Incredibly Stupid Bliss

I started this blog over a year ago to chart and define my love of things in the world (art, books, music, TV, whatever else), and my approach to loving these things:  incredibly, stupidly, blissfully.  But this has been a year or so of a lot of bad shit:  my mom died, then a friend from long ago committed suicide the next month, and just yesterday I found out one of my best friends has cancer.  What do you do with all of this? Write a blog about a TV show I guess.  One of the standouts on TV this year has been a show called The Last of Us .  Big hit based on a video game about the end of the world caused by an evil fungus. One episode stands out, although all of them offer a wildly precise fusion of arthouse and house of horrors.  This episode focused on a gay survivalist who stumbles across the love of his life after ambushing him in his post-apocalyptic front-yard pit/trap.  From that connect through twenty years of being together, the two men ...

  Fruit Bats is a one-man band overseen by Eric D. Johnson.  I've loved everything he/they have done since 2003 or so (including his side-band Bonnie Light Horseman), when I first discovered Echolocation , the debut album.   All the way through those 20+ years, Fruit Bats has been a touchstone for me, but Pet Parade , an album that came out a couple years back, is what I go to just about anytime I need music now.   It's lush country-drag pop, delicate but also full of denim-flavored 70s Fleetwood Mac greatness.  His voice is Supertramp merged with Glen Campbell, and the music has a synthesized ominousness and sense of fun, a hominess too. It's singer-song-writery but also contemplative beyond that, moving into this weird poetic direct-connect to my soul.  Every dang song on this thing is blissful and halfway awkwardly stupid in the way it needs to be, feelings bleeding out of every chorus and every note, with melodies laced with losses and happine...

Twice in a Lifetime is an unassuming anonymous movie from 1985 I remember seeing when it first came out and I was completely enraptured by its ability to be exactly what it was:  a realistic and sad but somehow optimistic drama about a working-class guy celebrating his 50th birthday by leaving his wife and family for a red-headed barmaid.   Upon first viewing I was floored.  It wasn't necessarily the novelty of the concept:  it was soap-opera territory of course.  It was the way the concept was delivered, not the content.  Every actor in this thing works it; you feel like you are inside somebody's family album, claustrophobically connected to their whims, wishes and hurts.  Amy Madigan as the outraged daughter got most of the applause (even an Academy Award nom for Best Supporting Actress), but it is the whole gang that delivers the goods. An ensemble masterpiece.  Gene Hackman is the lead:  his sorry-eyed take on a working-class no...

  It's a photo of a photo, so kind of blurry, but there she is.  Vera Ruth, senior in high school, 1963.  She died 12/30/2022, 3:55 pm.  All this week I was in Elizabethton, Tennessee, taking care of things.  Funeral home, burial site, all of that, but also when I first got there on Monday I was by myself for a day and got so lonely I had to go to the Mall of Johnson City.  Johnson City is a big city compared to Elizabethton, and when we lived there back in the mid-80s I used to go to the mall to buy records, get an Orange Julius, etc.  Hung out there with some friends from where I worked, Bonanza Steakhouse.   So I went to the mall, and it was beautiful.  Somehow the Mall of Johnson City has survived and even flourished when most other malls have died.  Hardly any empty storefronts, a big food-court, anchor stores with escalators inside them, all of it.  I walked and walked around that place, just to be around the life inside ...

I don't really know what to say.  This is us, right?  Me, my mom, sister, and dad, circa 1980 or so. I think it was taken at my dad's brother's house down the street, around Christmas time.  I don't think any of us knew what we were doing.  We were lost in different moments of existence, and my face especially reveals that:  I'm clowning my disdain.  I'm doing a schtick next to my mom, probably because she just said to smile, or maybe that she loves me.   I never really knew how to act outside of reacting.  I don’t know how to put it.  I never felt comfortable.  I never felt like I could relate.  I never felt like I was there.   A part of things.   There's no other way to verify these feelings outside of just saying I don’t really remember this day but I remember the feeling.   It's one that connects me to myself.  I feel alienated from most everything I am a part of.  It's just something...

I spent the summer reading William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair , and it was kind of a lovely slog.  It really is nice to say to myself:  I effing did it.  Finished that bad boy this morning and felt it all come together in my soul in a way novels really should.  Like you've been through a war and a couple marriages and a bunch of other shit, only this time with a large coterie of Victorian wannabes, an English middle upper-class that's frantically finding itself out of sync with reality, and yet clinging to old ways.  Um.  Like right now.   My biggest takeaway is the feeling this whole experience conjured inside my lowly skull:  I was 13 and it was summer-break and I was supposed to weed the yard and garden, so I opened all the windows in the house so I could hear Guiding Light on the TV.  If I couldn't sit on my ass and watch it, by God, I'd hear it!    I was addicted to soap operas when I was that age, that connection ...

Last night we went to the King's Island amusement park in Mason, Ohio.  It's 50 years old this year.  We didn't go into the park itself though:  there's an amphitheater on the grounds called Timber Wolf.  We went in a side entrance to see A Flock of Seagulls and Berlin there.  But still the experience was all drenched in this creepy stomach-ache nostalgia about the 70s and 80s and King's Island and people who go to King's Island.  The vast parking lot, the skyscraping rides and screams, smells of suntan lotion and cigarette smoke and fried food.   Walking up to the front of the place I got weirded out, time-traveling back to when going here was like entering the Kingdom of Heaven.  Just thinking about it back then was hypnotic. Now of course it is something else. Nostalgia is something that unplugs you from your surroundings in a mostly beautiful way.  It isolates your feelings around the past, gives those feelings back to you in one sca...