Mixed Nuts

Not much in the way of pop-culture blather to report. Last night TCM ran Mark Rydell's film adaptation of William Faulkner's last novel, The Reivers, but I tuned in late, and it was dinnertime so I was away from the telly for most of it. In any case, I realized that my memories of the novel were too vague for me to have any meaningful notion of how good an adaptation it was. I must have read the book at least a quarter-century ago, and I admit I didn't get as much out of it as I should have. I was a big fan of Faulkner's, and went into it with the wrong set of expectations, not realizing until many years later that it was intended to be a comedy, not the kind of southern gothic drama that I was used to from Uncle Billy. I kept asking myself, as I read, what was wrong with this picture? Well, what was wrong was me.

Beyond that, all I can say for certain is that Steve McQueen seems an odd choice for Boon Hogganbeck, but Will Geer is just perfect for Faulkner, and Burgess Meredith's narrations are a pleasure.

After that, I watched just enough of last year's "re-imagining" of Sherlock Holmes to know that it wasn't worth wasting any time out of  my life over. I normally like Robert Downey, Jr., but he's woefully miscast here, and with his fake British accent I couldn't understand a word he was saying. That was actually the best part of the movie. I could tell from the opening frames that this was going to be a stink bomb, but I toughed out about ten or fifteen minutes before I turned off the set and got back to unpacking.

Oh, and I did sit through the remake of Ray Harrihausen's Clash of the Titans on Saturday night. It's better acted and more dramatically sound than the original (Lord Olivier really sleepwalked through that one), although it's still quite nonsensical -- and I'm sorry, but although it allows the director more fluidity in which to frame a shot, the computer-generated special effects don't hold a candle to Harryhausen's techniques.

I spent most of Saturday and Sunday at the old house, packing and packing so that I would have enough not just for a load each day, but enough so that I could swing by on Monday and Tuesday and just load up the car without having to take the time to pack more. I'm really making strides. All my books are packed, the big closet is cleaned out, the built-in shelves are bare. The house is growing more and more eerie, an empty, silent place. I believe that I'll only need a couple more weekends to pack up everything that's coming with me. Then the auction house needs to be called back in, to clean out what they want. Still, there will be quite a lot left over. My lawyer says she knows someone who will take the rest. But I'm tempted to just throw the keys in my sister's face and say to her, "It's all yours. Take anything you want and clean the rest out, give the keys to the new owners when they come. I'm never coming back."

I was able to get a light carriage sofa into my car, now the cats have something comfortable to sit on in the new house. I'll have to move it when the real furniture comes in, but for now they like it much better than just a blanket on the floor!

The move is scheduled for Wednesday. Of course, the weather weenies are predicting snow. I've reached the point where I don't care. I need my furniture now. If the moving company cancels on me one more time, I'm going to use a different moving company. I can't find anything because I can't unpack. Boxes are piling up where the furniture must go. This move has reached critical mass.

I enjoy living in town. I've typed this before, but it bears repeating: winters at the old house were made harder by the feeling of living on the moon, being in the middle of nowhere. Our nearest neighbors were half a mile away. The forests and fields were barren and still when covered by snow. I would look out of the windows on a soundless night and feel completely alone.

In town, it never gets completely dark. There's a streetlight at the end of my driveway, and many of my neighbors never turn off their porch lights. I'm sure that the Tigers Whitestockings and Grumpyface appreciate this, as do I. There's an ambient glow to the night sky from all the lights, public and private. I look out of the windows and see just enough trees and woodland to make it seem homey and comfortable, but I also see the homes of neighbors, windows discreetly curtained, and cars rolling up and down the hill. I am still alone, but I am alone in the world instead of out of it.

Felines and Film

On Wednesday night, before making a run out to the old house, I fed the cats inside and out. Tiger Whitestockings, now quite relaxed, was waiting on the deck steps for her dinner. By the time I left, she had eaten her fill and disappeared, leaving about half a plate of food behind.

When I returned at around nine PM, the plate was clean. Clearly, another cat. One of the neighborhood cats? Or -- ?

Last night when I got home from work, a Tiger Quat was sitting at the bottom of the steps. I thought it was Tiger Whitestockings. But when I got out of the car and approached, she ran away from me, to the other side of the driveway. I heard a meow from under the deck, and Whitestockings came out through her special Secret Entrance. I looked at the cat on the other side of the drive. It was Tiger Grumpyface! -- and she was looking back at me as if to say, "Uh-uh, you ain't getting me in that car again and takin' me someplace I don' know where!"

