One for the Fan

This one is for you synchronicity fans (that is to say McNeil... see also). So, recently, I was watching the Joel Coen version of MACBETH and I was taken with the scene featuring some old dude. I was like, "What's the deal with this old dude?" So this morning I found my copy of the text and I read the scene, and boy has this old dude been seeing some dire portents and such! "A falcon, towering in her pride of place, was by a mousing owl hawk'd at and kill'd." That's the kind of dire portent I'm talking about! This I must have heard while watching the movie, but maybe it didn't register so good in my sad brain parts. But when I read that, I thought, WAIT! Wait, I thought, while I was walking around the neighborhood yesterday, listening to an audiobook of FINNEGANS WAKE, didn't I hear something about owls hawking? I did recall that in the graphology section, as I think of it, though, to be clear, I have no idea what I'm talking about, there was something about E's looking "like sick owls." So my investigation began. I got out my trusty and seldom-opened (until now!) hardcover of FINNEGANS WAKE, given to me, as mentioned previously, by a defrocked preacher, and there I found that the passage was one and the same: "crisscrossed Greek ees awkwardlike perched there and here out of date like sick owls hawked back to Athens" (see also the owl's connection to Athena, as hinted at by "hyperlink" in the previous "post")... anyway, so there you have it, owls hawking and owls being hawked, yes, there you have it, all right, but what is it? I mean, I know what it is, but what is it?

Effort

I don't mean to brag, but I was walking on the beach on Christmas Eve, listening to an audiobook of FINNEGANS WAKE. I was listening to Chapter 10... wait! I must already interrupt this wonderful story that has you on the edge of your seat. It wasn't really Chapter 10. More to come on that in a moment. Anyway, I was listening to what I thought was Chapter 10, and, hey, do you remember the comical "French" accent I imposed on a character in my second book? Well, it sure sounded to me like James Joyce perpetrated the same offense, and in a remarkably similar style. So, suddenly, I was proud of myself instead of being so terribly ashamed. I decided that upon my return home, I would double check my physical copy of the book, which was given to me by a defrocked preacher when I worked in a bookstore in downtown Mobile, to see whether Joyce and I had indeed independently hit upon the same inaccurate and even potentially embarrassing method of presenting to the reader a comical "French" accent. And that is what I did, or tried to do. The first thing I noticed upon digging out the book was that there are no chapter headings. I have run into this problem before, notably when I was trying to teach BELOVED during my brief flirtation with doing that kind of thing. Authors! Please number your chapters. Don't be like James Joyce and Toni Morrison. Ha ha ha! What terrible advice. See also the travails of the Dune Book Club. As I leafed through FINNEGANS WAKE - and allow me to state, just to help you understand what I've been through, that the online index to FINNEGANS WAKE I found years ago is now nothing but a zombie "link"! - it seemed to me (as already hinted) that Joyce's chapters were longer than the "chapters" of the audiobook, which, though unabridged, had been broken into bite-sized chunks... bite-sized if you're a hippopotamus! But relatively bite-sized, making my search more of an effort, especially given the fact that I no longer care about anything. I did track it down, though: "you wish to ave some homelette... Your hegg he must break himself." Believe it or not, that's James Joyce, not me. From context, the speaker seems French, though there is some German sprinkled around the passage, too, just to drive me batty. BUT THAT'S NOT ALL! On Christmas Day I was walking along the beach again and the audiobook said to me, "it being Yuletide"... and it was! Dr. Theresa could not walk on the beach with me because she had twisted her ankle. I would not be listening to an audiobook of FINNEGANS WAKE were I pleasantly strolling hand-in-hand along a beach with Dr. Theresa. I am sure you will recall that the last time Dr. Theresa and I visited my parents, we saw a mink run across the road and a pig run across the road. This time, we saw nothing run across the road. While I was taking a bag of trash to a garbage chute, however, I saw a little bright pink lizard of a kind I have never seen before. I want to say it was a salamander, because I have always imagined salamanders - no doubt incorrectly - to be pink. I also saw this guy (above) on the day after Christmas. Oh! I forgot! So I also heard Joyce use "owl-wise," I thought, seeming to mean both "always" and "wise as an owl." And I checked! Like a hero! Just to satisfy myself. And neither my hearing nor my huffing and puffing brain had deceived me, though my brain had added a superfluous hyphen. I found "the eternals were owlwise on their side every time"... and let me state for the record that I do not believe James Joyce was referring to the Marvel superheroes The Eternals, created by Jack Kirby, though, of course, there are certain similarities (see also). I also thought (and still sort of think after consideration) that owlwise could have meant "as regards owls," as, for example, when somebody (is it Jack Lemmon?) in THE APARTMENT says, "That's the way it crumbles, cookie-wise."

The Arts

For our own personal and individual reasons, neither Dr. Theresa nor I eats sandwiches anymore. And I do believe that is correct subject/verb agreement if you think about it for two seconds. So anyway, we were watching a "limited series" (those are terrible!) via "streaming" and it was a mystery thriller suspense drama of action! At one point the guy stops in a diner and orders up three sandwiches to go. And they look amazing, and I believe I will categorize them as "cheesesteaks," though I don't pretend to be an expert. But the scene does take place in Philadelphia. Even so, Dr. Theresa and I were taken by a simultaneous Proustian pang for some Italian beef combo sandwiches we enjoyed in Chicago in 2002. So then the guy gets in his car and starts having action-packed adventures filled with mystery and suspense, not to mention thrills, but we just don't care. All we can think of, and we say it out loud, is that "He's driving around with those sandwiches in his car!" In our distracted state we can't be sure, but it seems like it takes him several hours to get home with those sandwiches, and we're just thinking about how they've been sitting in the car all day. In other arts news, THE OBSCENE BIRD OF NIGHT started to seem too grotesque and disturbing to read in bed at night in the hopes of a peaceful slumber, so I switched over to DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP by Willa Cather... and it - unlike THE OBSCENE BIRD OF NIGHT - gave me nightmares! And death isn't even close to coming for this guy yet! Although... never mind. No spoilers! In a final arts thought, was it really a "Proustian pang" (above)? Didn't Proust actually get to bite into his memory cookie? If I may be allowed to stray off topic, the holidays are upon us, and I should mention a funny Christmas wish I received from McNeil, who asked, "Are you doing anything for Christmas? Besides take your blood pressure and hope Santa brings you one more day - JUST ONE MORE, SANTA!" An artful construction by McNeil, in fact, who goes on to recall imperfectly my alleged love, when we knew each other as children, of the snack cakes known as Sno Balls. To be fair, McNeil couched his assertion in the always reliable "if I remember correctly" context. He was, however, thinking of, or misremembering, Strawberry Zingers, a product I ate 5 days of the week for some matter of years without the knowledge of my parents, and it truly is a wonder I'm alive today. I don't know if they still make them. Anyway, my metabolism must have bordered on the miraculous at the time. I was like Matter Eater Lad from DC comics! McNeil, it must be said, was on the right track, as both items in question (Sno Balls and Strawberry Zingers) were sprinkled with poisonously dyed coconut. [The coconut slivers on the Strawberry Zingers may have been unpigmented, actually, but they were surrounded by a spongy cake-like substance soaked in a deep, alarming, and, indeed, unnatural shade of crimson. - ed.] If I, like McNeil, "recall correctly," Strawberry Zingers came three to a pack, which, to my way of thinking at the time, meant that I should eat all three at once. And I was a skinny kid! If I am doing the math correctly, and it is a very simple equation, I was ingesting 15 Strawberry Zingers a week. This brings us back to Proust, doesn't it? But that's not the point. The point is that McNeil says he's spending Christmas in "a neighborhood that boasts a three-legged alligator."

McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits

I'm sure some of you, if you existed, would be wondering about McNeil and why he hasn't bothered much with his bits lately... specifically, his "Li'l Bogie Bits," which is what we call it when he throws us a couple of bones based on the 700-page biography of Humphrey Bogart he has been reading. Well, here's what happened: he thought he had left the book somewhere and lost it. Maybe in another state of the union, I think? But then he found it at home under a pile of... unspecified stuff. Of course, Freud would say that McNeil just doesn't care about his "Li'l Bogie Bits" anymore, so he effectively hid the book from himself. But Freud would be wrong! Speaking of Freud (and don't worry, we'll get back to the promised bits), McNeil told me he's reading SYNCHRONICITY by Carl Jung. I know what you're going to say! Freud isn't Jung. Well, maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong. All I know is I can't think of one without the other, like the two great flavors in a Reese's peanut butter cup. Like, when Freud and Jung were arguing that time and there was an inexplicable explosion in a nearby bookcase. I think I have that story right. And that reminds me of another story! I made it into a chapter of SOUR BLUEBERRIES, my novel that no longer exists on this planet. So I think I can quote it here and no one will care. And this is a true story, and I didn't even change Leslie's real actual name to protect her innocence: "That made him think of the time he and Leslie were arguing about Kubrick and Mike Nichols on New Year’s Eve and there was a loud bang from the other room and everybody ran in and saw that the oaken bookcase with all the film books on it had cleaved itself down the middle in despair and the film books were in a pile on the floor." Okay. What was I saying? Oh yeah, and then there was the time that Freud and Jung were on a train, I think, right here in the USA, I think, home of the "blog," and Freud got it in his head somehow that Jung was comparing him to a corpse preserved in a bog, and Freud swooned and fainted! I think I have that story right, too. But if I don't, who cares? Oh yeah, and what about when Frasier had a Halloween party and came dressed as his hero, Sigmund Freud? I feel, in a related matter, that Frasier would occasionally (though maybe not in the episode in question) make a sarcastic quip about Jungians. I don't have the sources to back that up. None of this is the point. The point is (well, this might not be the point, either) that I was telling McNeil about an Elmore Leonard novel I was enjoying and McNeil said he was envious, because he wasn't making a lot of headway with SYNCHRONICITY (in a subsequent email, he indicated that he was starting to get into it and groove on its vibes, though not in those words). Explaining that he wished Jung's examples were simpler, McNeil wrote, with what I took as plaintiveness, and I believe this is a quote, "Why not cats walking through a door?" So I closed my email and I opened up Elmore Leonard and I read "A cat walks in the room..." WHAT! So I emailed McNeil back and said, I believe, "Synchronicity!" or some other smart remark along those lines. Now for the bogie bits, which I will now attempt to reconstruct before your very eyes through the power of memory. One of them was... hmm... I guess Bogart was getting sick of Sinatra coming over to the house and drinking up all of Bogie's booze, and also (if I am recalling correctly) putting the moves on Lauren Bacall, who was Bogart's legally wedded wife. What was the other one? It had something to do with Bogart winning an Oscar. McNeil did not specify the movie, but I am guessing it was THE AFRICAN QUEEN. I'm not looking it up because I don't care about anything anymore. Anyway, Bogart's buddy tells him if he wins he should act real cool and snarl "It's about time" and casually walk offstage like some kind of tough customer. So Bogart is like, "Wow! That's a great idea! I'll do it!" And then he wins and gets up there and blushes and giggles and cavorts about the stage all giddy and squealing. That can't be right. But as I have already expressed, I don't care. I was reading more of the Elmore Leonard in a doctor's waiting room today. I took it instead of my prescribed waiting room reading material. After that, I stopped by Square Books because my copy of THE ICEMAN COMETH had arrived. I ordered it because I was watching the movie version the other day, and the character Hugo, played by Boss Hogg from THE DUKES OF HAZZARD, said what I could have sworn was "Life is a crazy monkey face!" So I was going to check the text and see. So Dr. Theresa is driving us home and I'm flipping through the end of THE ICEMAN COMETH and I find Hugo saying "Hello, nice, leedle, funny monkey-faces!" And another time he goes, "Hello, leedle Don, leedle monkey-face!" I don't know, maybe he's all about the leedle monkey-faces the whole way through, though where I got "Life is a crazy monkey face!" I don't know. In my defense, Boss Hogg isn't exactly Demosthenes in this role. And he is forced by the author, as you have witnessed, to say things like "leedle." When I read the whole play, which I promise you I never will, perhaps I'll come across the exact line that I misheard. Thank you. This has been "McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits." Now leave me alone!

Various Birds

I picked up a book called THE OBSCENE BIRD OF NIGHT by José Donoso, and I was like, hmm, can this obscene bird of night be an owl, perchance? But then I read the epigraph, which is by Henry James's dad, and he is giving his sons some life advice, including "The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters." Thanks, Dad! (I recall while typing this that some kind of weird monster bird of the psyche attacked Henry James's father in a novel by Colm Tóibín and also, presumably, in real life.) So last night I was in bed reading THE OBSCENE BIRD OF NIGHT and I came across "the ugly chonchón of ill omen." So I was like, "Hey, sweetie, look on your phone and tell me what a chonchón is." Dr. Theresa, who was also lying there reading, picked up her phone and looked up the chonchón. She said - and here I paraphrase freely - "It's a head that flies around by flapping its big ears like wings," which was pretty dang close to how it had been described in the book. I mean, exactly, really. "A horrible head would fly through the air, trailing a long mane of wheat-colored hair... flapping huge sinewy ears that were like bat wings." I flipped to the TRANSLATOR'S NOTE at the end of the book, in which Megan McDowell refers to the chonchón as an "owllike creature," and, as you know, that's good enough for me. Though maybe I should put an asterisk on it for now. Which reminds me! I finished that Julian Barnes novel and I didn't see any owls in it, but there were some luminous geese... I should say, "Luminous Geese," as he afforded them the dignity of proper nouns. As a person who plopped luminous owls into his second book, I took special note of the Luminous Geese. (See also.)

