I had such plans for my annual holiday break. I was going to blog. A lot. I was going to sort through a couple thousand digital pictures I’ve taken over the past year and be brutal and efficient about deleting all the sub-par ones, and then I was going to Photoshop those that needed it and post the whole lot of them to Flickr. I was going to set up the digital picture frame my parents gave me for Christmas a year ago, and I was going to send long-overdue and just plain long emails to several people I haven’t contacted for a while. I was going to give my house a thorough cleaning, and go through my clothes and pull out a bunch of stuff I no longer wear and give it to charity, and I was going to sit in the sun streaming in through the window and read a fat novel and sip hot cocoa. I was going to listen to a whole mess of podcasts I’ve got saved on the computer and go to some movies, which, believe it or not, I haven’t really managed to do for the past couple months. I thought I might even take a nice drive up to Park City one afternoon and try breathing some less-smoggy air for a change. And when all that was done, I was going to actually write… not the lame-o crap I do around here all the time, but real writing, creative writing. Fiction, in other words, the stuff I used to think I was going to spend my life making.

And just how many of all those planned activities do you suppose I accomplished? Well… I managed to do a couple of memes for the blog. Yay me.

So what did I do over the break? I visited friends on Christmas Eve. I had a very rare stress-free Christmas Day with my parents. I spent an afternoon with my buddy Jer, who I only see a couple times a year because he lives in Vegas, and I enjoyed the annual reunion dinner with The Dudes, i.e., my buddies from the old multiplex days. I also enjoyed a New Year’s Eve video party with a different subset of friends I like to call The Usual Suspects. (Geeks that we are, the evening’s viewing selection was 2010: The Year We Make Contact. Of course.) And then I did penance for that party all the next day. (I’ve decided that champagne doesn’t agree with me; every time I drink it, I end up with one of those headaches that sits right behind your retinas and threatens to explode your eyeballs any time the treacherous daylight sneaks through a chink in the window blinds.)

I helped The Girlfriend’s parents organize and store their Christmas decorations, and was rewarded with a little road trip out into the hinterlands for lunch at one of those small-town greasy spoons I love so well, a place called the Stockton Miner’s Cafe (sorry, no web presence that I could find). I hung some framed photos that have been sitting on the living-room floor for several months. And I managed to see a movie, Guy Ritchie’s take on Sherlock Holmes. (For the record, I liked it. Well, I liked the story and the performances, at least — people who are screaming about revisionism don’t know their Holmes — but I am never going to get used to the modern way of putting together an action scene. Undercrank the camera, freeze for a moment, then overcrank and smash cut to something else, all shot in close-ups so you can never see where anything is in relation to anything else… ugh. The action in Sherlock is a lot more intelligible than the messy fights in those damn Bourne movies, but I still long for a nice steadicam shot once in a while.)

And all that stuff was great, it really was. But now, as Ray Liotta says at the conclusion of Goodfellas, it’s all over, and I’m back at work in the comma mines and feeling like a tremendous failure for not crossing off a few items on that “to-do” list…

In response to ABC News’ exclusive photos of the explosive rig worn by the so-called “crotchbomber” — who failed to bring down Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day, but did manage to burn the hell out of his own legs and, presumably, genitalia — Xeni Jardin over at Boing Boing remarked:

What better way to round out this scorched and shitty decade than to gaze thoughtfully into the charred, soiled underpants of a stranger. A troubled young man who seems to have hated America only as much as he hated his own junk.

I wholeheartedly concur. This entire decade has been pretty much end-to-end suck. Don’t believe me? Check out Newsweek‘s retrospective video (not embeddable, unfortunately) and refresh your memory. From hanging chads in 2000 through 9/11, the Iraq War, Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, and government-sanctioned torture; the PATRIOT Act; the TSA and its increasingly ridiculous “security measures”; the break-up of the space shuttle Columbia; Hurricane Katrina; the rise of reality television and the belligerent vapidity that came with it; the general bellicosity that seems to have infected even the simplest public discourse; increasingly corrosive and seemingly intractable political partisanship; a truly frightening resurgence of religious fundamentalism all across the globe, and the outright renunciation of science by a shockingly large percentage of Americans; the proud-to-be-ignorant anti-intellectual attitude displayed by far, far too many people in a country that used to value education and expertise; the crashing economy; all the talk about global warming and peak oil; the general sense that The World As We’ve Known It is coming to an end; and a constant societal undertow of fear, uncertainty, and disillusionment, all leading up to the recent death of Patrick Swayze (which, even though I haven’t blogged about it, really bummed me out) and finally this dumbass with the bomb in his shorts. Not to mention the inexplicable popularity of Napoleon Dynamite and Family Guy. Is it any wonder that I am ever-more consumed with nostalgia with each passing year, if this is the 21st century?

On the positive side, I read somewhere that Google Books now has a fine selection of back issues from the old Weekly World News tabloid, so that’s something at least. Bat Boy, save us from our despair!

One evening a few years back, The Girlfriend and I went downtown to see the lights at Temple Square.

I should probably explain for my out-of-state readers that Temple Square is the geographic heart of both Salt Lake City and the LDS faith. Practically the first thing the Mormon pioneers did when they arrived in this valley in 1847 was to pick a spot on which to build their temple. The early settlement, then the city that rose from that, and eventually the layout of the entire valley radiated outward from that one place. Today, the original temple grounds, which include the temple itself and several other buildings surrounded by a high stone wall, comprise an entire city block, Temple Square. And every fall, the church begins decorating the grounds — as well as several adjoining properties — with literally millions of Christmas lights. The switch is thrown over Thanksgiving weekend, and the lights stay on every night until New Year’s Eve. It’s an amazingly beautiful spectacle. And best of all, it’s open to the public, regardless of faith, and it’s absolutely free to get in. I doubt if there’s anyone in this valley who hasn’t experienced it at least once, and most everyone I know goes every year.

The particular visit I’m thinking of was on a bitterly cold night just before Christmas Eve. Anne and I were reasonably comfortable in heavy coats and the long underwear we’d bought for our Yellowstone snowmobiling weekend, but our exposed faces still tingled painfully in the frigid air. We were surrounded by hordes of similarly dressed people, all looking like chubby little marshmallow men (and marshmallow women and children) in their layered clothing, all of them buzzing happily about holiday parties, shopping left to do, and the other lighthearted things people talk about this time of year.

Not one of them was paying the slightest attention to the man seated on a mud-encrusted five-gallon bucket in front of the diner on the corner just south of Temple Square.

Continue Reading…

Hope you all found something nice under your tree!