When I set their dinner out and walked away, she came and ate. Clearly, she and Whitestockings remembered each other.

So -- I'm now marking down the Transplantation of the Outside Quats as a complete success! And the crowd roars!

Last night after dinner I unloaded the car and settled down for what turned out to be a long night of telly. Someone was airing Eyewitness, the 1981 noir thriller starring William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver and Christopher Plummer. I'd never seen it, even though it's been on my list since its original release (that's thirty years! I couldn't get over how young everyone looked!).

Was it worth the wait? Well. . . kind of.

It's well directed (by Peter Yates) and shot, in a style that feels fresh compared to contemporary cinema, where absolutely everything is done with computers and everything looks the same. As you might guess from the names, it's well-acted, too. I don't think Sigourney Weaver has ever looked better than she does in this picture, and that's saying something. The plot is fairly conventional, but structured well. And there's a fascinating (if a bit silly) climactic confrontation in a city stable.

 But the thing that really lumbers this one is the script. Much of the dialogue ranges from obvious dumb cliches to laughable stupidity. I think my favorite examples of the latter are Morgan Freeman introducing himself as "Lieutenant Black. That should be easy to remember," and  Hurt breaking up with his girlfriend:

"I don't love you."

"You're just saying that to make me feel better."

"No, really, I don't love you."

This stuff is absolutely cringe-inducing! It's funny that I dumped on  Steve Tesich just the other day in a post on this blog -- and here we have another lousy script from the same guy! I remember seeing him on The Dick Cavett Show around the time Garp was released. Cavett treated him as some kind of a Wunderkind. I think that he can't write his way out of a paper bag. It's sad to see actors of this caliber having to wrap their tongues around lines as terrible as Tesitch gives them.

So -- yeah, I'm glad to have finally seen it. But I won't be buying the DVD!

From there, I sampled a few other shows and gave up on them, before finally settling on something genuinely outrageous.

Sometimes a movie comes along that just offends every sensibility you have. You walk out, or turn it off, and try to forget all about it, if you can. Then, sometimes, a movie comes along that offends every sensibility you have -- and makes you like it! My friend BC said it best in his review of a movie called Trainspotting: "You can't believe what you're looking at, and you can't believe that you're laughing."

Such a movie is Zack and Miri Make a Porno. In a nutshell, it's an outrageously filthy version of a Mickey Rooney / Judy Garland "Let's put on -- a SHOW!" romantic comedy. The title says it all: two platonic friends decide to go into the porn business for themselves, and in the process fall in love.

By rights, it just shouldn't work. Some of the things I was exposed to last night are just -- just -- wrong! And yet I laughed like crazy, sometimes with my mouth open in astonishment, and when the credits began to roll I had a really big smile on my face. As offensive as the material gets, the damn movie is, well, charming. Elizabeth Banks, an actress I've never seen before, is a big contributor to that charm, but Seth Rogan manages to come across as a sweet, good-hearted entrepreneurial pervert, and the whole cast is quite likable, even when they are doing things that you really don't want to know about.

Kevin Smith wrote and directed, and that's another thing: I never thought I'd have anything good to say about that guy. He is a grotty little man to come up with this thing, but kudos must go out to him for, shall we say, pulling it off. It's . . . ehm . . . definitely not for everyone, but if the idea of a filthy Babes in Arms appeals to you, this is the only ticket in town! Be sure to stay through the closing credits.

--Freder

What if you had a Moving Date, and nobody came?

My ducks were all in a row. What's up with the movers?

If I were to write a screenplay based on the last eight months of my life, ninety percent of the dialogue for the poor actor playing me would be:

Ooooo-hoo-hoo-hoo!

Ooooo-hoo-hoo-hoo!

Ooooo-hoo-hoo-hoo!

This morning I was up at six-thirty to be on the road by seven-thirty, to meet the movers at the old house. I arrived a little early, and started throwing a load in the car. My emotions were running pretty high. Although I was quite excited to finally be getting my furniture, the memories of more than thirty-five years in that house were coming at me in Full Assault mode. There were tears. I really only got it under control when I started being irritated that it was taking so long for the movers to show up.

I worked for an hour and twenty minutes, and they never came.

I called them and asked for my contact guy. He wasn't there. The woman who answered the phone said, "Can I help you?"

