teased her relentlessly about this.  We helped Mom and Dad move two times in the last 29 years: from Cumberland to the Villages in Florida and from the Villages to Johnston.  We were astonished on one hand by the sheer amount of “stuff” they had --- especially Mom --- but it also was a never-ending source of laughter at Mom’s expense.  If you’ve ever seen her cupboards, pantries and food closets, you know what I mean.  Everything is neatly labeled and in its place.  There are at least five (or more) of everything, expiration dates be damned.  Yet, I know for a fact that on more than one occasion, Deb has gone shopping at Mom’s house, or alternatively, Mom would bring her surplus over.  “Hmm, how old is this can of…wait, there’s no nutrition data on the label!”  (Do a search for “nutrition labeling” on this page: https://www.fda.gov/aboutfda/whatwedo/history/milestones/ucm128305.htm )

What else did she collect?  Where to begin?  There are the small kitchen appliances she never used: waffle makers, blenders, the stuff that’s “Seen on TV”, the hard sell pitchmen who say “but wait, there’s more!”   There are meticulously labeled binders and binders full of recipes.  Containers from Dave’s Market.  Empty Fluff^® containers.  Medicine bottles.  There was no container that was not re-used, re-labeled, re-purposed --- all saved from the landfill.  I’m going to make a leap here, but Mom may have been the very first environmentalist. 

Mom’s favorite collection, though, was one you can’t see or catalog, or store in a prominently labeled shoebox or re-purposed medicine bottle.  She collected hearts: yours and mine and every heart that she encountered along her travels.  She nurtured them, and remembered them and laughed with them and fed them and cherished them.  Each of those hearts was a prize that she protected as a lioness protects her cubs.  If your heart was in her collection, it could never be traded.  There were so many of these that she sometimes lost track, but when you saw her at a family event or a ballgame or at a restaurant, she remembered and held it up to the light to make sure it was ok.  Your heart mattered in that moment and you smiled and laughed along with her.

She is not here.  The other day, I happened to find myself home alone, working on the slide show project.  It was quiet and I realized that I expected to hear a knock on the door and then the kitchen door opens and Mom is there, popping in.  No more.  She is not here and I cannot wrap my head around it because it can’t be true.  There is no medicine for melancholy.

We should all be comforted by knowing that she is watching over us, loving us, enjoying a sun-splotched afternoon on the shores of an idyllic pond as she casts, over and over, fishing for our hearts and collecting them, one by one.

A Shaggy Dog Tale or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Let me tell you what happened to me several weeks ago.  Those of you who know me fairly well will probably get it; others...probably not.  No, this is not one of those revelatory life-changing events that readers will universally relate to.  It's not even close.  But since this is my blog, it's personal and since it's not about you, you've already lost interest.

Anyway...

On my 50th birthday (2010), Deb  presented me with an iPod Classic.  I had resisted the Apple gene pool for a long time.  There was something cultish about all things Apple and I didn't want to join the crowd.  However, I had finally become totally frustrated with the mp3 devices that I'd had until then: they were buggy, hard to use and never had the capacity I needed for my music.  The iPod Classic has the capacity for sure: 160 gigabytes.  Apple's marketing says that's 40,000 songs at 128 kbps.

Over time, I filled it with 10,000+ songs.  I rip CDs using Apple Lossless, which are bigger files, resulting in better quality sound, hence 10,000 songs vs. 40,000.

I probably spent hundreds of hours ripping, downloading and then grooming the files on my iPod.  It's a labor of love and it's something that I obsess over.  All of the album art has to be right, the year of release precise, and then there's the playlists...

Ultimate Power Pop
Best of the Boss
Best Clash
A Weekend's Worth of Sadness
The Swingin' Sixties
K-Billy's Super Seventies Weekend
Omigod! It's the '80s!

...and so forth.

Again, literally hundreds of hours, usually late into the night.  If you purchased every song on it from iTunes or Amazon at a buck per song...well, the arithmetic says there's $10,000 of music on my iPod.

I use my iPod EVERY DAY.  I bought an after-market Sony car stereo that I can connect my iPod to.  There's no CD player.  I rarely, if ever, listen to the radio (well, NPR on the way to work).  My iPod is the best radio station on the planet, in my view.  At work (when I had my own private office), I plugged it into a speaker dock and it played all day.  (The iPod Classic does not connect wirelessly to the Internet.  You have to connect it to iTunes with a cable to update it.  There's no WiFi/Bluetooth like an iPhone, iTouch or iPad).  Now that I no longer have my own office, I use my earbuds to listen.  At night, listening to my iPod is a bedtime ritual.

