Cookie Man

If I'm reading the "blog" correctly - and really, who cares? - the last time I enjoyed a TV commercial was 2011 ("click" here for all the details you're craving). TV commercials! As I have mentioned many times, Dr. Theresa and I are the last two people who will watch "broadcast television" from time to time, like we're living in Colonial Williamsburg! The advertisers have a very special set of people in mind. All the commercials are about being afraid you'll fall down in the bathtub... or medicine to take if yet another medicine you take makes your mouth twitch almost imperceptibly, causing your loved ones to scorn and abuse you... or, as McNeil has correctly observed, deodorant you can proudly and openly spray on your butt... or... and here we reach the topic under consideration... life insurance. So, in the commercial I'm thinking about, there's a guy who picks up a cookie. He almost bites it, but then his wife tells him someone died, causing him to take the cookie away from his mouth. Then, every time he almost bites the cookie, she says something else that makes him take the cookie away from his mouth. This happens four or five times. He never puts the cookie in his mouth! I won't say I enjoy the commercial, but I have to admit that I'm riveted every time I watch it. I'm like, "Let the man eat his damn cookie!" I also wonder whose idea it was. Like was the actor all, "I don't think my character would ever eat the cookie"? Or was it in the script? Unless I'm hallucinating, the commercial starts with a closeup on the plate of cookies, which might argue for the latter. You know what this reminds me of? When I was a kid, you could send in a boxtop to vote on whether or not the Trix cereal rabbit finally got to eat some Trix. I seem to recall that I perversely voted to deny the rabbit such enjoyment. My reasoning, as I recall it, was that of course they were going to let the rabbit eat the cereal (which they did). But if I voted no, and then the rabbit was not allowed to eat the cereal, I could believe in the power of a single vote. Sobering thoughts for us to mull over in our times of contemporary life we currently experience in our daily existence as it is lived among us, the living, breathing people of the times we have today.

Utter Chaos

Few of us will ever forget where we were when I saw Dianne Wiest perform in the Samuel Beckett play HAPPY DAYS. But did you know that I was tempted to stand up at the end and shout “I loved you in COOKIE!”? As I recall, I was wearing my pink jacket, which, at the time, I thought might catch Dianne Wiest’s eye as I yelled incoherently about COOKIE during the standing ovation with spittle flying out of my mouth. Please be assured that in the end, I simply clapped like a normal person and kept my fat mouth shut. I’m just listing these details to avoid the inevitable... the inevitable being something about owls. Look. We all remember The Great Owl Drought of 2023, which lasted over three months. But other times, owls just come at a person too fast. There are too many owls! And yes, I get tired of telling you about every time I read a book with an owl in it, a habit that I began for reasons long forgotten or, more accurately, repressed. Before we go on (see how I’m still putting it off?) I should explain that the illustration for this “post,” of Peter Falk and Jerry Lewis walking on the beach, was taken from my TV in 2016, if I am supposed to trust the date stamped there by my computer. And indeed I can say with certainty that it was after April of that year, at which time our former TV blew up, because this is obviously a normal widescreen TV like everyone has now, whereas our old TV that blew up was one of those square boxes so heavy that even Ace Atkins had trouble lifting it when he came over to carry it out of our house, due to our begging and pleading. But the date stamped on this photo without my knowledge or consent... why does the government want to know the last time I watched COOKIE (2016 was not the last time I watched COOKIE)? And why am I talking about COOKIE? Because the Million Dollar Book Club is reading the memoir of Susan Seidelman, who directed that movie, along with DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN and at least two other really good ones of which I am too tired to type the titles. Anyhow! When Susan Seidelman is a kid, she and her siblings huddle up and watch late, late monster movies on TV, because they are “night owls.” As you will recall, the last night owls we mentioned were from Shakespeare, and he meant owls that literally fly around at night, which is... most owls? Right? You know what? Despite your many assumptions, I am not an owl expert. But Susan Seidelman is referring to the famous metaphorical night owls, people who thrive in the wee hours. The latter, I would say, is the most common kind of owl to run across in the Million Dollar Book Club. Previous examples of this kind of night owl (hardly a comprehensive list!) include Andy Warhol, Anna Magnini, and Yoko Ono. As I bring this interesting whatever it is to a close, I will say, look! If somebody else tells me a book has an owl in it, I usually don’t include it here. If I included every owl book that people told me about secondhand, featuring owls I didn’t witness in context with my own elderly mist-filled peepers, it would be utter chaos. Utter chaos! One time this guy Brian told me about the owl in a John Le Carré novel and it was a good (if upsetting) one, so I put it on the list. But don’t let that give you any ideas! However! McNeil read a book horribly called THE RAT ON FIRE, in which someone is as “drunk as a hoot owl,” which, fine. I’ve often wondered about where the phrase or concept comes from. I’ve seen it used in a work dating back to 1177! Which is quite a while ago. I don't think I was even born yet! But no one has ever explained to me why owls are supposed to be drunk (despite at least one owl who drank schnapps in real life). So I mentioned my puzzlement to McNeil, who immediately zapped me with an answer that struck me as satisfying. As you will recall, McNeil also explained to me why the wind blows in 2008. (I feel sure he once laid out the purpose of lightning for me as well, though I can find no textual evidence of when that happened. I do believe I wrote about it in my precious diary like the sweet little thing I am. I even recall that my mom found some tragic aesthetic or philosophical fault with McNeil's electrical reasoning. Sorry, McNeil!) Anyway, here’s what old McNeil had to say, and I quote: “Maybe because owls kind of bob their heads, and when they move on a branch they do it kind of awkwardly - one step to the right, then the other leg (or claw?) follows so it looks like their whole body is bobbing up and down. This is how they move in my imagination when I am asked by the authorities to describe the movements of owls.” PS! Embarrassingly, as I compulsively looked back over the "blog" for pointless "hyperlinks" that no one will ever "click" to add to this "post," I found one in which I had already been gently guided to a similar conclusion about drunken owls... over ten years ago! Like a jerk! Similar but not identical, I hasten to stipulate! McNeil's version holds more water... or booze! Ha ha! We're having fun now! We're finally having some fun, aren't we?