I told her my name and said that I was out in A_____ waiting for them. I said, "I'm here. Where are you?"

She said, "I don't have you on my books for today. The last thing I knew about you was that you were going to get the place plowed out and get back to us."

I said, "I did get back to him the very next day and we confirmed for the sixth!"

She said, "Well, he never conveyed that message to me. All my crews are out today, and I don't have anything open until next Wednesday."

I was so angry that I could barely speak. I said, "I even took time off from work for this!"

"I'm sorry, sir. . ."

I hung up the phone and burst into another bout of tears. I've worked so hard trying to make this happen, and now another week will go by. I'm hearing that two snowstorms are being predicted between now and then, including one for Tuesday night into Wednesday morning. I thought I had cleared out that yard for the last time. This means more work ahead of me, and with my luck it will get postponed again due to the snow.

If I didn't have the cats who need me to care for them, I would absolutely be jumping off of a building right now.

"Oh, bother!" Said Winnie-the-Pooh. . .

It never rains but it pours! Last night my original Imac, which has served me faithfully for more than a decade, finally went the way of all computers.

The good news is, I've been such a slacker over the last couple of years that I don't stand to lose much of importance, except possibly a chapter or two of my novel-in-progress. My fingers are crossed on that one. I hope I backed it up to disk sometime in the last year and a half. . . otherwise I'll be retyping the first three chapters from hard copy and trying to reconstruct the rest. With the mood I'm in now, that latter little thing isn't going to happen anytime soon.

The bad news is, I have to buy a new computer. In fact, I've just done it. I was especially concerned about the new software that I would have to buy, but it turns out that working at a college, even in a staff support position, has its benefits. I received a hundred dollar discount on Word, and -- get this -- a THOUSAND dollar discount on Adobe Creative Suite.

Let me type that again:

A THOUSAND smackers! That's real folding money to me.

Without the discounts, I wouldn't have been able to get out of this mess for less than three thousand dollars. Instead, it's significantly under two. Not that that isn't bad enough!

I thought my IMac was great and would have stayed with it, but, honestly, the new one should be better for me. The software was so outdated on the old machine that most websites crashed it. I'm not even sure that it would have been able to handle the DSL in the new home. I'll be able to blog from my own study! Up until now, the best I could manage was to write a post at home, email it to myself at work, and post it from there.

I'll be able to say that I'm up to date in my software and design skills. And I'll be able to take a moonlighting job doing some typesetting. I guess it was time: a new computer for a new era in a new place. But if you've been following this blog, you know how I hate to let go of anything. Even a computer.

I just hope I have enough money left over to buy a clothes washer/dryer for the new house! The laundry is starting to pile up. . .

-- Freder.

Finally, something worth watching

I took last night "off" from moving and stayed at home with the quats. They seemed glad to have me around, and it was a good thing for me, because I got some rest, and had a chance to watch I Capture the Castle, a film based on Dodie Smith's lovely first novel, on DirectTV.

Smith is better known as the author of The One Hundred and One Dalmatians, a book that is every bit as much fun to read as the animated Disney version based upon it is to watch (don't even mention the abominable live-action remake with Glenn Close). Smith, I must say, was an accomplished Romantic, and both of these works are infused with a classical Romanticism (not to be confused with the kind of thing we call "Romance" today) in both style and substance.

The movie of I Capture the Castle is faithful to the content of the book, if not exactly to its structure and words. The screenwriter has changed much of the novel's dialogue, I suppose to expedite the story, but it has the effect of dumbing down the subtleties of the novel, and making the characters seem harsher. I hate it when screenwriters put words into the original author's mouth, for whatever reason, and at first this was as bothersome to me as was Steve Tesich's screenplay for The World According to Garp. . . a ham-fisted adaptation of Irving's novel, and not one of George Roy Hill's better pictures.

But the look of the movie is perfect, and it captures the atmosphere of the novel so well that after a while I started not to mind about the other. At first I had doubts about the casting as well, but was quite quickly won over as I settled into the picture. Although predictable, this was a nice way to spend the evening.

But I have to ask what in hell the MPAA was thinking when they slapped an R rating on this very gentle movie. There is one very necessary and very mild nude scene. That's it. The rest of the picture is tamer than some things I've seen on Masterpiece Theater (the very dreadful and offensive Moll Flanders starring Alex Kingston first comes to mind).