McNeilileaks

Welcome once again to McNeilileaks, in which McNeil confides his darkest thoughts with me via email and I leak them to the world. And there's nothing he can do to stop me! After watching a crisp and clean movie via streaming, McNeil writes to compare it favorably with the version he used to watch via, in his words, a "VHS copy I recorded from an over-the-air station. A copy where as the movie goes along, static lines appear bolder and bolder as a lightning storm gets closer and closer. Those were the days... trying to squeeze it in before the power went out."

Perfect

Allow me to quote THE POSSESSED by Witold Gombrowicz, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, one of the books I am reading right now: "He drank a shot of vodka. It did him good. He had another. Then a large glass of lager, a herring sandwich and two more shots of vodka. Perfect." Yes! That does sound perfect. And I don't even care for vodka or lager. I miss sandwiches, though. They have me on this special diet and I haven't had a sandwich in many months. Anyway, I had feelings of envy toward the fictional character who was drinking vodka and lager and eating a sandwich. I put myself in his place through the workings of my innocent childlike imagination, and the whole experience seemed pleasing indeed, though the character is in a state of turmoil as he begins his enviable meal. Look, I would be allowed the herring, and even the vodka, but not the lager or the bread. Hmm, this reminds me of when my mom kept saying she wanted to have a slice of pizza and a beer for her 50th birthday, though she had never had even a sip of beer in her life... she just thought it looked so good on TV! In the end, she did not succumb to that temptation, nor has she to this very day.

The Meatballs of Yesterday

To my recollection, four things happened yesterday. 1. I got a text from Laraine Newman! She told me that the New York Times (or a newsletter thereof, to be precise) had some nice things to say about MYSTERY CUDDLERS, the pilot I co-created with Pendleton Ward. They say it has a "bright, appealing oddness," if that's the sort of thing you enjoy. 2. A package arrived from my brother! It contained a giant cookie jar in the shape of an owl. The owl is wearing a straw boater and a bow tie, of course. And the hat cleverly serves as the lid of the cookie jar. Thanks, Will! I stare at this cookie jar a lot! I would put a photo of it here, but I feel my masterful description could not be improved upon. Oh, you know what? Screw it! Pardon my rough he-man language of the dirty streets! 3. A cat sneezed all over me. If you have a cat, one day it will sneeze all over you, a fact taken from real life that we worked into episode one of season one of ADVENTURE TIME: FIONNA AND CAKE. I felt the need to change my shirt, which bore tangible evidence of the cat sneeze. So I broke in a shirt that Ace Atkins brought me as a souvenir of his recent trip to New York City. It says "Daddy's Little Meatball" on it. Ace didn't know this, but I once read a New York Times article about such a shirt, which I recall because I put it into one of my many unpublished novels (and subsequently deleted - the detail, not the novel, though I should probably delete the novel). 4. After I "blogged" about Julian Barnes yesterday, I thought of my childhood friend Henry Barnes (no relation, I assume), who dove into the bayou to retrieve a softball once. That was his excuse, anyway. Boy, did Sister Lois chew him out about that! It was 7th grade, the year I went to Catholic school, because Mom had a job there. The school was right there on the bayou. What was Henry supposed to do? NOT dive into the bayou, which was right there? My brother attended the same school and became an altar boy, even though we were Southern Baptists. How did that happen? That has to be against the rules. I hope the Pope doesn't read this! How many masses did my little brother invalidate with his non-Catholic subterfuge? I hate to say it, but there may be any number of souls sitting around in Purgatory to this day, all thanks to my brother. But the point is, Henry grew up to be the mayor of Bayou La Batre, which I believe he still is! I'll have to ask Mom. I haven't seen him in about half a century (see also).

A Walk in the Park

It's too cold to walk in the park right now, but don't you remember the park? The park where Dr. Theresa and I walk? And there's a trash bin of books there? I mean, a "little free library"? Well, a little while back, we were walking in the park and I found a Julian Barnes novel called ENGLAND, ENGLAND. I don't know why, but I thought he was an odd author to find lying there abandoned in the park like that. This book doesn't have an owl in it, at least not yet, but it does have Jerry Lewis in it. I should note that Julian Barnes works a subtle (?) variation on the hoary idea that the French love Jerry Lewis, which is pretty nervy coming from a guy who wrote a novel called FLAUBERT'S PARROT (which had an owl in it), but the execution was deft and casual, so I decided not to cry about it. FULL DISCLOSURE: I say it's too cold to walk in the park, but Ace and I walked around the neighborhood today.

Domes

Last night, Dr. Theresa and I watched FORBIDDEN PLANET - her idea, not that it matters. And now she wants to watch PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES! I ventured that that one would pair well with ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS, which I kept suggesting during the Halloween season, but she never quite came around on it. Looks like the winds of change are shifting, though! Just like Bob Dylan said. Sort of. But that's not why I'm here! I just wanted to say that, having been thoroughly conditioned by McNeil's obsession with decorative obelisks in movies, I could not help but note that Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) has a groovy space obelisk in his funky alien living room. You can see it in the image above, which I captured from our TV screen. The obelisk in question sits roughly at his left elbow (his left, your right!). As I cleverly remarked to Dr. Theresa, the exterior of his home resembles Devo's headquarters on Sunset Blvd. As proof, I took out my phone and showed her a photo of the latter building, because that's what we do now as a people, we see things that look like other things and then we take out our phones and find pictures to show people who maybe care and maybe don't. AND! Although you can't tell it from the image above, Dr. Morbius seems to share an interior decorator with Jerry Lewis. Oh! The appearance of Robby the Robot here reminds me of a chapter of SOUR BLUEBERRIES, the novel I deleted from the "internet" when I guess I was "going through some things." A "fictional character" (me?) brings up FORBIDDEN PLANET and another character says "It's boring. I hate it." Then he says that Robby the Robot is no B-9 from LOST IN SPACE. I, I mean, "Chet" naively asks if they aren't exactly the same, at which point, to quote the novel, "'No. Their domes are completely different,' said Jay. He started drawing their domes so Chet could compare B-9’s acceptable dome to Robby the Robot’s dome worthy only of hate." You know what, "Jay"? Last night I really enjoyed watching Robby's robot brains kind of whirling around in his head like he was the Glass Cat from the Oz series of novels. Oh, wait, that reminds me, I also wanted to tell Oz fan Laura Lippman (no monkey fan) that FORBIDDEN PLANET has a monkey in it!