About six weeks ago, as I was walking to the office after parking my car in the Providence Convention Center Garage, the iPod fell out of my briefcase and I did not hear it fall.  (I don't use the iPod for the 5-minute walk every morning...pedestrians in downtown Providence run the risk of sudden death if they don't pay attention.)

When I arrived at the office, I discovered that I had failed to close a zipper on the pocket that I use to store the iPod, my earbuds and a charger.  No iPod.  Not in my jacket, or my pants pocket, or in the other briefcase compartments.  Panic crept in.  Maybe it fell out in the car.  Maybe I plugged it into the car stereo this morning.  I told someone I'd be right back and ran out of the building, retracing my steps, eyes on the ground, traffic be damned.  I arrived back at my car.  I searched everywhere inside: under the seats, glovebox, under the floormats, in the console, in the stereo.  No iPod.  Took out my iPhone and searched under my car with its flashlight, on my hands and knees and then looked under the cars on either side.  No joy.

I returned to the office, eyes searching everywhere, slowly resigning myself to the notion that it was gone for good.  Past the Civic Center, past the Hasbro building, across Fountain Street, past Trinity Rep, across Washington St., down Aborn St., past the Satin Doll up to the office on Westminster St.  No iPod.  As I entered the building, I asked the security guards if anyone had turned in an iPod.  Nope.

I arrived at my desk and a co-worker asked me if I'd found it.  I called home and asked Sarah to check my nightstand, the kitchen table, the driveway outside.  Nothing.

It was gone and that was that.  I spent time during the day explaining my loss like it was a death in the family.  I said that it sounded really stupid to be so upset over losing a thing, an object. a geegaw, a gadget, a device.  Everybody was polite and said they understood.  It wasn't the thing, it was the hours, it was the attention to detail.  Have I mentioned how important my music is to me?  (That's probably a topic for another blog post.  Maybe not.)

I mourned.  Yes, it's silly.  I'm 54 years old and I was all verklempt over losing an iPod Classic.  Did I mention that Apple stopped producing them last fall?  And that the secondary market has plenty of 'em for sale, if you want to pay through the nose?  They retailed at $249.00.  I couldn't find one on eBay for less than $500.

Yeah, my iPhone is an iPod.  There's 47 songs on it because most of the rest of the 32 gig is full of apps and texts and photos and...there was only music on my iPod.  No photos, videos, notes, etc.  Just 10,000+ songs, obsessively curated.

I put a lost notice on Craigslist, I was so desperate.  First-time user, first-class loser, that's me.

A work colleague said she'd say a prayer to St. Anthony for me.  (I thought it was St. Christopher, so what do I know? )  I thanked her for that, feeling more than a little petty about the whole thing.  I mean, there are wars and hungry, homeless people in the world.  I needed to ---- yes, say it along with me --- let it go.

For the next week, I walked to and from the office with my eyes down, a futile, fruitless exercise in risking my life to a careless Rhode Island (or Massachusetts) driver.  Deb and Sarah, God bless them both, truly took pity on me and let me be morose and whiny.  (Well, not whiny.  Deb would never stand for that.)

Exactly one week later, as I made my way to the garage after work, I passed a glove on the sidewalk outside of the Hasbro building.  Walking with my eyes down, you understand.  I didn't stop right away but a few steps later, I did.  I went back and picked it up.  It was a leather glove, rather expensive-looking.  Probably someone would be upset at losing it, right?  So, I decided to go inside Hasbro and turn it in.

I walked up to the security/reception desk in the lobby and gave it to the guard, explaining that I'd found it outside.  He said thank you without looking at me, distracted by someone saying goodnight while exiting the building,  I turned to leave and then stopped.  I went back and said, "While I'm here...did anyone turn in an iPod they might have found outside?  I lost it a week ago.  It's black with a chrome back."  Shits and giggles.  Grins.  Why the hell not?  What's to lose?

The man rummaged under the counter, murmuring, "There's a box here somewhere..."  He finds said box, reached in and said, "Is this it?'

It was, and I've come to the end of my little tale.

There's more, but I suspect that many abandoned this several paragraphs ago or, because this is not about them, completely lost interest.  (That's one of my favorite Seinfeld references, by the way:

George (or Kramer or Elaine) is telling a story.