For crying out loud, torture porn like the Saw and Hostel movies goes out with an R rating, plays in our friendly neighborhood cinemas and fills the racks at Wal*Mart. To say that they are depraved is a gross understatement. And here we have a lovely, gentle, quite chaste coming-of-age story about a young woman who must become the glue to hold her family together and save her father's life -- and it gets the same rating.

People have been complaining about the ratings system for years, and rightly so -- but I think this goes deeper. This is not, I think, about standards, but about Organized Crime. What kind of payola are Lion's Gate and the other distributors of vile films shoveling into the MPAA's collective pockets in order to get their trash into wide circulation? I have no doubt that it's happening. No reasonable person could put these two eggs (the one white and clean, the other rotten and stinking of filth and degradation) into the same basket.

Readers of this blog know that I often get off the subject. So I'll just end with the words, Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle. Read and watch.

-- Freder.

Bumping and Grinding

After work last night I sped home, fed the quats, changed into my shlubbing around clothes and drove twenty minutes out to the old house. Tuesday morning is Trash Time out there, and I had five very full bags of garbage that needed to go out. I was there for two hours, packing and loading. I have started on the things in closets and on shelves, mostly books. And, barring maybe a few chairs, I have now moved the last of the furniture that will fit in my car. It is reaching the point where there is less and less there that I actually care about. The house seems a strange and lonely place. Although I still feel an attachment, and feel wistful as I look at it from the outside, it is not home anymore.

My mother's remains are scattered around the grounds. I think about that every time I drive away.

Then it was back out to the All-New, All-Different DuckHaus, where I made dinner, gave the quats a treat, unloaded the car and got a start on unpacking what I'd just packed up.

I opened and emptied the boxes to the accompaniment of the breathless moaning and groaning of the soft-core porn on Cinemax. It wasn't at all arousing. First there would be a perfunctory stab at something that resembled a plot, then five minutes of bumping and grinding with, rather obviously, no connection of any kind between the actors, the same thing over and over with different bodies. So why did I tune in? I don't know. Perhaps in the hope that it would perk me up. Perhaps because I was so tired, and this certainly didn't require much in the way of attention. Perhaps I chose it just for novelty value. Or, perhaps, the masochist in me chose it to rub salt into the loneliness wound. In case you hadn't noticed, I'm not above Creating Drama.

In any case, it didn't work.

I feel badly for the actors, some of whom are at least as talented as, say, Tom Cruise, not that that's saying much. They're all making their run at the same dream, trying to make it in Hollywood, yet this is the only acting job they can get. Do these people ever tell their parents what that big acting job was that they got last week? Do they have boyfriends, girlfriends, wives, husbands? What do they have to say about this line of work?

But perhaps I'm being simple-minded and hypocritical. I've only ever held one job (as a typesetter for the biggest large-print book publisher in the country) that wasn't, at some level, about getting paid to be screwed -- and even then, we all ended up being screwed when the parent company laid off the entire production department and moved our jobs to Michigan.

Eventually, I got so bored with it that I switched to Anderson Cooper on CNN. He was interviewing Michael Moore, who was dumping on the Republicans -- which amounts to a different kind of pornography altogether, and much more entertaining.

My phone service was supposed to begin yesterday -- it didn't. I was looking forward to calling my father and my friend BC. Instead, I have to call the phone company from work and harangue them. Maybe I'll wait a day on that.

I haven't seen Tiger Grumpyface since the afternoon I brought her out. At the old place, it wasn't unusual for her to disappear for a couple of days at a time, but all things being new, it is worrisome. On the other hand, I've done absolutely everything I could for her, and she would be impossible to bring inside. Tiger Whitestockings, on the other hand, seems to be settling down. I see her every night. I see pussycat footprints in the yard and driveway, even up on the deck. She's not cowering anymore, but walking confidently, with her tail held high. I'd like to know where she goes during the day.

Who watches The Watchmen? Not me -- at least, never again!

Oh, my. After just three days I'm convinced that DirecTV is the handiwork of The Devil.

The installer came by late on Thursday and spent four hours setting me up. My first reaction was: Yippee! Teevee again! I am back in the land of the living! I can listen to the news and weather reports!

Then the installer started showing me some of what DirecTV delivers, and I think I said, out loud, "This is insane!"

For all of my life, I've had access to just eight or ten channels: all three networks (from two locations), a couple of PBS stations, and within the last couple of years, FOX. It used to take me maybe sixty seconds to go through all the channels, find out there was nothing on that I wanted to watch, and slot a DVD into the player.