The Last of the Old Comic Books

You know the story. How Tom Franklin brought me a stack of old comic books in the hospital, and even more stacks of even more old comic books when I got home. And how I began to purchase old comic books for my very own self until I amassed quite a pile. How I found it so soothing to read myself to sleep with old comic books... then... something changed in our interesting modern times, or perhaps something cracked in my warped little soul, and I found that I was permanently out of the mood to read old comic books. I've been slowly finishing the few remaining old comic books in my possession. There are two left. One of them, coincidentally, is about Deathlok, the first superhero I ever mentioned on this "blog"... in the "blog's" very first "post"! That exclamation point was forced rather than felt. I just don't care anymore. Anyway, in the old comic book I was grudgingly reading last night out of a sense of duty, there was a guy named Jack O'Lantern, but get this. He was wearing, like, a purple sack on his head. What does that have to do with jack-o'-lanterns? I don't know and now I never will, having given up old comic books forever. But that's not the point. The point is that Jack O'Lantern goes "GOOD WORK, OWL WOMAN." And then you see this character who I guess is Owl Woman standing over there. I don't know who she is, either. She didn't look too much like an owl from the little I saw of her. Now I'm going to ask you to open your mind to some groovy concepts. So, as you will recall, when I really read comic books, back when I was a kid... that is, when I went and bought what were then NEW comic books from Schambeau's grocery store or Red's Drugs in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, I would have thought of this Jack O'Lantern (with a purple sack on his head!) thing as being a weird, amazing COMIC BOOK FROM THE FUTURE! Because it came out in 1988, when I hadn't seen a comic book in at least 12 years. Yes, I stupidly thought those days were behind me. So it's an "old comic book" now but in another way it was... oh, hell, who cares? You get it. I would say I have wasted enough of your time but we both know I haven't wasted nearly enough of it.

Owl Balls

Just read about "owl balls" in a manuscript. It doesn't mean what you think it means. This reminds me of when I read a manuscript in June that had some owls in it and I couldn't tell you about it yet, and I still can't, and I can't tell you about this other manuscript I'm reading right now, either, no, I can't tell you about anything, really, we were never here, you never saw me. Well, as long as we're here, though, because we are here, after all, I can tell you I dreamed about a guy from high school I hardly ever think about. McNeil knew him, too, so I emailed McNeil about my dream, in which this guy we knew in high school dressed a duck in human clothes and the duck didn't like it. Which reminds me. Okay, this creepy bio I read of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald? Well, first some backstory: McNeil asked at some point why the Million Dollar Book Club, which he described in belittling terms, had never read a biography of Lila Lee if we were so damn great, or words to that effect. And I am afraid I emailed back to him in the coarsest of language, something like "I don't even know who the hell Lila Lee is." And I still don't! But she was mentioned in this Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald book as, I assume, some sort of divine retribution. I'll find a picture of her with which to illustrate this "post" just to make my punishment complete. So, to conclude with another subject entirely, last night I got a text from my sister, which said, "What song goes like this 'I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish'?" And I texted back, "I don't know. Is it called... 'I Wish'?" I had no idea what she was talking about. I called her up so she could sing it for me, but it was just her going "I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish" in a kind of monotone, which made us both laugh. She insisted I had put it on a mixtape for her when she was a kid, and that it was the very end of the song she was thinking of. I was afraid the part of my brain retaining that knowledge had been completely over-electrified in a recent episode. She said, "It was on the same tape with that Nick Lowe song 'Lucky Dog,'" like that would help, which made us laugh again. We certainly do laugh a lot. The point is, I had no memory of that Nick Lowe song at all! Like it never existed as far as my brain was concerned! This story has a great ending. Some time later, as I ate chili prepared by Dr. Theresa, I suddenly realized that the song my sister was trying to remember was "David Watts" by the Kinks! So I called her up and sang part of the chorus and we had a celebration of remembrance. (PS Coming back to say I read another page and this manuscript has White Owl cigars in it, too!)

Sunny and Red

The book (see yesterday’s “post”) did inform me that Nelson Eddy had a bodyguard named Red Boyles, which I found hilarious for reasons requiring, I believe, no explanation. Furthermore, Jeanette MacDonald, later in life, enjoyed the company of a regular “escort” named Sunny Griffin, which is not a significantly funny name. But Sunny Griffin’s day job? Makeup man at a mortuary! I guess it is, if not funny, something... for a mortuary makeup man to go by a cheerful moniker like Sunny. But maybe I don’t know enough about mortuaries. One time Dr. Theresa and I were in a bar in Decatur, Georgia, I think, and a guy there was like... wait, his girlfriend was writing a big old grimoire by hand at another table. And this guy was like, “Did you know you can just walk in and get a job in a mortuary with no qualifications? That’s what I did!” And he was really happy about it. Now, we don’t have to take his word for everything. Then, as I recall, he said some weird stuff about remembering a photo he had seen on someone’s refrigerator of Dr. Theresa in the gloves she wore at our wedding, and something else weird about what she had done with her hair that day, which I think may have been his job? Fixing up hair at a mortuary? Or maybe I got that from an X-FILES episode. Then he said something funny about his hometown, or he said it in a funny way, which, though I can’t or won’t explain it right now, became the basis of a long-running inside joke between Dr. Theresa and myself. I hasten to add that the joke was not at the fellow’s expense, as you may be forgiven for thinking after he had made startling personal remarks about a photo of Dr. Theresa he had seen once and never forgotten, like he was Dana Andrews in LAURA, while his girlfriend scrawled evil runes in a big, black book (the latter being a detail I drew on, if loosely, for my 2016 story collection MOVIE STARS) but no, it had to do with the musical intonation he struck while saying the name of his hometown, that’s all, a very innocent bit of japery indeed. This little walk down memory lane has reminded me of a song by Bill Taft’s current band. I’ve gone to the trouble of making it the number one selection on the following very manageable 10-song playlist (for you to experience as you read this “post” over and over again) of bands featuring Bill and the cellist Brian Halloran, though another of their bands, Hubcap City, seems to have been scrubbed from the music streaming service entirely, just like Jerry Clower before it. (Hey, just to bring it full circle, which I don’t think I’m actually doing, Bill and Brian were both in our wedding! Brian played his cello as Dr. Theresa, before she was a Dr., came wafting down the aisle on the wings of love, one assumes.)

Of Course She Did!