Artist's Statement

Hey! Tomorrow is the big gallery show opening in Alhambra, California, so check it out! I think I forgot to mention it's ADVENTURE TIME and FIONNA AND CAKE themed, featuring works by more than 50 artists associated with those shows. My piece is called “100 Adventure Time Characters from Memory, Made with Covid.” I call it that because of all the Covid I had when I drew it with magic markers in a sketch pad that Dr. Theresa bought to cheer me up. Now, I was afraid maybe I had shortchanged the lucky buyer, if any, because, despite the ambitious title I had prematurely scrawled on the paper, I didn’t count the characters as I was drawing them, and then, after I had drawn them, I found them impossible to count. Until! Some weeks later, I struck upon the notion of identifying them all by name. Somehow, and I know how, but I’m too tired to tell you, a list of names was a much easier thing for me to count. So I’m happy to reveal that I overachieved, at least quantitatively: there are 106 Adventure Time characters in my drawing. A couple of them were driving me nuts because I couldn’t figure out, once I had recovered from my feverish agitation and actually examined what I had drawn for the first time, who the hell they were supposed to be. I worried maybe I had made some of them up in a delirium. But I thought about it all night and decided that one was a Gumball Guardian (I had forgotten they have noses) and one was the King of Ooo (I had forgotten a couple of his identifying marks, plus I had him in Princess Bubblegum’s crown, which, in my defense, he did wear for a while). Adam said I should sponsor a contest and see if anyone could guess them all. But who was a guy who was good at guessing? Oedipus? Well, he was until he wasn’t. Anyway, not even Oedipus at the height of his guessing powers could have figured some of my drawings out (Pen, for example, thought Chips and Ice Cream were Hot Dog Knights), so I’m going to tell you who I drew, in (once you see the "art") not a really helpful order: Cinnamon Bun, Hunson Abadeer, The Bear Who Liked Finn, Starchy, Tree Trunks’s Alien Husband, Little Dude, One of the Villagers from “The Visitor,” Shoko, Mr. Cupcake, Billy, Abracadaniel, Party Pat, The Comet, The Squirrel from “Up a Tree,” The Cosmic Owl, Bartram, Gridface Princess, Martin, Ice King, Y5, Banana Guard, Patience St. Pym, Flame King, The White Lion Who Became the Vampire King, Abraham Lincoln, Jermaine, Chips, Ice Cream, Lemongrab, Lady Rainicorn, Gumball Guardian, Shelby and his little brother Kent, Big Destiny, Marshmallow Kid, Blank-Eyed Girl, Peppermint Butler, Breezy, Scorcher, Simon, Original Gunter, Ice Thing, Ricardio, Mannish Man, Wildberry Princess, The Squirrel Who Hates Jake, Glob, Grod, Grob (we can assume that Gob is behind them, but I can’t in good conscience count that) Fionna, Mr. Pig, Shermy, Huntress Wizard, Snail, Sleeping Old Man (Prismo’s Physical Form), Tiffany, Princess Cookie, Finn, Joshua, Choose Goose, Toast Princess, Cherry Cream Soda, Flambeau, The Empress, Slime Princess, The Crabbit, Farmworld Finn, Betty, Toronto, Wooby Woo, Dream Warrior, Lumpy Space Princess, Lumpy Space Prince, Tree Trunks, Uncle Gumbald, An Ant, Crunchy, Glass Boy, Magic Man, Leaf Man, Banana Man, King of Ooo, TV, Wyatt, Bubble, BMO, Skeleton (from the Ble offices? Or maybe that’s a guy from the Deadworlds), Jake, Gunter (classic penguin version), Embryo Princess, Rattleballs, Mr. Fox, The Music Hole, Lemonhope, Prismo, Hot Dog Princess, Dream Bird Woman, Owl from “Up a Tree,” Loafy, James Baxter the Horse, Gingerbread Muto, Minerva, Bufo, Morty Rogers, Marceline, Princess Bubblegum. In retrospect, perhaps my biggest mistake was thinking until very recently (today!) that The Empress had one eye in the middle of her forehead like a Cyclops (though I knew better at one point). I could lie and tell you I was trying to draw Blaine from “Wizard City,” but I would only be hurting myself.

