Year: 2006

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Happyish Anniversary!

Today marks the one-year anniversary of my dad’s quintuple bypass (or clock-resetting, as he calls it). He’s recovered pretty well, but he’s gotten kinda sedentary again, which led to piling on some weight. He also doesn’t seem to attach any psychological significance to the fact that he’s been compulsively buying “designer” watches off of Ebay.

Anyway, Dr. Praeger’s procedure has bought time for Dad, for which I’m thankful. Pop’s also finally booted his cardiologist, who had the charm (and appearance) of a used car dealer from 1982. I haven’t made enough time for Dad lately; not like the first few months after surgery, when I was over at his place after work, getting him on the treadmill, talking him through Jim Cramer’s stock advice.

Coincidentally, I read this article about Philip Roth’s new book, Everyman, today. It’s about old age and mortality:

“Old age isn’t a battle,” the protagonist thinks to himself after calling a former colleague who is dying in a hospice. “Old age is a massacre.”

“This book came out of what was all around me, which was something I never expected — that my friends would die,” Mr. Roth said. “If you’re lucky, your grandparents will die when you’re, say, in college. Mine died when I was a schoolboy. If you’re lucky, your parents will live until you’re somewhere in your 50’s; if you’re very lucky, into your 60’s. You won’t ever die, and your children, certainly, will never die before you. That’s the deal, that’s the contract. But in this contract nothing is written about your friends, so when they start dying, it’s a gigantic shock.”

Reminds me of that line from Fight Club: “On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”

Dad, meanwhile, was giving himself milestones, in the “I just have to live until . . .” dates, like his grandkids’ visit last summer, or my wedding last March. Now that there are no big events to “live until,” he has to start living for each day.

If I have to tell the rest of you again to make the most of the time you have, I don’t know what I’m gonna do. . .

(More coincidentally, my iTunes just shuffled onto “O, Death,” by Ralph Stanley. You know I wouldn’t make up something so obvious.)

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Park it

Conference over! Now my boss & I head off to the Tigers-Angels game! For those of you scoring at home (ha-ha), this is the ninth ballpark I’ve visited (Yankees, Mets, Baltimore, Philly, Toronto, Oakland, Seattle, San Diego); there may be a Fenway visit (grr) in June, too.

Back in 2002, after breaking up with a LONGtime girlfriend, I plotted out a driving trip to hit 7 or 8 ballparks in 9 or 10 days. I thought about it pretty seriously, but concluded that a solo drive that long probably would’ve left me talking to myself WAY too much. I’m glad to do it this way, visiting parks when business-travel brings me around.

I only wish I’d scalped tickets a few Sundays ago for the Cubs-Cards game at Wrigley.

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Athens, Jerusalem and Gillette

I’m here in the Real O.C.! I haven’t seen Peter Gallagher’s eyebrows anywhere, nor Kristin Cavallari’s roots, but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.

During the flight, I watched No Maps for These Territories, a documentary about William Gibson. I’m ruminating on that one, and might write a lengthy, rambling take on it next weekend. Harass me about it, so I can formulate some more.

Also, I read a pair of short columns that I think you might like, and that seem somehow intertwined. I haven’t gone to Arts & Letters much lately; not sure why. But Amy hit it this weekend and came across both of these pieces, so all credit goes to the official VM wife.

The first is a review of Harold Bloom’s Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, which explores Bloom’s visions and revisions on the relationship between the Old and New Testaments:

Bloom interprets the trinity as an essentially polytheistic “structure of anxiety” in which God the Father—whom Bloom finds “lacking in personality”—is a mere shade of Yahweh. Yahweh, “the West’s major literary, spiritual, and ideological character,” has not, according to Bloom, “survived in Christianity.” In J’s portrait—the earliest biblical layer—Yahweh is “anxious, pugnacious, aggressive, ambivalent,” not to mention all too often absent. But unlike Jesus Christ and God the Father, he is emphatically not a theological God. Indeed, Bloom asserts that “no God has been more human.”

The other piece is about wet shaving, Homer, and the possibility of redemption. I can’t begin to do it justice.

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Absentia

Sorry to be posting so infrequently, dear reader. This headcold’s been whomping me, and I’ve been on a rough production schedule for the magazine. On top of that, I have to head out to Anaheim on Sunday for another conference. I’m guessing that the architecture won’t quite match up to Chicago’s.

We’ll catch up next week, sometime.

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Someday, only meth users won’t be congested

The true cost of the War on Drugs was the 3 minutes of my life that were wasted in CVS on my lunch break when I bought some decongestant.

I had to bring a product-card to the front checkout so they could give me the decongestant. Then was told I had to sign a registry book with my name, address, time of purchase, and quantity of pseudoephedrine.

So I’m afraid that “Ambulatory P. Groin” of “1313 Mockingbird Ln.” might find himself getting a visit from the DEA sometime soon. He probably shouldn’t have bought “one pound” of the product, but hey.

(I wonder what expression the clerk would have had if I walked up with 200 product-cards and dumped them on the counter. I swear: when I get over this headcold, I oughtta start a meth lab. This is worse than those Truth commericals.)

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Bald Win!

I follow Page 6 in the New York Post pretty devotedly. I’ve never been one for the supermarket tabloids & gossip mags, with their overriding fixation with pregnancy, but Page 6 usually gets is just right, with embarrassing celebrity stories, blind items that Amy & I occasionally suss out, and a seeming moratorium on Paris Hilton items.

I don’t link to the items because they go dead within a week, and it always makes me sad to look over blog-archives and find dead links. I’ve got issues.

Anyway, in the past week, Page 6 raised an interesting question in the VM household. See, a few months ago, there was an item about Stephen Baldwin’s residence in near(ish)by Nyack, NY. Baldwin, a born-again Christian, so objected to a local porno store, he began writing down the license plates of cars in its parking lot, for publication in the local paper.

Last week, the column reported that Baldwin’s moving out of Nyack for another town in Westchester. The thing is, the item referred to him as “the least-famous Baldwin.”

Well, we thought, it’s pretty easy to say that Alec‘s the best known, but what about the rest? I know Daniel Baldwin best from his crack-binge blowout a few years ago, but Amy sez he’s pretty well known from being on Homicide.

But Billy? More famous than Stephen? Sure, he’s married to Chynna Phillips, but could we really say that Billy’s Dagwood Bumstead haircut in Sliver outranked the “Oswald was a pussy” line from The Usual Suspects?

Fortunately, a week later, they followed up with an item referring to Stephen as “[t]he third-most famous of the acting Baldwin brothers,” which sounds better. Unfortunately, the item was about how Baldwin’s actually moving because he’s stuck for cash.

All of which gets me to this weekend’s movie revelation: The Cooler. Sure, William H. Macy was great as a down-on-everybody’s-luck casino jinx, and Maria Bello was flat-out great to look at, but Alec Baldwin was absolutely fantastic as the casino owner. I was amazed at how he devoured the role without playing up the “Look at me! I’m Alec Baldwin!” face. He seemed to revel in the past-his-prime-ness of the character.

He’ll always be the most famous of the Baldwins to me. Even if Page 6 reports more terrible details of his custody fights with Kim Basinger.