The rule is that every time I read a book with an owl in it, I have to tell you about it, no matter how the book makes me feel inside. It is my sad duty to inform you that the Million Dollar Book Club is reading a biography of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. You knew it would come to this. But that's not the bad part! How can I say this without alienating all the Nelson Eddy fans who flock to the "blog"? Well, reading this book, Nelson Eddy comes off as a scary monster, despite the efforts of the author to sort of gloss over everything that seems to make Nelson Eddy so very definitely a scary, terrifying monster. And the more she glosses it over, the scarier Nelson Eddy becomes. It makes for unpleasant reading. This is the nadir of the Million Dollar Book Club. Hey! I'll briefly liven things up by mentioning that today, while I was getting ready to take my blood pressure, I read some of that Pessoa biography, and Pessoa had a friend with a "full set of gold teeth." A full set! Not just a couple. All of this guy's teeth were made of gold. Okay, now I feel better. Back to the book with the scary monster. So, a contemporary reviewer quoted in the dual biography doubts that the "night owl clientele" of the Cocoanut Grove are going to dig the restrained decorum of Jeanette MacDonald. Anyway, as I texted to Megan - I don't have my phone here, so I'll approximate my observation - "I never dreamed the most messed up people we would ever read about would be Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy." (I know you don't know who they are. Would it kill you to google something? That aside is to you, the "blog" reader.) Megan texted back that they were more messed up than Salvador Dali. I responded they were more messed up than Tennessee Williams. She texted back that they were more messed up than Errol Flynn. And so on. I'll tell you one good thing. This book caused Megan to dig out the Jeanette MacDonald paper dolls she had when she was a kid. Of course she did!

The Eisenstein Effect

Speaking of TV that has commercials in it, I keep meaning to tell you about an ad for cream cheese that was bothering Dr. Theresa, due to the inadvertent suggestion on the part of the cream cheese company, as Dr. Theresa saw it, that the protagonist of their commercial had eaten her (the protagonist's) cat. "They don't understand the Eisenstein effect!" Dr. Theresa shouted on November 1 of this year, a date I can give you with 100% certainty, as I recorded the plaintive outburst in my diary at the time of its occurrence.

Who?

Hey! Do you want to watch MYSTERY CUDDLERS but you couldn't stay up until 3 AM Central Time like I did? I have good news for you. You can see the whole pilot by "clicking" this "link" to the Adult Swim youtube channel. I watched it on TV just the way people did in olden times. I was sitting through a Dawn dishwashing liquid commercial that came on before it and thinking unironically, "This is nourishing my anticipation!" That is the kind of thing I sit around thinking. Then the middle of the show was interrupted by an ad for generic Viagra. Really, nothing could have made me happier. They (some people at the network) asked us just last week, "Uh, where is the commercial break supposed to go?" and Pen and I were like, "Uh-oh! Hmm! Whoops!" Then Pen thought of a funny place where it could go, which made me laugh when it happened at roughly 3:11 AM Central Time, but now that commercial break is lost forever in the history of broadcast television. Before you "click," I should tell you I play an owl on the show, which I only mention because the casual "blog" observer will think I am obsessed with owls. "And now at last," you will be thinking, "he has become one." But is that guy, the one who seems so interested in owls, the "real" me? This is like when I tried to explain my unicorn pin to Hendrik Hertzberg. It really doesn't matter! What I'm saying is that the owl was 100% Pen's idea, and so was me playing the owl, and by "playing the owl," I mean I sat in our bedroom closet saying "Whooooo?" over and over into a microphone I had borrowed from Ace Atkins. In conclusion, MYSTERY CUDDLERS was inspired in very small part by my novel SWEET BANANAS, which I can say without fear of crass self-promotion because that novel existed only in a limited edition of 365 copies with 365 different covers, which are all off the street, and can only be purchased in alleyways, like in GOODFELLAS, when Robert De Niro is telling Lorraine Bracco, "That's right, keep going, yes, that's it, that dark alleyway just to right, go in there," I paraphrase.

Car

Hey, remember how I told you that my dad has been building a car over the past 10 years of weekends, I mean building it from nothing but an idea in his head into a car? Well, he was asked to be in a car show this weekend and I thought I would show you what the car looks like now (see above). He is almost ready to race it! Which Mom continues to be less than thrilled about. I think that will happen within six months. Please do not concern yourself that Dad seems to have sprawled his car over at least one ADA parking space. This is where he was asked to unload it when he first got to the car show. My dad is in compliance with all known laws!

The Last Patty Melt

I see that word has gotten out about MYSTERY CUDDLERS, a pilot created and written by Pen - that's Pendleton Ward! - and me for Adult Swim. They're going to be airing it in the wee small hours of the 19th, as Frank Sinatra would have said, probably, had he been informed of the matter. As I know from reading a biography of Dean Martin, he (Frank's friend Dean) was up at that hour, watching cowboy movies. Dino couldn't sleep! I would be afraid I had just alienated the potential audience if I didn't know for sure that the people who read this "blog" don't exist. So it's going to be on at 3 AM ET, according to the Adult Swim schedule, or 4 AM, according to other places on the "internet," so you'd best cover your bets. Just like Dean Martin would do, I'm assuming, though I'm not even sure what "cover your bets" means. But here I am sitting on all the most important parts! MYSTERY CUDDLERS has an amazing cast we were lucky to get, including Pam Grier and Randall Park as the eponymous cuddlers. Elsewhere in the cast, Maria Bamford! Michael Winslow of POLICE ACADEMY fame! (We wrote a part especially for him. Then we were like, "What if he can't do it???" but he could.) Brian Posehn! "Weird Al" Yankovic! A little kid named Maverick! That's his real name! I consider Maverick my personal discovery. And the boarders! I didn't discover them. They have already been discovered. Another crew of your dreams! Charmaine Verhagen! Graham Falk! Evan Borja! And Pen himself. Yes, yes, now it can be revealed, it was Pen with whom I went to Bob's Big Boy in May of 2023, after a meeting kicking it all off. There I consumed perhaps my final patty melt, given recent... events. It was good! Oh yeah, and the music is by Joe Wong! To the show, not to the patty melt. Though if Joe wanted to, he could write a good tone poem evoking a patty melt. Looking over my ancient emails I see that interest in MYSTERY CUDDLERS was proclaimed by the network in July 2022, and you know what? From what I've noticed about this business - ha ha! I have noticed almost nothing about this business - this all seems like really fast work (I was just in Los Angeles a few weeks ago for the final sound mix!) and I'm really happy you'll get to see it soon. Everybody who worked on it is great and nice and easy to work with and I hope you will scrutinize the credits frame by frame and appreciate everyone you find there and I'm very sorry that I'm far too lazy to type a complete list here. Wait! Maybe I meant "hedge your bets." POSTSCRIPT! It's definitely 4 AM Eastern/3 AM Central. You see, Adult Swim's "web" site was sneakily, if efficiently, pitying me as a pathetic inhabitant of the Central Time Zone, and automatically updating my "browsing" experience to reflect my location... which I guess it is tracking, and no doubt handing over to the proper authortities.

Everybody's Talking

Last night Dr. Theresa and I were watching a TV show which, despite taking place in our up-to-date modern times, had a plot point about Alexander the Great's horse, then I got in bed and read a book by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis instead of an old comic book, and the narrator mentioned Alexander the Great's horse, then I decided it was no big deal because everybody is always talking about Alexander the Great's horse.