Jerry:  Is this about me?

A shake of the head.

Jerry:  Then I've lost interest.)

You'll note that one of the playlists I mentioned near the top of this post is called "A Weekend's Worth of Sadness."  Well, that playlist has 286 songs on it.  Probably took me a good 5 hours to compile it and groom the tracks.  It contains some of the saddest songs in my collection and for one reason or another, I love songs like that.  (It's 180 degrees from "Ultimate Power Pop", another one of my musical obsessions.)

I'm going to blog about the songs on that list, tell you why I think they're great and that you should think so, too.  Maybe you'll discover a gem or two you've never heard before or maybe you'll opine that a particular song is not even worth anyone's time.  That's completely fair.  As someone once said, there's no accounting for taste.

As for my iPod:  all is well again and all sense has returned to me.  It was completely undamaged and works perfectly.  It goes into an inside compartment in my briefcase these days.  I readily acknowledge the shallowness of my emotional connection to this hunk of metal and plastic, but there you go.

Wouldn't this have been a really cool story if I found a glove outside of the Satin Doll?  Think of the possibilities!

Until next time, in which I will write about:

Ain't No Sunshine - Bill Withers
Buenas Noches From a Lonely Room (She Wore Red Dresses) - Dwight Yoakam
Come Back - Pearl Jam
Day After Day - Badfinger
Cry Baby Cry - The Beatles

Yes --- even more Chicken 'n ' Beer...

Now, it's "they didn't say it like they meant it." This sums up the media's reaction to the mea culpas offered by Josh Beckett and John Lester. This is beyond the pale and maybe I should consider just letting it go, or say something like, "I won't even dignify that with a response."

Morons, all.

Final word on the subject from me.

Chicken 'n' Beer or, Much Ado About Nuthin'

Ok, it’s time for me to weigh in on the “chicken-and-beer” controversy, which has become a trope amongst the media who cover the Red Sox and has worked its malevolent way into the daily discourse of the so-called “Red Sox Nation” (a cult that I have resisted joining), many of whom troll the Interwebs and contribute to the daily noise heard on local talk radio --- the infamous shut-ins who have earned my wrath in the past.

That was a long sentence. Rants are often characterized by them. This post is not a “musing”, by definition.

I hope it will be amusing. Ahem…

Anyway, to my point --- there is one, please be patient. And thank you to those of you who have hung in, awaiting an anti-timesucking payoff.

Listen, I was upset as anyone by the jaw-droppingly awful end to the 2011 season. It was like watching a slow-motion train wreck that took an entire month to unfold; its end was as sudden and shocking as a slap in the face. On the last night of the season, as I watched the denouement unfold in my man-cave, flipping between NESN, the MLB Network and ESPN, swearing as I did so (“son-of-a-BITCH” being my epithet of choice) I predicted that this was gonna end badly. Red Sox fans know this feeling, a collective feeling of inevitable heartbreak and doom. Now, though, for me, it is not tinged with melancholy or self-pity --- two World Series wins in the last seven seasons have made all that go away. Yankees fans have lost all “hand” --- their 2004 team is the poster-child for “sucks for all time”. It is a mantle they can never shed. Even if another team chokes as badly as they did, the 2004 Yankees are the standard-bearer.

Anyway, I digress. After Evan Longoria touched first base after slamming that line drive over the wall, I snapped off the TV and hummed the remote into the couch cushions. I uttered one last “son-of-a-BITCH” and stomped upstairs to commiserate with Deb and Sarah, who also wondered what the hell just happened. (Later, I couldn’t help myself and returned to the MLB Network and renewed my jealousy of those guys’ jobs, getting paid to watch and talk about baseball and laughing their heads off at the amazing events of this particular evening.)

Days (weeks?) later, the “chicken-and-beer” stories began to emerge, amidst the resignation/firing of Terry Francona, the fleeing of Theo Epstein and the inevitable blame-placing and finger-pointing by the media and “Red Sox Nation”. It’s no surprise that Francona and Epstein both took the high road, despite the hateful stuff written and said about them as they left the Red Sox stage. This happens all the time (Mo Vaughn, Roger Clemens, Nomar Garciaparra, Pedro Martinez, Manny Ramirez, et al). TWO World Series trophies came to Fenway under their watch; perspective apparently is something that is anathema to most of Red Sox Nation.

