Gobble

Taking a break from today’s writing to…well, do more writing. A brief rundown of yesterday’s Thanksgiving festivities:

Headed to Topeka for Laura’s family get-together…held at noon for the benefit of the geriatric crowd, and due to the number of folks involved, held in a church hall. Thanksgiving surrounded by wall banners and such helpfully informing all assembled that some chap named Jesus is, apparently, LORD. Good for him. I like Laura’s family, and usually enjoy spending time with them, but at extended-family get-togethers like this, I always end up at some table with a bunch of cowboy-boot-wearing, Republican-voting, senior-citizen second-cousins or somesuch. Yee-fucking-haw.

The good part of this is that we were back home by 2:00, which allowed me to install myself in the kitchen, bust out my wicked-sharp cooking skillz, and have our *own* Thanksgiving feast cooked and on the table by 8:00.

Finished the evening in a Turkey-coma, assisted by a bottle of home-brewed mead, and watched the Thanksgiving Day Marathon of Jon Favreau’s Dinner for Five on IFC.

For those who are not aware, the show is writer/director/actor Jon Favreau (Swingers, etc.) inviting 4 celebrities (usually actors, directors, musicians, etc.) to dinner at a restaurant in either L.A. or New York, and filming as they shoot the breeze. Brilliant stuff. The best episode shown last night was the Daredevil tie-in, with Favreau (who played Foggy Nelson) hosting Kevin Smith, Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner and Colin Farrell.

That was yesterday. Today, it’s back to work.

The worst thing about being your own boss: You can’t bitch about it when your asshole boss makes you work on the day after Thanksgiving.

GMS

What He Said

From Warren Ellis, via his email-list-blog-thingie, BAD SIGNAL:

“If I use the word “monkeymass” to describe a vocal section

of the comics “fan” population online, I invoke Harlan

Ellison, who used the word first in my experience. And

there but for the grace of god. The guy’s a hundred years

old, but you can still read of him described as an “enfant

terrible,” often simply because his personal sense of what

is right is unquiet. Who the hell wants to be an enfant

terrible at thirty-five? It’s embarrassing. Who wants to

be a “gadfly,” which is how, if I recall correctly, Ellison

described his own journalistic works when he was my age?

It invites swatting. It invites a constant expenditure of

your strength against the lazy palms of people too stupid

to tie your shoes. And look at the guy now. His cardiac

muscle is held together with garden twine and Lego. When

on his game, he’s a magician of prose, and I imagine he’s

won almost every significant battle he’s fought. But I

can’t help but wonder how much storytelling was not done,

was lost through endless days and nights of kicking against

pricks. I mean, you read about them in his essays, and I

sit there thinking, why did you elevate these people simply

by gracing them with your time? Why live in a constant

state of stress?”

Holy distillation of inner thoughts, Batman.

Anyway…in case any of you were still wondering, that’s a good approximation of why I don’t spend any time railing against the asshats any more. Too much energy wasted, too many stories untold, and too much elevation of worthless fuckwits.

I no longer get to indulge the visceral satisfaction of skewering a gibbering dweeb with poison-pen bon mots, but the trade-off is that my productivity is climbing.

GMS