Passing Through

As you know (?), I take my blood pressure twice a day. Before doing so, I sit silently for five minutes, for a ten-minute total per day. And as I sit so silently and still, waiting to take my blood pressure with all the suspense of someone slowly scratching off a lottery ticket, or Charlie Bucket peeling off the wrapper of a chocolate bar, I read a book. To qualify as my "blood pressure book," the book must be a sturdy hardcover with a mighty spine that allows the volume to lie open flat on the table. That is the only requirement. All this you know. But I don't think you knew that my current blood pressure book is a biography of Fernando Pessoa, which is about as long as THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY. Anyhow! And forgive me for going over some of my other reading habits but it's so obviously important. Anyhow! I have also been reading old comic books at night, ever since Tom Franklin brought me some old comic books in the hospital. But I have to say I'm getting tired of the old comic books. Something has... changed. Something in the... I want to say... no I don't... national mood??? I didn't say it! Let's not talk about it! Once I finish the current pile, which is swiftly dwindling, that may be it for old comic books, at least for a while. Old comic books can't soothe me anymore. Anyhow! ANYHOW! I was very surprised, as Pessoa's biographer, Richard Zenith, which sounds like a name young Fernando Pessoa would have made up, analyzed a specific sort of Pessoa poem by saying, and here I quote my blood pressure book, "And the scenes and moods are not only juxtaposed, they also interpenetrate, passing through each other the way Superman passes through walls, without him or the walls losing their structural integrity." Talk about juxtaposing and interpenetrating: at last my blood pressure book and my old comic books had met! BUT WHY? The comparison is striking for a number of reasons, several of which I am about to tell you until you can take no more. First! The allusion does not seem particularly Pessoa-friendly, especially since Pessoa died in 1935, well before the creation of Superman. Now! We must of course admit that the biographer has an advantage, in this case, over his subject... that of still being alive (as far as I know). Therefore, he can draw from any range of examples he likes, including those from a future unimaginable even to his very imaginative subject. BUT! Pessoa is conducting seances just a couple of pages later. Isn't a ghost something that passes through walls? Might not a ghost be a more universally recognizable figure for the average reader, if the average reader pictures something that passes through walls without losing its structural integrity or altering the wall? I hope it is not blasphemous to suggest that one also thinks of Jesus, in his appearance to St. Thomas. But I'm not done! The biographer's Superman example is interesting to me because... do people know Superman can do that? I mean, I do. But I have made a serious study of all his oddest powers. A superhero who is more famous for vibrating through a wall is the Flash, if you know about the Flash, but, of course, more people know about Superman than know about the Flash... yet the question remains! Does the reader with a rudimentary knowledge of Superman realize that he can vibrate through a wall? I have no evidence to back up what I'm about to say, but I suspect that the average reader, if asked to imagine Superman going through a wall, would picture the "Man of Steel" busting right through it with his super fists, like the Kool-Aid man or the Schlitz malt liquor bull, not that my latter two examples were known for using their fists. The Schlitz malt liquor bull, being a hooved quadruped, was not even capable of making a fist! While the Kool-Aid man may or may not have been able to make a fist, I doubt whether he had the arm extension necessary for pounding down a wall with it, especially as he, if I recall correctly, grasped in one hand a pitcher of the same sweet liquid with which his living body was filled. Nevertheless, it can be easily proven with video evidence that both the Kool-Aid man and the Schlitz malt liquor bull BODILY knocked down their walls, as, I put forth, most people would credit Superman with doing as well. (I am including the "beer label" on this "post," even though the Schlitz malt liquor ads issued, according to my hazy memories, the specific command "Don't say beer, say bull!" May the Schlitz malt liquor bull forgive me and not crash through my wall. Amen. Not that I am worshipping a golden calf! Not even a hypothetical one made, unlike the all-too-fleshly Schlitz malt liquor bull, of golden malt liquor, however tempted I might be at this moment to drink a calf-sized container of such a brew.)

Out of the Murk

Well, I've had this copy of MERCIER AND CAMIER on the shelf for 20 years, at least, I bet, without opening it. Probably more like 30! Did I read in a Samuel Beckett biography that he didn't like it much? I don't know. Maybe not. Something kept me away from it. I don't know what. It was on just the shelf where I thought it might be, though. The pages are brown with age. A sticker on the front tells me I bought it used at A Cappella Books. Six dollars! Which seems like a lot. The back cover claims that it is "the first paperback edition" of the work. I knew an owl would be too on the nose, and I was right. I did not find an owl. For a while, the dual protagonists... and that's how I ended up reading it. Tom Franklin texted me, asking about novels with "dual protagonists" (of which he has written a couple himself). That's how MERCIER AND CAMIER popped into my old noggin. Anyhow, Mercier and Camier are stumbling around in the dark for a long time, out in the middle of nowhere, perfect place for an owl... too perfect. "Strange animals loom, giant horses and cows, out of the murk do you but raise your head." Then, on the next-to-last page, as if to taunt me, "We did not meet many animals, said Camier."

Monocles, Bullets, and Cigarettes

Like the world at large, I have completely forgotten about the book I wrote about cigarette lighters. But yesterday I was watching Erich von Stroheim's version of THE MERRY WIDOW, that's right, a silent operetta, what could be more fun? Lots of things. And let's say Erich von Stroheim doesn't exactly have the Lubitsch touch, as I wittily texted to Megan Abbott, and oh how she must have chuckled at my waggish observation. For example, it takes Stroheim an hour and a half to get to the point where Lubitsch's movie STARTS! To be fair, the stories are pretty different. But why should I be fair? Who is reading this? You? You don't exist! Anyhow, I guess you, if you did exist, would be wondering what this has to do with my cigarette lighter book. Fine! I'll tell you. In THE MERRY WIDOW, as undertaken by Stroheim, there are a man and woman with cigarettes in their mouths, and they are standing so that the tips of their cigarettes touch. It might be that one is giving a light to the other, a process described in my book, in which I thoroughly explore the obscene slang term for such an action. I tried to search the "blog" to see if I had mentioned it here before, but I don't see how I could have, except by such euphemistic means as I have employed above. If you want to read dirty talk like that, you'll just have to buy the book! Anyway, so these two are standing there with the tips of their cigarettes touching and the bad guy, who is across the room, and in a hilarious mood, takes out his little gun and shoots off the ends of both of their cigarettes with a single bullet. Then he shoots the eyes out of a statue, which has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. He is, however, wearing a monocle, and monocles figure heavily in my cigarette lighter book for reasons I would tell you if we weren't both asleep by now. But! The relationship of guns to cigarettes and lighters is another theme of the book, so you can see clearly that when you tabulate all the various themes and subthemes and so on of my book you've never heard of and will have forgotten by the end of this "post," I am obliged to add THE MERRY WIDOW (1925) to my appendix of stuff that really should have gone into my cigarette lighter book but didn't. You know what else has a lot of monocle action? NIGHTWOOD! What pie and ice cream were to Kerouac, monocles are to Djuna Barnes. There's one chapter where a guy fiddles with his monocle in every conceivable way. You should take a drink every time Djuna Barnes uses the word "monocle"! (The surgeon general advises against it.) In a movie, the actor playing Felix, the guy with the monocle, would be like one of the pipe-smokers I have observed in at at least three movies "letting the pipe do most of the acting," except with a monocle instead of a pipe. And in an earlier chapter, Felix's monocle pops out, I believe, the way your monocle is always popping out when you're shocked. You may recall that I also found a person whose monocle pops out emotionally in Fitzgerald's TENDER IS THE NIGHT. You know what else had lots of monocles? That Erich von Stroheim bio we read in the Million Dollar Book Club! (Did you know Anita Loos affectionately called him "Von"?)

