My favorite poem of the year is a toss-up between Lao Tzu or this Ron Padgett gem, from his Collected Poems. It’s unfashionable to admit it, but I do own a television, two of them, in fact: one is our old 40″ that lives in our living room, so my boys can watch Daniel Tiger or whatever and leave me and their mother alone for half an hour so we can actually accomplish a simple task like a shower or dinner or just staring into a coffee cup for five minutes, and the other TV is a gigantic 4K monster that I went out and bought at Costco on a whim. It lives in our bedroom, connected to a $5 antenna, and it is beloved. Last night we lied in bed with bourbon and watched My Man Godfrey and Rockford Files and Star Trek and fell asleep. It was heavenly and I am unashamed to admit it.
Cosmic perspective
Jerry Seinfeld kept photos from the Hubble Space Telescope up on the wall in the Seinfeld writing room. “It would calm me when I would start to think that what I was doing was important,” he told Judd Apatow, in Sick in the Head. “You look at some pictures from the Hubble Telescope and you snap out of it.” When Apatow said that sounded depressing, Seinfeld replied, “People always say it makes them feel insignificant, but I don’t find being insignificant depressing. I find it uplifting.”
This is one of the reasons I look at the moon.
Merry Christmas, y’all
Christmas in Texas is full of single panel cartoons like his one.
Comfort and joy
In the December 23 entry from Tape For The Turn of the Year, A.R. Ammons writes, “release us from mental / prisons / into the actual / fact, the mere / occurrence—the touched, tasted, heard, seen.” For many, Christmas is a spiritual time, but it’s also a sensual time, of food, music, lights. It’s a mistake, I think, to elevate one over the other. The spirit and the senses are not disconnected. They are a two-way street.
Hallelujah, I’m a bum!
Today an interviewer asked me what was the common trait that the artists I look up to share, and without missing a beat, I answered, “They all work harder than I do.”
“I don’t like work,” sang Harry McClintock, “and work don’t like me!” I think my fellow millennials, most of whom will spend their lives working harder and harder for fewer and fewer returns, should make this their anthem:
Oh, why don’t you save
all the money you earn?
If I didn’t eat
I’d have money to burn!
(Avocado toast, my ass.)
I’m also reminded of this Ivan Brunetti Nancy strip, which I’ve had hanging above my desk for years (even back when I did have a day job):
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