Grits

Hey! Remember how I fretted that McNeil was never going to present us with any more of his special Bogie bits? I should have known that he had his reasons! The 700-page biography of Humphrey Bogart, from which the bits were extracted, got really sad toward the end, he tells me. Then he gives us what I assume are his last few bits, and they are grim ones indeed. Grim bits, or "grits" as I call them for short. You have been warned! Writes McNeil: "I pick it up every once in a while, but it's sad when he's old before his time, and his wife is probably running around with Frank behind his back - and there's nothing he can do, really...except die." I told you it was grim! And as I have discovered for myself, after reading probably hundreds of celebrity biographies under the auspices of the Million Dollar Book Club, they all get sad toward the end. But I never learn my lesson. Hardly any celebrities get taken up bodily into Heaven like Enoch in the Bible. We should move on to happier things! Like, Adam sent Dr. Theresa and me a package of treats when we were sick. And, a week or two later, when Dr. Theresa was breaking down some cardboard boxes for recycling, she found a package of cookies in one them. A package of cookies we had overlooked somehow when we unpacked Adam's thoughtful gift. A package of cookies! Like a miracle! Is that a happy story? Because I can imagine a peevish reader, you know, Elon Musk or his teen BFF Big Balls, saying, "So what? Where's MY cookie?" Well, let's see. Speaking of the Million Dollar Book Club, we're on Kafka's diaries. So yesterday I was reading about a dream Kafka had about "a greyhound-like donkey, which was very restrained in its movements... its narrow human feet were unappealing to me because of their length and uniformity." This here donkey Kafka dreamed about had a "silvery shining breast." You know what I thought of! The supernatural creature the Padfoot, of course, a description of which provided the epigraph to my story collection MOVIE STARS. I'll save you the trouble of "clicking" on the "hyperlink": "In the neighborhood of Leeds there is the Padfoot, a weird apparition about the size of a small donkey, 'with shaggy hair and large eyes like saucers'... to see it is a prognostication of death." So we're back to death again, you're welcome. Grits!

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."

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).

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. 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.

