For approximately the nine hundredth time

...in this still-young year, I am wishing that I still smoked cigarettes.

It's not a nicotine fit—it's been years since I had one, and I was never even a habitual smoker: it's just that, as the afternoon winds sullenly down into a vortex of mind-killing boredom, I'm left with nothing to do but brood.

A man who smokes can at least get up from his desk, can go for a walk, can stand out on the cold cement loading dock and watch the sky darken over the wet grey parking lot. I need to get up and walk, but I can't, because I have no vices to give me that permission.

Where you goin? Goin for a smoke.
Whatcha doin standin out here? Just came out for a cigarette.

See? Easy questions, easy answers.

But not for me.

This shouldn't make me smile

...but it does:
Man Beating Dog With Gun Shoots Himself

Score one for karma, motherfucker.

An Observation for the Day

When the fire's at its hottest—good split oak black and crackly revealing its secret red heart—the rising thermals set up a violent rushing in the flue—a sound indistinguishable from the howling of a cold wind around a cold chimney.

Potted

Hm. I'll have the reserve judgment re: the Singing Detective remake after all: director Keith Gordon is no dope, for all that he was in Jaws II...

Most interesting tidbit, though, comes from Roger Ebert as he begins his annual dispatches from Sundance—the screenplay for Gordon's film was adapted by Potter himself, as one of his last projects. It's been purposely and purposefully Americanized and updated; the writer/hero's fascination with the pop music of the 1930s has become a love for 1950s rock'n'roll. Be interesting if the film's entire cultural lens has been shifted forward: the tough-guy noir movies and crime fiction of the Fifties share a certain cultural currency with the detective pulps of the Thirties (the story's other important touchstone), but regard it from a slightly different angle—less sex, more outright desperation.

I'm optimistic, but guardedly so: though Potter himself was a teenager in the 1950s, he always identified himself with the pop culture of his parents' generation (perhaps most vividly in Pennies From Heaven, which he also adapted, not entirely successfully, for Hollywood). It will all depend on how the screenplay conveys the escapism and the nostalgia.

What is wondrous and heartening, though, is the sheer amount of work the man got done while under his "death sentence"—not only this screenplay but also the linked miniseries Karaoke and Cold Lazarus—all while caring for his wife (who was also dying of cancer) and settling his affairs, and all before early afternoon, when pain, fatigue and liquid morphine would put him away for the day.

So this could be tremendous, a genuine re-imagining of the story... or it could be the Second Coming of Cop Rock. I remain unconvinced—just as I remain unconvinced, even after watching his fine, subtle performance in Signs, that Mel Gibson can do justice to a role originated by the marvelous Bill Paterson.

It is currently warmer in Antarctica than it is here in Boston.

(Figures courtesy of a site called, belive it or not, The Weather Underground. And they say irony is dead.)

Zurich Death Trip

Learned a new word today which I probably could have done quite happily without...

ZURICH, Switzerland — A terminally-ill British man has ended his life at an "assisted suicide" clinic in Switzerland. Reginald Crew, 74, had been suffering from motor neurone disease, which he claimed had robbed him of his dignity. The former car worker flew to Zurich on Monday morning to meet representatives of Dignitas, an organisation which helps people to commit suicide.

Assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland, illegal in Britain: some social critics say this is the beginning of a new industry—death tourism.

A Little Personal Business

Many thanks and much love to Apple-Pickin' Jenny and everyone else for their kindness and concern. It's been a rough couple of weeks, yeah—the world situation playing hell on nerves already shot by personal concerns and the Old Midwinter Blues, exacerbated by a case of Big Daddy Syndrome.

Do you know this one? In her column in Child magazine, Vicki Iovine quotes a proverb: "The mother of one, the mother of all." And so by its nature motherhood has been linked to all manner of social concerns.

It holds for Dads, too—but, being guys, we tend to express our compassion (as with so many other things) as anger: and when we can't target our anger effectively, we (as with so many other things) internalize it, where it eats us up. As a father, I am in the business of Making It All Better—and when I can't, it makes me a little crazy.

But this is a war. And so we keep on fighting, crazy or not.

While Awaiting the "Which Porcaro Brother Are You" Online Quiz

I've heard the song dozens of times, but never really listened to it—hardly surprising, since it's pleasantly well-crafted but disposable soft-rock, and neither invites nor rewards undue analysis—and so the line has always just sort of washed across me: As sure as Kilimanjaro rises (something something) above the Serengeti—but this morning, that (something something) bit just jumped out at me: Did he just sing "like a limbus"?

I was excited, for a moment. What an unexpected word to find an L.A. session pro using—and it's a simile within a simile, no less. Limbus: a border or a junction, a leading edge—sometimes used to describe the shadow-line where the moon's bright face turns dark, and for a moment I'm picturing this mountain above the plain like the moonrise, and the cut of light and shadow across its face...

...and then I realize he had, in fact, sung Olympus. So he was essentially describing one big mountain in terms of another big mountain, but one located someplace else. Which is probably the stupidest simile ever.

Still, I bless the rains.

My Power Is In Your Hands

Which Colossal Death Robot Are You?

Holy cow. This is bad.

Through work, I sort of vaguely know people in New Delhi—and I knew things were hairy, there, but... there are sixteen hundred people dead. Wrap your head around that number. That's one WTC tower's worth of dead folks. Dead for the want of firewood and blankets, or even (in many cases) of four solid walls and a roof.

Nobody I know is freezing to death, of course—these are IT professionals, with I'm sure, nice apartments—but I doubt any of them have central heating, either: and why should they? New Delhi, at 28° North latitude, is firmly subtropical, and usually wouldn't get much below 60F° even in the dead of its nominal winter.

So I feel for them. I mean, we're looking at 25 below zero tonight, but we live in New England fa chrissakes—we knew what we were getting into. Freaky chillsville straight outta the Himalayas—hells no; that weren't in the contract.