(G)Nat would kill me, and I absolutely mean kill me if I told you this, but she’s still a few years away from googling it all, and by then she’ll be furious for some other reason, so I might as well spill the beans. She put on her “Very Minty Christmas” CD tonight – the one sung by the My Little Ponys – and lined them up and pretended they were singing the songs. For every loud neuron on their brain urging them to grow up, there’s another that gestures back to a warm simple place. Its exact details can never be reconstituted, because the mind is seemingly designed to protect us from remembering too much happiness. If, at age 50, you could recall the specific elements of being five, with the warm radiator smell and the snow on the eaves and your toys all around, Dad down the hall and Mom downstairs and Christmas coming and Rudolph on TV tomorrow and your favorite song playing for the sixth time – ah,  it would be too much. Forgetting is a blessing. No one can reassemble the particulars, but you can recapture the generalities.

Too clunky to be an aphorism, but you know what I mean.

I don’t know where this evening went; I moved from one thing to the other, and things got done, but it hasn’t added up to anything significant I can present to you. Aside from the weekly buzz.mn video, that is – I shot it this afternoon, and hoped no neighbors were watching. They wouldn’t have wondered why I went outside in the snow to shovel the walk and threw the shovel into the drift six times, because they wouldn’t have seen the camera in the window. Then I went to the hardware store to shoot some more stuff, went home, downloaded the video, and realized I hadn’t gotten a master shot. Idiot. Back in the car in the snow, back on the thick choked roads, slipping and sliding. I got the shot, and it must have seemed an odd sight – man drives up, man gets out of car, man takes 15 seconds of video, man gets back in car, drives away. Once again I wish I had someone else on these shoots, if only to give me legitimacy. Next time I bring a manikin with a boom mike duct-taped to a limb.

Edited it down; did homework and piano with (G)Nat, took her to choir, sat in the basement eating dry puffy wet bread masquerading as pizza, went home, did the voiceover, spent more time tweaking the file size and compression of the video than I spent shooting it. It’s up at buzz.mn in the morning, so stop by. As usual, I had no idea what I’d do for the video, but that shouldn’t stop you.

(I shot this one with the good wide-screen camera, so it’s not as horrible as the rest.)

So, that’s that. Some links:

The Daily Coyote. He looks like Jasper. Speaking of which: Tuesdays are hard on him, because no one eats at home, which means no plates to lick. We come home smelling of pizza, his favorite, yet no pizza in evidence. It’s like we invented invisible pizza. Bastards! Tonight when I got home from Church Basement Choir Pizza Night I let him outside to flush the pipes and tubes, and afterwards gave him a Frosty Paws treat. This is the sign that the evening’s consumption is over, and he should ramp down and expect no more. But since it had not been preceded by plates to lick, he was suspicious. He looked at me from the corners of his eyes; he eyed the proffered Frosty Paws with doubt, knowing this meant the end. He looked left, right, walked back, looked up at the counter, sniffed up, clacked over around the chairs to check, then came back, unhappy. I don’t know how you did it but you did it alright. You invented invisible supper. He took the Frosty Paws with a sullen look and went into the living room, because he’d had enough of me.

It just gets better: computer servers are “as bad for the climate as SUVs.” You may add this to the list of things are that are now morally suspect. If you cared, you’d give up the internet and communicate by means of lines etched in pieces of bark. But only if they fell off the trunk of their own accord.

While watching a movie containing a small portion of Isabella Rossellini the other night, I was struck by how ageless she seemed. Make-up? Exceptional genes? Crafty lighting? All of the above, perhaps, but you couldn’t imagine her ruining her features with surgery or a diet that drew in the cheeks to the point where she looked like a vampire six seconds after the sun hit. Sigourney Weaver looked great too, and she looked her age. That sort of confidence cannot be purchased or inserted by therapy or topically applied by creams. Such solid souls seem rare in Hollywood. Exhibit A in the parade of unintended – and obviously unrecognized – consequences of the pursuit of endless youth, is here. She looks like she’s been using carbon paper for dinner napkins. 

That said, I'm considering lasik eye surgery.

Your daily Christmas jpy. I never liked this song. If you saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus it would ruin your faith in one of them. Possibly both. Guess who's supposed to be singing. And yes, I whipped up a new logo; the other one annoyed me.

New Ad in the archive, of course. This being Wednesday. See you at buzz.mn with a new video. And if you don't mind: buy the book. Please? Thanks!