Bible Belt

I have something else to say about that belt. So, it had a price tag on it, of course, and this price tag was the size and shape of a fortune cookie fortune. When I clipped off the price tag, I saw that it (the price tag, not the belt) had a Bible verse printed on the back of it! (See also, the bottle of water that had a Bible verse printed on it.) Now, the verse was a translation from what I took to be the New English Bible or such. That doesn't cut it around here! So I'm going to give it to you from the King James Version. As everyone knows, I'm a KJV stan. "Keep my commandments, and live; and my law as the apple of thine eye." What that has to do with the price of belts, I'm not sure. Well! As long as I have you here, McNeil read a book with an owl in it. I am sure you recall that McNeil has been going through his grandfather's old books. Before he found the owl, McNeil was primarily struck by the fact that the detective in the novel he is reading is, quote, "naked a whole lot in this book - just walking around in a dead guy's apartment talking to cops and reporters and whoever wanders in. Weird." The owl, he tells me, appears in the guise of a character who "grinned owlishly." Naturally, this put me in mind of the Travis McGee novel in which someone is said to be "smiling... like some kind of owl." Once again I find myself forced to state my belief that owls do not smile or grin. What else? Oh! McNeil has an idea for a comic book about a character he has created, Professor Moon Menace. I hesitate to reveal too much about Professor Moon Menace, but his name gives you a fair idea of some of his interests.

Television Commercials

Unlike everyone else, we still have a TV and sometimes watch "TV broadcasts" that have "commercials" in between the segments of "programming." So that's how I saw a commercial the other day for this stuff you squirt in water to give it flavor. And the commercial had this guy crawling across the desert, but he doesn't want water, exactly, he wants this stuff you squirt in water to give it flavor. And I thought WAIT A MINUTE! Because Peggy on MAD MEN pitched this same idea for Sno-Ball brand shaved ice treats, and Don thought so little of it that he dismissed it with a wave of his hand. But now, in the actual present in which we live, somebody finally thought the idea was... good enough! I would also like to say that I saw a Keebler cookie commercial where a Keebler elf is using binoculars to spy on an unsuspecting family! He says something like, "Wow, what a special family!" I may be paraphrasing slightly. But anyway, he's spying on them from a distance, using his binoculars, so it comes off a little creepy. At no point does the elf try to make ordinary contact with the family.

Karl Malden Wouldn't Sit Anywhere Else

When I go on a trip I still take my famous jotting book but I hardly jot in it anymore because I don't "blog" anymore, rendering the very act of jotting questionable. And besides, as Adam Muto rightly admonished me last time I won an Emmy (this is my subtle way of telling you that I just came back from Los Angeles with another one!) I should look up and experience the world directly rather than jotting about it while it's right there in my face. In fact, if you "click" on that previous "link" you will see a photo of me with my jotting book open and ready for jotting backstage in the immediate aftermath of the awards presentation two years ago. I'm the problem with America! But you know, I'm glad I brought the jotting book because I AM required to "blog" whenever I read a book with an owl in it, and on this trip there appeared in my path THREE books with owls in them. I couldn't believe it. It was a bonanza! Let's get right to them! Well, first I stopped by Square Books for something to read on the airplane, as I like to do. And I was drawn again to the Travis McGee novels of John D. MacDonald, though I never enjoy them the way I'm supposed to. But now I guess they say "airplane" to me because of some sick compulsion. I picked up this one called DARKER THAN AMBER and I was like, "This seems familiar." Because they all seem familiar. And the titles are interchangeable. So I put it back on the shelf and went home empty-handed. And I sat there and thought, why do I know that title? And I poked around on the "blog" and saw that my friend McNeil had mentioned DARKER THAN AMBER as being particularly sexist. But as far as I could tell from my own "blog" I hadn't read it, and perversely I decided to get it and see if McNeil was right. And McNeil was right! In fact, I would argue that Travis McGee goes beyond (?) mere misogyny into a psychotic fear of sex. Now, of course, we can't confuse the author with his creation, but I would argue that McGee is presented as an aspirational character. "Jake leaned back on his heels and stared up at me, like a man admiring a tall building," is a typically modest self-description by our narrator. And now please forgive me but I'm going to quote just a smidgen of the misogyny so you won't think I'm exaggerating. You have been warned. Here we find catalogued McGee's disapproval of women who have had too many boyfriends: "she suffers a sea change wherein her juices alter from honey to acid, her eyes change to glass, her heart becomes a stone, and her mouth a windy cave from whence, with each moisturous gasping, comes a tiny stink of death." What! What kind of writing do you call that? Moisturous! Moisturous? It has a certain purple tone that KNOWS it has a tone (A CERTAIN PURPLE TONE sounds like the title of a Travis McGee novel)... hmm... a tone approaching parody, but wanting it both ways... what is called in the business "kidding on the square," as I was once informed by Rob Schneider. Ha ha! But "tiny stink of death"? That's one of the grossest phrases I've come across. And later McGee refers to a woman's mouth as a "round horror-hole," okay? A ROUND HORROR-HOLE. Wow, I'm forgetting the owl. Weren't we talking about owls? McGee says that the eye of a corpse is "like a cheap glass eye in a stuffed owl." And you know what color that eye is? "Darker than amber," that's what color. So I was lying in bed reading this in the hotel room and Dr. Theresa was lying there too reading her own book - what a picture of contentment I am sure we made! - and she said, "Hey! This has an owl in it!" The owl in her book, she said, flew right into an inn and caused much consternation and dialogue. So! I finished Travis McGee and started a book of Sam Shepard short stories I had picked up at Skylight during one of our jaunts across the city. And in the very first story, some owls settle into a eucalyptus tree. So anyway that is a lot of owls in a lot of books for one trip. Speaking of Skylight Books! I ran into the actor Steve Little there, forced a copy of my most recent story collection on him (they had a couple of copies) and kind of harassed him until he fled the store. This is an accurate depiction of events. And speaking of Sam Shepard! So, T-Bone Burnett was one of the presenters at the Creative Arts Emmys, and I was determined to meet him at the ball following the show. And I did! Megan Abbott and I had been reading Sam Shepard's ROLLING THUNDER LOGBOOK, in which T-Bone Burnett appears, leading me to make the following brilliant remark to the distinguished musical icon of whom I have been a lifelong fan: "I saw a picture of you dressed up like a wizard!" (See above.) I'm getting everything out of order.