The Latest St. John Chrysostom News

Now, I am sure you recall 2016 as the year when I was reading a book with St. John Chrysostom in it, but it was too big to take on the airplane, so I brought a smaller book on the airplane, and to my surprise, it ALSO had St. John Chrysostom in it! Okay, stay with me. Now cast your mind back to mere days ago, when I took NIGHTWOOD on an airplane, but didn't finish reading it, even though it is short, because of all the things to distract me on the airplane. Well, yesterday, I continued NIGHTWOOD, and a character asks, "Am I the golden-mouthed St. John Chrysostom, the Greek who said it with the other cheek?" He goes on to answer himself, and bear in mind, these are not my words, but those of Djuna Barnes, writing in 1936: "No, I'm a fart in a gale of wind, an humble violet under a cow pad." Take it up with Djuna Barnes! She died in 1982 and is beyond caring whether or not you like fart jokes. You know, as I continued to read, and got deeper, I began to realize - again to my surprise! I get surprised so much! - of whom the rhythm and flow of the words in this book remind me... Barry Hannah! I almost didn't "post" any of this because I knew no one would care but then I decided to "post" it because I knew no one would care.

Butter Knife

Attention! My friend Sarah will appear in this "post." I happened to notice yesterday - Sarah would never mention it herself; she's too nice! - that I've been dropping the h from her name for how long? Months? Longer? I have decided to investigate no further. But I did want to record my shame here for all to see. Now we may move to happier matters. It's back! The precious little jotting book has been removed from its mothball-filled cedar chest. Now that I have stopped pretending to stop "blogging," I am allowed to take said jotting book with me to Los Angeles, California, and, upon my return, to transcribe my jotted experiences into the form of little numbered jottings. 1. Ace Atkins printed out my boarding passes for me! He said he had left them in his mailbox, and I was concerned, having noticed on our many walks around the neighborhood as we exchange wise thoughts, that the door had fallen off of Ace's mailbox. What if my boarding passes were to blow away in a gentle breeze? I discovered, however, upon my arrival, that Ace has a BRAND NEW MAILBOX! This is the biggest thing to happen in the neighborhood for years. And it reminded me that Dr. Theresa and I had driven past Tom Franklin's house not that long before, and I had admired their sleek, modernistic mailbox. I couldn't decide whether it was new or if I had simply never noticed it before. One day, I vowed, I'll get to the bottom of this! But such thoughts would have to wait, for I was on my way! To wherever I was going. 2. My chosen reading material for the airplane: NIGHTWOOD by Djuna Barnes. My friend Eugene recommended it. He's been dead for 26 years, but I finally got around to it! 3. The new jotting book has an interesting flap on it that it is not within my writerly powers to describe correctly. It also has a built-in ribbon bookmark, burnt orange in color - a jotting book with a bookmark! A first for your correspondent. 4. So, we stayed at the Peabody in Memphis the night before my trip, because the plane left so damn early. Pardon my language! Anyway, I knew I would be rising before the Peabody started serving breakfast, so I ordered a pot of coffee the night before, thinking to down it cold in the morning. Guess what? When I poured a cup, 10 hours after having received it, the coffee was STILL WARM! Here's to the magic coffee pots of the Peabody Hotel. 5. I admit to eating half a Biscoff, my favorite airplane cookie, to help with my fear of flying... the first cookie or sweet of any kind in which I've indulged since the fun little medical incident I enjoyed in March. The king of cookies! The mighty Biscoff. 6. Should I boast that my old iPod is still working hard and well to provide my inflight entertainment? I seem to be listening to a version of "I Love How You Love Me" featuring bagpipes. I jotted as much during the flight. Only when the plane landed did a guy sitting behind me and across the aisle lean forward to ask if he had seen with his own eyes an actual iPod. I was proud to extol its existence, longevity, usefulness, and capacity. He was happy to hear it. 6. I found a Burbank hotel in which my accommodations included a full kitchen - you see, ever since my little medical hiccup, in which part of my human mind was zapped (despite my decision not to investigate further, I did investigate further, and, as I feared, I started dropping the h in Sarah around that point), it is much better if I cook for myself. But the full kitchen did not include any knives of a sufficent sharpness for the necessities of ordinary meal prep. Friends, that is how I ended up cutting up shallots with a butter knife! Let me tell you, it is no easy thing, attacking a shallot with a butter knife, even though a shallot presents itself as a small and tender thing. But don't we all? (See also.) 7. Stopped by the front desk in the morning to see where to get coffee. The "night auditor," as he called himself, was still on duty, a jovial man named Randy. When he asked if I had received my 10% off coupon to the restaurant, and I replied that I had not, he exclaimed, "What the devil!" which I found charming. The way he said "I'm Randy!" was reminiscent, without any of the unsettling atmospherics, of the way Steve Buscemi says "I'm Chet!" in BARTON FINK. 8. When I went to get coffee and asked about a kitchen knife, the server explained that they don't allow sharp things in the rooms. Hmm! She, like Randy, was very nice, and said they would cook anything I wanted, off the menu, to my specifications, so I wouldn't have to stand there brutally murdering a shallot with a butter knife like a chump. Her name was Lourdes, which I found to be a cool name, especially as I was sitting there reading a discussion of miracles in NIGHTWOOD. 9. Not until I returned to the room did I notice for the first time that it was decorated with a large photograph of Jayne Mansfield carrying Bob Hope down some steps (see above)! My powers of observation! They have never been great. 10. Saw a crow in a palm tree but failed to get a decent pic. 11. Elizabeth Ito brought me an illicit steak knife! Which I smuggled into the room, wrapped in a dishcloth (the steak knife was, not I). Elizabeth and I wound up in a photo booth. 12. In NIGHTWOOD: "He'll look as distressed as an owl tied up in a muffler." There! Unlike smiling or drunken owls, this is the type of owl comparison I can understand! Although I cannot approve of the owl treatment described.