So, as this story evolved and trickled down to the locker room, Beckett, Bucholz and Lester became the villains-du-jour, fodder for every snarky radio-show host, columnist and blogger within a 500-mile radius (and sometimes beyond) of Fenway Park. Universally spitting venom and taking on a holier-than-thou stance, these poor miscreants of the airwaves and the Interwebs both were laughable and anger-inducing to this typist. My initial take was --- and still is --- that the clubhouse shenanigans would have been a non-story had the Sox won just two more games at the end and won a game or two in the playoffs. (That’s the most any of us could have expected --- this was a tired, injury-riddled team with major flaws, after all.)

Instead, this story, despite the Patriots’ great season, festered all winter. The self-righteous among “Red Sox Nation” began to demand “accountability” from the ringleaders and it became a sort of keening wail, usually reserved for funeral mourners. It’s patently obvious to me that these moaners need to get a grip and move on. But nooooo…

OK, finally, here’s the thing, “Red Sox Nation”:

Step away from the ledge. Perhaps you'll be happier when the Sox brass announce the Beckett/Lester/Bucholz Every-Fan-In-New England-Personal Apology Tour. They've got all that time between starts and it's obvious they can't be trusted alone in the clubhouse, so they can hit 37,000 fans a night on their off-days at home.

I'll be skipping the tour, though, 'cause none of those guys --- not one --- owe ME a @#%&*# thing.

Perhaps, if you pull some strings with ownership, you can get at the head of the line to get that tearful apology and a warm hug.

There. I feel better, now.

Some predictions, as a bonus for having read this far.

Bobby Valentine will soon prove to be a bad choice. His selection was obviously forced down poor Ben Cherington’s throat by L. Lucchino. Valentine IS a polarizing figure (he says he doesn’t understand the word or its use to describe his character) who will take all the credit and be quick to assign blame. He is a shameless self-promoter and loves to hear himself talk. He is NOT Dick Williams. I’m not sure why the media and bloggers believe him to be a taskmaster and ass-kicker --- he is the opposite of that. There’s a reason why he hasn’t had an MLB managers job in nine years. He’s no Terry Francona, that’s for sure, who was the best manager in Red Sox history (this will go up my father-in-law’s ass, hahahaha). For me to forget Tito, Bobby V is gonna have to win THREE World Series.

The Sox will finish a poor second in the AL East, behind Tampa Bay. Joe Maddon is now the best manager in the division (arguably in the American League), leading a young club loaded with talent.

The Yankees got better, but not in the way everyone thinks. A. J. Burnett is now a Pittsburgh Pirate, so the Yanks got better by subtracting. This guy Pineda, whom they traded for from Seattle, will NOT be the stud this year that everyone assumes he will be. He was good up until the All-Star break in 2011 and then he fell to earth. His presumed Cy Young award and installation in the Hall of Fame is based upon a three-month sample size of pitching well in the AL West. Please stop it. The Yankees are an ordinary team with a boob running it.

Not predictions, but random musings:

I hate, hate, HATE the New York Giants.

I am going to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band on March 26. The new album (Wrecking Ball) is due on March 6. Can’t wait.

I’m not fond of reality TV, but “Comic Book Men” on AMC is in my sweet spot. Comics, collectibles and pop-culture snark --- a perfect blend. I just watched the first episode and laughed my fool head off. It’s OK if you don’t get it. It’s not you, it’s me.

I love my Nook Tablet. Books, magazines, newspapers, the web and Netflix on one amazing device. I was crushing on it right from its announcement. You will have to pry it from my dead hands…
…unless you’ve got an iPad in yours, for which I will willingly exchange. Two of my brothers own iPads and I am not-so-secretly envious.

Speaking of magazines, I received my SI Swimsuit issue four days late, on Saturday. It came in a plastic bag with a printed apology from the US Postal Service. It was badly damaged by a robotic sorter. The cover (poor Kate Upton and her barely-there bikini!) and about 25 pages were torn and the spine broken. It was just this side of confetti. They even attempted a half-hearted repair with Scotch tape! I immediately accused my wife of conspiring with the USPS to deprive me of the coveted issue. She did not deny it.

Such is my life.

Christmas Songs, Pt. 2

One of my favorite Christmas songs for a long time was one I heard only on WBRU-FM in Providence in the late '70s.  When I heard it, I remembered that I had seen The Roches sing "The Hallelujah Chorus" on Saturday Night Live in November 1979.  I guess "glorious" is the descriptor here; I'm fascinated by the intricacy of the arrangement, the close harmony and when you add the visual, the delight in the performance shared by Maggie, Suzzy and Terre Roche.  Enjoy!