Let me check my jotting book and see which of my sparse jottings I've left out. Oh, went back to Dan Tana's and got the same booth. I was like, "Hey, I liked that booth when I was here before, can we have it?" And the maître d' was like, sure! "Karl Malden wouldn't sit anywhere else," he informed us. So here we are sitting where Karl Malden would be sitting were he still among the living. But he can't do a thing about it now! Photo by my brother. Well, I'm flipping through these pages and I hardly jotted anything, it turns out. I'm not sorry. On the plane ride to Los Angeles I was sufficiently convinced that my Biscoff cookie bore the face of a holy saint to request that Dr. Theresa take a photo of it, which she gamely did.

Clink

And now it comes to pass that I must tell you how I went to New York City for the Peabody Awards ceremony and all the marvels and wonders that the Good Lord did cause me to witness there. I know the first thing you want to know is "WHAT DID YOU READ ON THE AIRPLANE?" Calm down! Thanks to my precious book of jottings, I can tell you everything. 1. That cursed book about the Middle Ages got me thinking about THE DECAMERON. Wouldn't you know that Bill Boyle, knowing of my keen interest, purchased me a nice chunky mass-market paperback - perfect for airplanes - that promised "the complete text of this ravishingly rich and robust work." So I started reading THE DECAMERON and the guy starts right off about how people are dying like goats in the street. But he's quick to reassure us that he has to get that part out of the way so the fun stuff can start! 2. I turned down a Biscoff offered to me by a flight attendant! The world's greatest cookie. All part of my ongoing effort to button my suit for the Peabody Awards. 3. Met Megan Abbott at the Temple Bar, a great bar of the darkest kind, where I had the most refreshing gimlet of my young life. I mean, it was a dark bar. Megan took pics of our drinks and gee just look how dark they are.

Having sworn off hooch for two weeks (part of the aforementioned jacket buttoning resolution) I was ready for some gimlets. Kent Osborne showed up! And soon enough, Pendleton Ward! A fellow there in the Temple Bar pooh-poohed the artistry of BARRY LYNDON and I cursed him succinctly! That's not like me. OR IS IT? Pen drew several pictures of me on coasters and gave them to Megan. They were much like the religious icons of yore, immortalizing my various stages of peacefulness and cursing. In one of them I have my arm around Kent and I believe I am saying of him, "This guy is the king of love." I'll show you that one. The others are hilarious and I will keep digital copies of them for my own enjoyment and, perhaps, edification, but I shall never show them in public, festooned as they are with the vilest profanities. 4. We went to the hotel, where Pen taught Megan to rhumba! There is a vine of it happening if you would care to "click" here to see it. 5. Then Pen taught me to rhumba (as he had once promised to do). He had to remind me not to lead. He warned me before he dipped me. Today I don't remember how to rhumba. 6. On the bathroom wallpaper in the hotel room: whimsical black-and-white line drawings of wry cartoon birds. Closer inspection revealed that a previous guest had taken a pencil and decorated random birds here and there with graphic bits of anatomy I shan't shock you by naming.

