Christmas Day 2014

Another Christmas Day is done. And what did I accomplish?

I slept late, just because I could. I didn’t get out of bed until after 8 AM. I shuffled to the bathroom and peed last night’s special Christmas Eve blend of Sauvignon Blanc and 80-proof vodka. While doing that, I observed my face in the medicine cabinet mirror. My hair looked like a crazy man’s hair. Maybe I am a crazy man. If I am, would I know it?

I shuffled to the living room and grabbed the cord on the window blind and pulled the blind open. I could see blue skies in the west. Sunny day. That’s a nice change; it’s been cold and rainy for the past 3 or 4 days.

I turned on my computer and while it booted up I scanned the TV channels. Regular morning programming seemed to be all that was available. Meh. I read email and then surfed the news for a long time. There is so much interesting stuff on the Web. After a while I decided to fix breakfast: fried eggs and pork sausage links, a tasty combination of high cholesterol and a sage-flavored fat-bomb. To which I say: “Yum!”

Then I watched 1992’s My Cousin Vinny. I saw it years ago and felt like watching it again. It was the movie that brought Marisa Tomei international visibility playing Mona Lisa Vito, Vinny’s (Joe Pesci) fiancée. I really like the movie, but it still seems to me that Tomei, who was 28 at the time, was too much younger than Pesci, who was 49, for them to realistically be a couple. It turns out the role of Mona was planned for Lorraine Bracco, who was 38, but she turned it down. Trivia: The American Bar Association's publication, the ABA Journal, ranked the film #3 on its list of the "25 Greatest Legal Movies.”

After that, I watched The Interview. In case you’ve been on Mars for the past month, that’s the movie at the center of the Sony Pictures hacking. It’s the movie that garnered threats of world annihilation if Sony should release it. There are plenty of reviews on the Web so I won’t write another here, except to say that one reviewer described it as “scabrous, puerile and scatalogical.” In other words, uproariously funny if you’re a 14 year old American male. Although it didn’t make me laugh, I confess I almost smiled several times. If you like the Seth Rogen/Evan Goldberg brand of comedy, you’ll think this film is hilarious.

After that, I walked down the street to my friend Butch’s home. He asked if I preferred to come inside or go for a walk. I chose the healthy option and we walked a couple miles around the ‘hood, and our conversation went like this: “Remember what that used to be? … Yeah, that used to be … ” followed  by the appropriate noun – the post office, the barber shop, the bank, the drug store, etc. Eventually we arrived back at Butch’s house.

Butch has a small Christmas tree sitting on a table in the corner of the living room. I’d be willing to bet serious money that if he didn’t have a wife, there wouldn’t be a tree. Having a woman in the house can have that domesticating effect on a man. I scoff at his tiny tree, and he scoffs at my never having a tree. I tell him he’s wrong; my tree is in my head and I can see it just by closing my eyes, and though his tree is nice, the tree in my imagination is much prettier and much less work. So I’m happy with it.

After some time, a carload or two of his family arrived so it seemed like a good time to make my exit. I snagged a couple of his wife’s homemade cookies on the way out and walked back to my house. When I turned on the TV, I saw that some kind of musical Christmas special was on. It was called A Hollywood Christmas at the Grove and the next band up was going to be Pentatonix. I happen to like Pentatonix, but in small doses. I mean, a cappella music gets old quick, but they do it quite well. Trivia: music is older than language. Bone flutes have been dated 40,000 to 80,000 years old, and experts assume that people were singing (or at least humming) before they began making flutes. In Judaism, the Torah was set to music as a way to remember it before it was written down.

And so my day ended like this: TV reruns and this blog post. Which I will now publish to the Web. It’s the only thing I’ve accomplished today. At least, it’s the only thing I can point to; the only tiny scratch I’ve made on the Universe today. It’s my Kilroy was here, my Mr. Chad, my Foo was here. I blog, therefore I exist.

And now it’s midnight. I’ll watch some Pentatonix on YouTube followed by Modern Family reruns until bedtime. Goodnight, all.