Let’s get right to it, shall we? Or rather, let’s not get right to it, let’s start this one with a poem. Then let’s talk about mixtapes, sliders, memories, smells, silence that isn’t really silence, limitations, your mother’s shoes, tweens, soccer moms, Young Adult fiction, the Sundance film festival, veal, Hindu gods, Springsteen on Broadway, the working man, Sons Of Anarchy, U100, snow globes, Dr. Seuss, SWAT teams, and insurrection.
Happy new year, here are some mixed nuts. And, since a balanced diet is important, have a little helping of 9/11, Black Lives Matter, trolling the aisles of CVS, the mathematics of grocery shopping, human history, deadly peanut allergies, Janeane Garofalo, Michael Che, Celiac disease, The New England Journal of Medicine, the most kick-ass 70 year old the world has ever seen, unemployment insurance, working at McDonald’s, Corrine Burns, and lunatics.
You know how sometimes you tweak your neck somehow and the damn thing hurts for days (and days and days) and you’re walking around looking like Lurch or Frankenstein because you’re moving the whole top of your torso from side to side just to avoid moving your head from side to side?
I have that.
I’m old, so I have a lot of things. Like the one shoulder that doesn’t quite work right because of that time you separated it and didn’t go to the doctor for it (because, what’s a doctor going to do for that anyway, right?), and every morning you wake up and that shoulder goes, “HI! I’M STILL HERE!” only it says it with a delightful shooting pain all up and down your arm?
I have that too.
I’ve had a winter cold clogging up my head and making me sleepy for a few weeks (because I wouldn’t just lay in bed for a few days to get rid of it like I usually do), and now, today, on this most holy day of Christmas, mind you, I wake up with a sore throat. I guess to keep the cold company.
This has been some year, and it’s ending with a vengeance. But then I wouldn’t respect it if it didn’t. Now I look at the calendar and think, “Boy”—apparently I call myself ‘boy’ when I’m talking to myself—”you have to start writing a podcast, the first Saturday of the month is coming at you!” And I think, no. No sir, I cannot. Not at this moment. I just can’t.
And then my self says to myself, “You’ve never missed a deadline, idiot, in four years you’ve never missed a deadline!” and my self is saying that to me because the first episode was indeed foisted onto the world on December 27th, 2014, which seems like a really long time ago right now as I consider missing the next deadline.
If I’m being honest—and isn’t it funny when people say that? Like, up until now I’ve been lying my ass off, but now I’m being honest. Maybe. “If” I’m being honest—there are 10 days to get something together and record it. I just don’t know though, at this particular moment, if that’s enough.
So maybe there will be nothing new here on the first Saturday of 2019. I don’t know. Just warning you, there may not be. I know you will be devastated and heartbroken if that happens. Um hmm. But at least you’ve been warned.
It’s raining in Los Angeles, so we may as well talk about formative years, Bangladesh, mittens, waterlogged La-Z-Boys, Blue Mountain coffee, English muffins, Bordeaux, procrastination, what it means to be human, Facebook and other modern afflictions, Alex Jones, conspiracy, shirtless weeping, the Roman Empire, truth and science, Jesus himself, Nixon himself, Woodrow Wilson, selling candles door to door, and pear trees.
What is it about beer, or any alcohol, really, that makes us so…I don’t know, wonderful? Okay, it doesn’t make all of us wonderful, I’ll give you that. Some people shouldn’t be allowed to drink. I certainly shouldn’t have been allowed to drink when I was a young man, but no one stopped me, so some things happened, as they will. Here is the story of one (or two) of those things. Also, don’t forget to vote! I’m supposed to say that, right?
Join me, won’t you, on an action-packed cross country bicycle trip that I undertook a few short decades ago, in the America of the late 1980s. Weren’t those glorious times? What with the Cold War, the Reagan presidency gracefully pirouetting into the Bush presidency, Iran-Contra, Oliver North, revered statesman Dan Quayle, precious baby Jessica falling into that darn well, the “War on Drugs,” Exxon Valdez, Lyle and Erik Menendez, that kooky Berlin Wall. We’ll talk about none of that, but perhaps we’ll see what we’re made of, all of us. Or, you know, not. Anything can happen.
And a one and a two and a here we go, off into the wild blue yonder of the Malibu coastline, with wine, exes, freeway traffic, sophistication, $10 couches, real money, dog catchers, Thomas Brothers maps, helicopters, Elizabeth Shue in a leather skirt, bacterial infections, hard boiled eggs, sweat, darkness, garbage, shrubbery, pregnancy, hospitality, Cheech and Chong, George Carlin, Bill Cosby, pop life, and a friendly admonition to keep on truckin’.
That Google+ link is the same as it’s always been, but you’re not on Google+ anyway, so it’s probably a moo point. You probably should be on Google+, but that’s neither here nor there. There’s no Facebook link because…Facebook, no. And yes, I know that Instagram is Facebook. They’ll all be owned by Vladimir Putin eventually anyway, so we’re really splitting hairs here.
Speaking of moo points, have you heard/seen Mooo! by Doja Cat? It’s pretty goddamned funny. Her father wrote the music for the Broadway show Sarafina!, which, incidentally, is the only Broadway show in the history of Broadway shows that wasn’t completely useless and awful.
Mooo! has become a sensation among the kids and whatnot, so of course they’ve dug up some old Doja Cat Tweets that are politically incorrect and the Internet has gone from loving her to hating her in the span of about 10 minutes, which the Internet will do. I mean, does anybody remember laughter?!
The song is still great, in the “I am really, really high” or “I really, really don’t give a fuck” kind of way, both of which are AOK in my book.