7. Now here's the part about the Peabody Awards. I wore a tie pin that Megan had given me the night before at the Temple Bar. This picture was supposed to show off the tie pin for Megan (that's why I'm pointing) but you can't see it. It's in the shape of a cigarette lighter! 8. Before we left for the Peabodys, Pen's mom gave all of us really nice pens! Because her son's name is Pen, as she explained, and also because of our professions. Very thoughtful! 9. Now look. Here is the gang who went up onstage to get the Peabody Award for ADVENTURE TIME.

You can see that we are all dudes. I feel very lucky to have been invited, but I am also sorry for whatever quirk of timing or fate or scheduling or process that means you don't see any of the women here who are so integral to giving ADVENTURE TIME its voice. The show wouldn't be the same without Seo Kim (last night's episode was a perfect example!) or Rebecca Sugar or Natasha Allegri or Ako Castuera or Ashly Burch or Elizabeth Ito, and I could name many, many other women, past and present contributors to the show, who put their personal stamp on it and just as easily could have been up there with Pen and Adam and Kent. Not taking away at all from the immense talent of the guys you see assembled above. In fact there are infinite combos of women AND men absent from that picture who would be just as appropriate to share that stage with Adam and Pen and Kent (three people who should be in ANY picture celebrating the show). Once again, I feel really lucky that it happened to work out that I could attend. But I'm getting ahead of myself chronologically; don't you want to hear about the delicious pigs in blankets they had at the pre-Peabody reception? The server called them "cocktail franks." 9b. Speaking of bad chronology, and speaking of Natasha, she tweeted this last night: "bury me with my husband hugging me." That reminded me of the "Classics Illustrated" comic book of THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, which I probably haven't thought of in at least 40 years. So I dug up the final panel, and boy what an impression it must have made on me, because it's just the way I remember it:

To which, when I tweeted it back at her, Natasha responded: "so romantic!!! so romantic that i can't think of a good bone joke!" And that's just one reason I love Natasha. 10. Fred Armisen hosted the show. Remember when I met him before he was famous and he was just some non-famous guy having a sour day? 11. We stood backstage behind Amy Schumer and her gang, who were to receive their award just before us. Tina Fey was there! Kent pointed her out to me but I could only see a vague figure gracefully flitting in the dark.

12. Steven Soderbergh was at the table next to ours! I told him how much Dr. Theresa and I love THE LIMEY and he said, "That's not something I hear very often." Ha ha ha! Here's a shot from Dr. Theresa's very favorite scene in THE LIMEY. 13. And at another adjacent table sat Ray McKinnon.

You remember him from beating up George Clooney in O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU! I met him at the Ajax Diner here in Oxford, Mississippi, a couple of years ago, so I was able to strike up a little conversation about some mutual friends of ours. Sadly, I didn't get a chance to introduce him to Tom Herpich, who is a huge fan of Mr. McKinnon's TV show RECTIFY. I missed my window on that! Boy did I feel guilty. For a good portion of the "after party" I chased Mr. McKinnon around like the prince going after Cinderella, but I never found him. I really wanted to introduce him to Tom. I apologized to Tom perhaps to a point at which I should have begun apologizing for apologizing, which I may have also done. 14. Ray McKinnon wasn't the only Peabody recipient I knew from home. Isn't that weird? Tina Antolini was there to pick up an award for a radio show she works on. And I've had drinks with her at City Grocery Bar! Oxford is weird. 15. The Adventure Time folks rode to the show in a stretch limo that had tiny lights on the ceiling that kept changing color. I said, "I want the inside of my coffin lid to look like this." And Pen's mom said, "That's the sixth joke you've made about death!" 15b. Somewhat related: I guess after I went to bed on that previous night, the night before the Peabodys, a few people stayed in the hotel bar and Pen decided with some passion that we should all dress as English peas for the Peabody ceremony. These would be, then, our "pea bodies." And according to Kent, it came close to happening, if only a quick enough delivery had been possible. Look at the casual morbidity of this tweeted report:

"ADAM!! We're all gonna die in 30 years! ORDER THE PEAPOD SUITS!" - Pendleton Ward

— Patrick McHale (@Patrick_McHale) May 31, 2015

16. I talked to Amy Schumer at the Peabody "after party." I was curious about the dynamic in an interview I'd seen her do with Jerry Seinfeld. I think I kind of put down Jerry Seinfeld...? For being "old-fashioned"? Ha ha! I don't know what I was talking about. Why was I trying to subtly badmouth Jerry Seinfeld? What did he ever do to me except try to make my life a little nicer? Amy Schumer told me that he's like her best friend now, pretty much, so I was like, "Okay!" I kept clinking her glass with mine, like giving her a toast, every time I told her how great she was. Ha ha ha! What a jerk. I just kept habitually clinking her glass each time I made another expression of genuine if hackneyed praise. I suddenly realized I had clinked her glass about half a dozen times and I apologized. She was nice and said, "No, I like it."

17. Okay! So after you go onstage, you're led to a "press area" and you miss most of the rest of the show. (We've completely abandoned chronology now, who cares?) When I finally got back to the audience area, my chair was gone! The ADVENTURE TIME table had one less chair. So I went and sat on the other side of the room with the people from the show Radiolab. I have to say they were the nicest, sweetest bunch of people at the Peabodys! Everybody loved talking to them. They love ADVENTURE TIME and Pen feels just the same way about their show. I have a lot of happy memories of riding around in a car with my brother and my nephews and all of us just enjoying Radiolab. So, anyway, those people are just as nice as you might think. They let me sit at their table a long time! 18. I have to say this about the Peabody Awards: the people who win them are doing serious work! This one guy came out and introduced his friend who shared the stage with him. The Chinese authorities had tried to take her bodily organs! Just take them! I mean, what can you say? And here she is. It's a miracle she's alive. And there was another winner who showed a clip of a beautiful child singing a song about freedom, and as she's singing, a bomb suddenly destroys the street she's standing on. Just right at that moment! It was one of the most powerful and visceral things I've ever seen and it was an introductory clip at an awards show. And I want to say this about Pen: he watched all of those documentaries in their entirety to prepare for the show. Pen is a man with great perspective. He cares about the world and that's one thing that makes his work so personal and good. 19. Pat McHale was part of the ADVENTURE TIME contingent, so I got to meet him for the first time and he was a treat to be around. I talked about how much I loved his casting of Jack Jones as a crooning frog in his masterpiece OVER THE GARDEN WALL and after saying a lot of nice things about Jack Jones, he began to analyze Rudy Vallee's singing technique.

You can't know, as an old man who works with young people all the time, what a tonic it was to my poor heart to hear a fresh-faced youngster such as Pat McHale rhapsodize about Rudy Vallee. IT JUST DOESN'T HAPPEN IN MY LINE OF WORK. Then Pat said that his grandmother had been a dancer at Radio City Music Hall! He said she had a problem with Frank Sinatra... something about how he handled a microphone. 20. Now I'm going to type about how I ate a lot of good vegetables. Ha ha ha! Vegetables! Too bad for you. I went to a place that had great fresh seasonal vegetables. Tom Herpich brought us there. And pleased were one and all by his felicitous choice. Lunch with Kent and Pat and Adam and Tom. Kent was talking about the films of Eric Schaeffer, which he finds morally, emotionally and aesthetically repugnant.

I hope I am not misrepresenting Kent's opinion! Blame me, not Kent. Let's say that I am not sufficiently describing Kent's complex attitude. Anyway, Kent was describing a particularly pornographic obsession that haunts Mr. Schaeffer's oeuvre and I said, "Hey, Kent, there are some little kids at that table over there!" and Kent said, "They have to learn about Eric Schaeffer sometime." Ha ha! Kent's witty implication was that the very idea of Eric Schaeffer was the offensive part of the conversation, you see. The next day my old friend Ward McCarthy suggested the very same place for lunch and I was only too happy to go back. I was excited! Like, "I will try different vegetables this time!" Vegetables! 21. I had eaten so many vegetables that I felt no guilt whatsoever about the mountain of fried clams I consumed that evening at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station. Clams are something we just don't have in the South... or shouldn't. I recall a time that Caroline Young and I had clams in a seedy dive in Atlanta, GA, with unspeakable results. BUT! I am getting both ahead of and behind my story. It's not a story, is it? 22. Megan and I went to MOMA and saw Martin Scorsese's collection of movie posters, which were on display. Here's one for THE KILLERS, the Don Siegel version, and I am standing under Lee Marvin's legs, I guess.