Now it takes an hour!

Sports channels up the wazoo (of no interest to me)! Bible-thumping channels! Infomercial channels -- seemingly hundreds of those useless things! There's even soft-core porn (I've seen more simulated sex in the last three days than I care to think about). . .

I'm grateful that, as you flip through the channels, a description of the program that's currently airing pops up before the channel actually has time to load. This gratefulness stems from a couple of encounters with the premium movie channels (which, thankfully, will be going away in three months). I was thumbing the "channel up" button when I suddenly noticed the words: "HBO -- SAW IV."

I thought, "Yikes!! Saw IV!!?? I don't want to see a single frame of that thing! Get me outta here!!"

The exact same thought was repeated a few moments later when the title Zombieland came up. Ye Gods! Who watches this stuff? Its easy availability is actually disturbing to me. I've been a life-long proponant of free speech, but free speech doesn't give you the right to yell "Fire" in a crowded theater, and it doesn't give you the right to make and distribute torture porn and cannibalism movies, either.

Then I stumbled upon the much-talked-about film adaptation of Watchmen, the graphic novel by Allan Moore and Dave Gibbons. I decided to brave it. After all, it didn't cost anything (over and above what DirecTV costs, anyhow). So I wasn't directly giving them my money to watch it.

I expected the egregious lapses in taste, but what surprised me was that the egregious lapses in taste weren't the main reasons why I ended up giving this ugly movie a "thumbs down." The original graphic novel was many things: but it wasn't pretentious. This thing, with its over-use and abuse of slow motion, portentous empty-eyed, stone faced acting, not to mention its overwhelming sense of self-seriousness, self-importance and superiority (particularly notable for something that's really just a grotty little exercise in nose-wrinkling) embodies pretension to the nth degree.

It's been noted that the movie displays an almost slavish devotion to the book. I didn't see that. Admittedly, it's been years and years since I read the thing, but there were whole swaths of story material that I didn't remember and would swear were not in the book. The movie is also more gruesomely violent than the book. It replaces the book's many layers of complexity with layers of vulgarity. Its one improvement over the book lies in the ending, which for expediency's sake changes a fake alien invasion into a fake attack from one of the existing characters.

You feel exhausted when the thing is over, and a little bit dirty, and very much as if you have wasted your time.

Oh -- and don't even get me started about Universal's recent remake of The Wolfman.

Much more enjoyable (though still problematic) was BBC America's marathon showing of the new Doctor Who series. I'd never seen this incarnation of the show before. With its significantly larger budget and the abandoning of 20-minute "cliffhanger" episodes for hour-long self-contained stories, Who has gained much over the days of the original series -- but it's also lost something, too.

The first story I looked at was an epic-length two-parter starring the Good Doctor's most popular baddies, the Daleks. Because it's now shot on film and because they have access to computers, the producers can now make their Dalek Invasions quite spectacular: but with literally hundreds of Dalek spacecraft careering around shooting everything in sight, and literally thousands of Daleks hovering and swarming about, the emphasis has shifted away from story and onto spectacle. At its core, it was a fairly ordinary, by-the-numbers Dalek story, even when a four-way cliffhanger was tossed in at the end of the first hour.

The second part was worse: a mish-mash of technobable and confusion. It was complicated by the boatload of supporting characters who were being re-united for this story, all of whom the producers seemed more interested in than the Doctor! U.N.I.T -- the Torchwood crew -- Sarah Jane Smith. Too many characters and not much in the way of clever dialogue for the Doctor.

The second story that I watched -- "The Next Doctor" -- was much, much better, though still, in the end, over-reliant on computer-generated spectacle. The Doctor finally gets to be Doctorish, and the story was a clever one featuring the Cybermen. And -- was that Miranda Richardson guest starring? In Victorian London, the Doctor meets what he at first believes to be a future incarnation of himself. Meanwhile, the Cybermen are using child labour to build themselves a gigantic cyber tinkertoy with which to literally squash the British Empire.

I was grateful to catch up on what the beeb were doing with one of my favorite shows, but three hours was more than enough. By then I was just rested-up enough from a day of moving to manage dinner.

I'll continue to dip into DirecTV as time permits, but I suspect that I'll be returning to my DVDs soon. I can program better for me than some young suited dunderhead.

Oh -- and if you want proof positive that it's the work of the Devil? Check out something called Yo Gabba Gabba!

-- Freder.