13. I met Quinn's cat. He looked like a tiny human person! 14. Met Ashly Burch in Beverly Hills, where I was given a fork with a dramatically bent prong with which to eat my egg whites. No, it wasn't some sort of fancy Beverly Hills utensil for eating rarefied egg whites, it was just a peculiarly, even obscenely destroyed fork (see evidence below) and the egg place just didn't give a damn, presumably. I defiantly swallowed my eggs with the aid of the monstrous fork! You know, and this is true, the last time I ate with Ashly Burch, in January of 2022, as I sat on a wooden bench waiting for my "ride share" to arrive to take me to a fine sushi dinner, I glanced over and saw a fork lying there on the arm of the bench! I took a photo of it at the time, and no doubt shared it on "social media," but I see that it is no longer in my phone, so you'll just have to take my word for it, as I have quit "social media" to the acclaim of millions. What I am saying is that every time I eat with Ashly Burch, there is something weird about a fork. About the bent fork, I made a Uri Geller joke, prefacing it, or softening the blow, by saying, "Now, if I were Dennis Miller, I might say..." and also adding the caveat that Ashly Burch would have no idea what I was talking about when I presently mentioned Uri Geller, which turned out to be true, but she laughed anyway, because she is so nice. Later, I described the incident to Joe Wong, who said I had not really imitated Dennis Miller, because there were not enough allusions to obscure celebrities in my remark. So I gamely tried again, saying, "Looks like Uri Geller and the Amazing Kreskin had a brunch date, cha cha," which Joe kindly deemed passable, though I had added but one allusion. Or maybe "brunch" is an allusion of some kind to something or another. 15. That night, Kate was giving me a ride and I said, "I remember these seat covers!" She has these sheepskin (?) seat covers in her car. Kate laughed and said, "They're old!" She told me I was sitting on the same seat cover where Stan Lee had once parked his bony ass, though she didn't use such crude language, and neither would I, so I don't know what happened just now. Anyhow, it reminded me of the time ("click" here) that Kelly Hogan once touched William Faulkner's buttocks through the very fabric of time itself. I felt the power of Stan Lee's butt! 16. They have spectacular grocery-store brand frozen mango in California. Look, frozen fruits are part of my medically induced breakfast ritual now, okay? So Sarah with an h took me to the grocery store and I was walking around pouting and crying and knocking over huge pyramids of canned goods, as I believe happens in THE DISORDERLY ORDERLY and maybe BACHELOR IN PARADISE???? I am exaggerating my reaction to Sarah's favorite grocery store, but I really was going around saying, yeah, so what? We have these same eggs in Mississippi! And so on. But now I publicly admit that grocery-store brand frozen mango in California is plucked at the peak of flavor and texture. The stuff I'm getting here at home just doesn't measure up! 17. Going home, my inflight screen prominently announced BATMAN RETURNS as an entertainment choice and I felt it was a sign, because I had just been praising that film to Ashly AND Kate AND Adam on my exciting trip. Man, I was ready to watch it. It really struck me as the perfect airplane movie. But the screen was broken! The flight attendant, a very nice person named Davi, showed me that the kids' entertainment selection was working, anyway. "Wallace and Gromit are funny," she assured me, which might be true, I guess, but who cares? Wallace and Gromit can go to hell! I'll tell you what she did, though. I couldn't get my phone to connect to the wifi, so she entered her own password to give me special flight-attendant access to whatever the hell I was doing. I ended up watching Chaplin's A WOMAN OF PARIS, because my headphones didn't fit my phone, and a silent feature seemed to be a good option. 18. I had purposely arranged a 4-hour layover in Atlanta for reasons best left unexplored. 19. As the plane descended, the guy next to me asked if we were landing in Atlanta, which I thought was a funny question from a person on an airplane, but I said yes. 20. As I was leaving Cat Cora's airport restaurant, where the service was excellent - thank you, Ana and Winsome! (That's right, Winsome, another cool name... to Sarah, yes, Ana had but the one n in her name, I checked) - a guy stopped me and said he was a missionary. He said he could sense with his missionary powers (though he didn't put it that way) that I had had some health issues recently and he wanted to pray for me. He might have said "over" me. I said, "You can pray for me later, but I have a plane to catch now." He said it would take 10 seconds. I said all right. Wait! I should mention he was wearing a shirt that said "Fudgie Wudgie" on it. I asked him what "Fudgie Wudgie" meant. He said he was a chocolatier as well as a missionary. I said okay. He prayed over me as advertised. Then he said, "I can see the Holy Spirit all over you." I said thanks.

McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits

Why, hello. I didn't see you standing there. You're just in time for "McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits," your one place on the "internet" for McNeil and his bogie bits, so li'l, and extracted so lovingly from a 700-page biography of Humphrey Bogart that McNeil is reading. I'll hand it over to McNeil, who writes, "In 1951 Bogart and Bacall had a radio show called 'Bold Venture.' Thirty minutes once a week. It lasted about a year and made them $500k in 1951 dollars." In a subsequent email, McNeil includes a clarifying detail of the show's plot, adding just the sort of zesty zing for which his vaunted bits are so justifiably famous: "Bacall is his young charge...kinky!" McNeil's chosen adjective may be explained by the fact that Bogart and Bacall were, of course, husband and wife, whereas "young charge" is a phrase one hears more often in connection with, say, Batman and Robin, or maybe that's just me.

Art Chimp

Dr. Theresa and I watch many monster movies and such every October as part of our personal Halloween festivities, of which watching movies is the only component. So last night we watched REVENGE OF THE CREATURE, which I remembered parts of surprisingly well, though I have not seen it since I was a child and it aired, I assume, on "The Big Show," the WKRG afternoon weekday movie hosted by Max Goodman, a man in glasses and a suit. I sure remembered the part when people were having a nice time at a seafood restaurant with a spacious dance floor and then a monster strolls in! But what I wanted to say is that REVENGE OF THE CREATURE had a chimpanzee that painted paintings in it, a "trope," as I call it, to which I have alluded in my masterful fiction, ha ha ha. Here! I have quoted myself once, and I will do it again: "Henry knew that a lot of times people just pretended to like art so they could be cool. They would stand around and drink alcohol and eat weenies on toothpicks and make a big deal about some piece of junk that was supposed to be great art, but then it would turn out to be nothing but a knocked-over garbage can or a no-smoking sign or a spot on the floor where somebody had thrown up, which was a situation that Henry had observed in many comedy movies. Like the one where the supposedly great artist had trained a monkey to ride around on a tricycle with paint on the wheels, and that was how he had made his supposedly great art!" That's from my second book, and you shouldn't confuse the author with the character and so on. I must say the chimp came off pretty well in REVENGE OF THE CREATURE! There was no making fun of chimps OR artists. He just happened to be a chimp who painted! And it was fine! And no one was worried about it and no statement was made about whatever people usually make statements about.