But you can't see the guy so there is some possibility that I am standing under Ronald Reagan's legs. They could be Clu Gulager's leg's too. I would rank the possibilities like this: first, Lee Marvin, second Clu Gulager. There is really very little chance that I am standing under Ronald Reagan's legs. Honestly, they are abstract legs and could belong to any "killer." 23. We went up to the Yoko Ono exhibit, which I found to be a barrel of fun! I just loved it. I can't speak for Megan. She would go around a corner and come back and command me, "Don't go around that corner, Jack!" Later, telling Dan about our day, she described whatever was around that corner as "very gynecological." She was looking out for me! Well, Megan I both saw the movie of the waddling butt that just waddles along and I guess we averted our eyes from it most of the time. It doesn't do anything but waddle along, we got the gist. I believe Megan read the placard next to it, in which the waddling was described as "a sexless march," if I am remembering what Megan read aloud correctly. But I found Yoko Ono's art to be fresh and fun. Once again, I cannot speak for Megan. 24. But I was disappointed that Yoko's apple was in pristine shape. There's an apple on a pedestal and (I think) it's just supposed to stay there until it rots. I have to say, that is one hale apple she has there! In sadly perfect condition. 25. As we were leaving the exhibit, we had a chance to participate in the "bag performance." There were two "facilitators" there and no line. Megan urged me to do it. But the bare feet of the facilitators seemed ominous and then Megan and I read the plaque and discovered that we were expected to take off all our clothes and get in a bag together and, I don't know, stumble around. We didn't. 26. Speaking of facilitators, Megan took me to St. Patrick's cathedral to show off its beauty. She said the lines on Ash Wednesday had been crazy! But once you got inside it was very efficient, with 25 ash stations, and 25 priests - facilitators, I call them - just throwing that ash on you in frenzied handfuls (from what I imagined were large buckets); sounded like to me they had a real penitence factory going there.

27. After dinner at the Oyster Bar, Megan and Dan and I went to the famous 21 Club for a nightcap. I remembered from reading (as much as could of) that Errol Flynn autobiography that something big happened to Errol Flynn at the 21 Club... either an unexpected moment of graciousness from a kind friend or stranger at his lowest point of abjection or maybe he beat up some guys there, or maybe both! 28. So the mural in the men's room at the 21 Club is hard to understand. It shows a guy peeing into a goldfish bowl. I'm pretty sure! From an impressive distance. And the goldfish is surprised and for some reason a lady's skirt is flying up. Also in surprise? And as long as we are talking about restrooms, let's go back to the Oyster Bar, in which Megan snapped this shot of a sofa in the Ladies' Room:

29. Megan's nightcap conversation at the 21 Club! She said that she's a direct descendant of Mary, Queen of Scots! Probably the least surprising news I've ever heard. Then she said, "You know, Frances Farmer never got a lobotomy." I'm pretty sure that came out of nowhere. "After she went on a binge," said Megan, "she said to the arresting officer, 'Hasn't anyone ever broken your heart?'" Then Megan asked us rhetorically, "Doesn't that just kill you?" And it did! It killed us.

Dog Cookie Faint

Did you know there was a sitcom starring Robert Mitchum and NATURAL BORN KILLERS' Juliette Lewis? Me neither! McNeil sent me a bunch of sad stuff from the last part of a Robert Mitchum biography, most of it so sad I'm not going to even tell you. I believe I've mentioned before that every biography of a dead person gets sad toward the end. I'm not even going to tell you the name of the sitcom because I don't want you to go searching for it and watching it the way McNeil forced me to do. Forced me! So Robert Mitchum is a formerly homeless man who is also the grandfather to some kids, and he goes to the grocery store and comes back with a bunch of junk food. Juliette Lewis disapproves! She shows a snack cake to the dog and the dog pretends to faint in disgust. A little girl pops out of a grocery bag! And I guess some other stuff happens. (Hey, I don't know why, but there are a lot of images on the "internet" of Juliette Lewis dressed up like this.)