Pilgrim's Progress

My fingers on both hands are cracked, split and bleeding, which makes everything ouchy. Every muscle in my upper body is complaining. I banged my elbow on the edge of a door and it's grown a bump. Sleeping on it is murder. Moving ain't for wimps! For a solitary moment I considered letting the movers do everything that was left. But that would be prohibitively expensive, and anyway part of the process of packing lies in deciding what to keep and what not to keep.

I'd intended to spend a long day at the old house yesterday, loading up enough boxes for the whole rest of the week, so that when I dropped by in the evening, all I would have to do is load up the car and leave. But something happened to change my plans.

I caught Tiger Grumpyface!

For three days after the storm, I didn't see her. On Friday, she appeared just as I was about to leave. I put out a can of food for her, no tricks, I figured she must be pretty hungry and had no desire to hassle her.

Then on Saturday, she showed herself as soon as I arrived. She still seemed pretty hungry. Again, I wasn't going to trouble her, but then I thought, "We have the whole day. If she still won't go in to the carrier I'll take the food out of it before I go."

So I brought the cat carrier out and she watched me put the food inside of it. I went out front and continued shoveling (more on that later) and when I looked up she appeared to have gone into the carrier! I crept up as quietly as I could, but snow crunched under my feet and she scooted out onto a drift, looking at me.

I went inside. As I watched through the window, she padded down and walked right into the carrier, and appeared to be quite engrossed in the food.

I had left the doors ajar, so as to sneak out soundlessly. It worked. Only her tail was sticking out of the carrier door (which is made of metal bars). I leaned out and slammed the door shut, and put the lock through the hasp! Tiger Grumpyface freaked. She jumped onto the plate and yowled at me. But I had her!

I felt bad, though, that it had happened right at the start of the day. I still had hours of work ahead. But I resolved to cut it short and leave by 2:30 so that there would still be an hour or so of light when we got home. I left the carrier where it was, and she yowled at me every time I walked by before finally settling down.

She was better about the ride in the carrier than any of the other quats have been. When we arrived, I put the carrier under the deck, which has become Tiger Whitestockings's official way station.  I made sure that there was food right in front of the carrier door. When I unlocked it, there was a brief pause from inside, rather like a storm brewing -- then Grumpyface shot out at about mach five, past the food, around the corner of the house and out of sight. I was afraid that she would run away. But half an hour later, as I was unloading the car, I looked through the slats and found her coiled in a clear, dry corner, glaring out at me with a very Grumpy look on her face indeed. "Baleful" would be the appropriate word.

This morning she was gone. But perhaps, like Whitestockings, she will be back tonight. I've done my part. All I can do is make sure that there is always food in the same spot, and hope that she will grow a brain cell or two.

*

On Wednesday, getting the place accessible for the movers was a big part of my worries. I stopped at the local market and found a number for someone who did plowing. But a big load was taken off when I pulled into the driveway and saw that it had already been plowed! A lousy job, but why look a gift horse in the mouth? It was good enough. My guess from the big tractor tire marks is that it was the handiwork of my brother-in-law. Nice of him.

So, a big part of my trips out to the old house this week has been taken up just by shoveling snow. The movers plan to use all three main doors on the house, plus there's stuff in the big barn. It all had to be cleared. I took it a step at a time, going inside to do lighter work when I got tired.

Now -- why is it that things disappear during a move? I'm missing things. As an example, I can't find my Three Stooges DVDs or the second season of The Wild Wild West. It's not like there could have been any light-fingered moving men, because I'm the only one! Is there a vortex whose opening is triggered by the moving process? Everywhere in the world, whenever anyone moves, does the vortex open and suck random objects right out of your boxes and into a parallel universe where the missing things drift aimlessly through time and space?

I spent New Year's Eve unpacking in the new house, barely aware of the event. Upstairs, in my bedroom, I tuned the teevee to Times Square -- I've no idea which network -- and noted that only twenty minutes remained in the detestable, loathsome, hurtful and miserable year of twenty-ten. I walked down the hall to what I am calling the Studio bedroom and unpacked DVDs for what felt like about ten minutes. But when I wandered back up the hallway the countdown was at five -- four -- three . . .

I've never felt so detached from a New Year's celebration. I watched the ball drop and the crowd go wild. I watched couples frenching each other in the street. I watched the confetti fly. I watched for about thirty seconds. Then I turned off the set and went back down the hall to do some more unpacking.

-- Freder