Christmas Songs, Pt. 1

OK - favorite versions of "(The) Little Drummer Boy"


#1: Harry Simons Chorale - a nostalgia pick, first heard it probably 1969 or 1970 on local AM radio, when radio stations played Christmas music only intermittently in the last week or so before Christmas. You only heard it a couple times, maybe and not again until next year. Even at age 9 or 10, I somehow recognized and was attracted to the minor key, even if I was too young to realize it.


#2: Low - first heard several years ago on TV; the GAP used it in their Christmas ad campaign. It's "slo-core" (a cleverly-named category in and of itself) and I'm attracted to it because of its casual gravitas and solemnity. Love the hushed vocals, muted drums and the minor key drone that acts like a "bed" for the song. Cool stuff.


#3 Joan Jett and the Blackhearts - thanks to brother Dave, who included this on one of his absolutely outstanding holiday compilations. Joan bleepin' ROCKS on this track and I love how she trills the "rrrumpa-pa-pums" --- awesome.

Out With the Old, In With the New

"...another year over, a new one just begun." - J. Lennon

Yeah, I don't know where it goes, either. Malcolm McDowell, the bad guy in one of the Star Trek movies, says that "time is the fire in which we burn." Melodramatic most definitely, but there is a chilling truth at its core.

Let's see: this past year I turned 49, my wife turned 40 (!), my parents observed their 50th wedding anniversary, my baby daughter turned 15 (!!!) and began high school and I received a 30-year service award at work. It seems there's good reason my hair has turned nearly white (but thank God I still have plenty of it).

We stayed in last night and had Chinese take-out (what I observe to be one of those Rhode Island New Year's Eve traditions but which may possibly be a universal rather than a provincial one), watched a movie (The Hangover --- I laughed out loud, despite the set-pieces being so over-the-top and fundamentally oh-so-wrong), and then tuned into the network shows to watch the masses in Times Square squeal themselves silly in the cold rain, watching the spheroid drop to mark the passing of 2009 and the arrival of 2010. Both my wife and I say that we have absolutely no interest in actually being a part of that, but maybe would if we were 19. Maybe.

Speaking of 2010, let's all try to remember that it's "twenty-ten", not "two-thousand ten". After all, we don't say "one thousand nine-hundred and ten", do we? Make this your New Year's resolution, if you must do so. My thoughts on New Year's resolutions echo Calvin's (of Calvin and Hobbes, of course). To paraphrase: "I don't need to change anything, everybody else does!"

Well, it's ironic, you see.

Let's see. Other random thoughts: I saw The Road the other night and it was what I expected, having been traumatized by the novel. A heartbreaking, depressing story, hewn very closely to Cormac McCarthy's beautiful cinematic language. I spent the last twenty minutes of the film wiping my eyes and sniffling (an oncoming head cold, you know). I enjoyed it, anyway, as troubling as that may sound. We all need a punch in the gut every once in a while, to remind us to feel.

Also watched a program last night on Palladia HD (a mostly cool music channel) that was called Hard Rock-something-or-other. It was a presentation of an outdoor music festival held at Hyde Park in the UK last summer. It caught my interest because the program guide mentioned Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, which was definitely cool, but I had another observation. A young British band, the Kooks, played --- they're late-teens, early twenties, guitars, bass, drums and passion for the music. The audience, also young (for the most part) and diverse, sang every word of the song the band played. It seems to me that UK audience have a passion for music and musicianship that US audiences lack. For UK music fans, music is an integral part of their lives, a passionate affair that consumes them. I think US audiences treat music as though it's just another compartment in the TV-dinner trays of their lives. Ah, a crappy metaphor, but I'm just typing here!

Three days off and nothing on the agenda that can't be PPD'd or erased altogether. There are new DVDs to watch, CDs to listen to and an ever-growing stack of books and magazines to read. Might go to the movies and see Avatar or Up In the Air.

Just remembered: Cowboys/Eagles on Sunday afternoon (how 'bout them Cowboys!). Looking forward to that, hope I'm not disappointed.

Also, first baseball practice of the season is Janaury 13 --- just awesome, can't wait. I was on three rosters last year, maybe I'll cut that down by one, I don't know. Getting old, you see.

The New Year is 11 hours, 50 minutes old already. Where the #$@!@ does the time go?