Holiday Cheer (right)

Well work is nuts and they got rid of someone else when I wasn’t looking. Merry Christmas everybody. Sheesh.

Was shopping last night

As a confession I have to say I do love New York this time of year – I would like it to be a little colder (it’s winter come on 45-50 degrees just aint cuttin’ it) and some snow – A fresh coat of snow and Central Park is beautiful - but I do enjoy the lights and the tree and the decorations and the windows in Macy’s, Lord and Taylor and Saks – I love the whole Rockefeller center ambiance during the holiday and even the crowds of tourists walking along in slow groups looking up with their mouths open. Even the garishness fits this time of year. Yeah NYC can be a total pain to live and work in. It’s expensive, people can be staggeringly rude, and it can make you hard bitter cause the place just never lets up but it’s my home. I feel more at home here than I ever did all those years in the suburbs. Don’t quite know why – maybe not enough contact speed rush on the streets of my old town.

I note the Joint Chiefs of Staff are questioning our leader’s plan to send some 20-50,000 more troops and have them wander around and get shot at for a while (there doesn’t seem to be much more to the plan than that) pointing out the men would not be fresh troops but either troops whose rotation in Iraq will be extended or troops who were already scheduled to got to Iraq having their deployment to Iraq accelerated. This means these are going to be guys on their second or third tour of hell. These won’t be fresh troops like people are pretending, these are going to be burnt out stretched thin units with worn out and broken equipment that have had their edge removed banging them against the rock that is Iraq.

Finally finished Christmas shopping – thank you internet – however did pick up one book for me – Colin Wilson’s Atlantis and the Kingdom of the Neanderthals – in which he postulates that the Neanderthals come from Atlantis.

Say what?

Yeah. Pretty much my reaction too. But I roll around in these books like catnip. God Sometimes I think other than the good looks, the sister abducted by aliens, the FBI job and the porn addiction, I am Agent Mulder from the X Files. There is hardly a book too weird for me not to read. (Although this is getting damn close to that edge) – I suppose this is my printed word version of my bad movie fetish.

The book is by Colin Wilson who after showing up in the fifties as an infant terrible of the British literary scene with his book on alienation and existential angst The Outsider has become an almost stereotypical English eccentric writing on anything that he finds interesting with a decided slant towards the occult and paranormal. He’s a competent writer and a little mad (in an entertaining way) so this should be interesting.

I’m not going to dismiss the idea he has out of hand but as I like to say, while this is possible, it’s highly unlikely. I’ve noticed that a lot of these books jump from – is it possible (to which the answer is above) to the next point acting as if they had proved their first point by asking “is it possible” at which point the alert reader needs to press a buzzer and demand time out.

I was going to do Mothra today but it doesn’t look like I will have to time – maybe tonight as a separate blog.

Listening to the Television Personalities – which are about as depressing as you can get. Which is odd I’m not in that down a mood but there you are and there they are playing away.

The Television Personalities are basically Dan Trecy and whoever is in the band with him at the time and since about 1977 has been writing and performing some very distinct diy punk style. While I love his stuff. He really can’t sing but he doesn’t care and since I own all his albums I guess I don’t care either.

He is very good at evoking a sense of lingering loss and regret for something good that is gone – usually a love or a time – or odd little twee things like “I know were Syd Barrett lives”.

His melancholy is real he’s struggled with depression, and drug abuse and ended up in prison for a time for drugs. He was out of sight for so long that folks wondered if he was living in some cottage in Cambridge like Syd did in his final days. But it turned out it was the depression, drugs and then prison that kept him out of the public eye.

I’m not sure if artists have any special disposition towards self destructive behavior – a lot of stock brokers in the 80’s and 90’s put vast amounts of their money straight up their nose and you would hardly call them artistic types. Still there are times that you feel like an exposed nerve ending or like a little boat on stormy lake being swept this way and that by your own powerful emotional responses - and to numb that down for hour or two you feel is worth the brain cells. But that way leads to a double trap – one you get cut off from your emotions and you get addicted. It’s process that has destroyed a lot of good people.

I’d rather go with the emotional storm – the excellence of Mai Tai’s not withstanding.

This is the end of the year and people are waving papers in my face. It’s like every two minutes I ‘have’ to get something done. But in order to maintain my own sanity I’m adopting this rule:

Co-worker: This has to get done today. It’s an emergency.
Me: when you say emergency do you mean that if I don’t do this the earth will suddenly stop rotating and we will all be flung into space and die.
Co-worker: Ah no.
Me: Then it’s not an emergency.

Actually I can’t say that – I do want to keep my job – but oh boy do I think it.

“If I had three wishes, I‘d ask for three more” Three Wishes – from the TV Personalities “They Could have been bigger than the Beatles”

Later

Peace Love, Paisley shirts.

That's a Dalek - has nothing to do with anything I wrote today.