The Gravy Doesn't Just Come When You Cook The Meat

In Neil Simon's The Odd Couple, Oscar angers Felix by coming home very late for a double-date dinner that Felix is cooking. By the time Oscar ambles home, beer on his breath, the roast is dried-out. Felix, already angry, asks what he is supposed to do -- the dinner is ruined. Oscar makes the mistake of suggesting that they just pour gravy over it.

FELIX: Where the hell am I going to get gravy at eight o'clock? 

OSCAR: I thought it comes when you cook the meat. 

FELIX: When you cook the meat? You don't know the first thing you're talking about. You have to make gravy. It doesn't just come!

This popped into my head today as I was thinking about the sort of laissez-faire attitude people seem to have toward their own lives. They expect the gravy just to magically make itself, when it comes to life, in general -- especially in terms of marriage and kids.

The Desolation of Smaug: My Two Cents

Anyone who reads my drivel on a regular basis will have gleaned by now that I am a Tolkien guy. I credit his work with awakening my interest in literature; I still love to read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I also like the Peter Jackson films -- I think he did as good a job as he could with most of them. Sure, I disagree with some of his choices, but I am open to the idea of interpretation: he sees it the way he sees it and he makes choices not only in the interest of the source material, but in the interest of making a good movie. That is the nature of the beast.

Tolkien's own illustration of Smaug

I just saw The Desolation of Smaug -- the second film in the trilogy based on The Hobbit. The first film in the trilogy, An Unexpected Journey was actually my favorite of all of Jackson's adaptations, so far.

While I enjoyed this second film, I think that (so far) it is the weakest of his adaptations. Smaug, the dragon himself, was awesome in the truest sense of the word. In the end, though, I don't think the movie captured the charm of the original book the way the first one did.

If You Buy A Kid an XBox

(I never posted on Christmas -- here is an older post that I still get a bit of a kick out of...)

(A children's story in the tradition of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.)

If you buy a kid an Xbox (360), the guy at the store will tell you that the old XBox games will work on it.

If you bring the Xbox (360) home, you will find the old games only work if you buy a one-hundred and thirty dollar external hard drive.

If you are a high school teacher who doesn't want to spend one-hundred-thirty more dollars (after the $375 you already spent on the game system), you will decide to hook up the old Xbox along with the Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii. (This will require a degree in engineering or a lifetime of experience with cords and plugs, the latter of which you fortunately have.)

After you do this, you will find out that your TV room is too small for the "Kinect" that allows game play without remote controls. For a moment you will consider whether you really need the garage that lies beyond the confining wall. You will also wonder whether you could make a small doorway into the garage, so the kids will be able to back up far enough. Your kids will suggest standing on the couch to play. You'll consider this, as well, and then get a hold of yourself.

Sexual Desperation

If had a daughter, she would be beautiful. (I would think that automatically, I mean -- that was not meant to be a reference my genetic mojo.) It is impossible to imagine it would be otherwise, even as a fictional father of a girl, so I have to extrapolate that she would, eventually, upon her blossoming into womanhood, be attractive to men.

And when this fictional daughter of mine finally became, physically, a woman, I would want her to feel comfortable in joining in all the reindeer games of flirtation. I would want her to be proud of her body. As much as I would instinctually want to dress her in a burlap sack and hide her from the prying, seedy eyes of her hormone-possessed male contemporaries, I would teach her that she has two rights, when it comes to her body:

1) It is okay for her to look sexually appealing.
2) It is okay for her to deny access to her sexually appealing self, at any time. 

I would want her to feel the joy of being appreciated for her aesthetic charms. We all find it gratifying to be "looked at" (in a polite way, at least) by the opposite sex. It's good for the old ego and it is nice to feel attractive. It spawns some wonderful poems, too.

How Music Spins Up My Soul

It took quite awhile to realize that people who also love music don't also love music for the same reasons I do. This is probably because music's effect on me is so immediate and so fundamentally related to what is going on in side me that it feels as if it couldn't be any other way for anyone else. Maybe it is genetic. Maybe it is programming, but it is "musical direction" that my dad always pointed out to me -- the way the harmonies and the melodies walk through the span of a piece and carry the listener's heart along. For me, the presence of that direction has always been a necessary ingredient in truly good music.

To put it another way, to guys like us, it is the horizontal progress of a piece that makes the magic, not the a rows of verticals stacked up next to one another like books on a shelf, that makes the magic happen. Rock music (and pop) are often based on verticals: one chord follows another and the melody note is just something laid over the top. To my dad (and to me) that was generally ineffective. But when harmonies melodies and chord move gracefully in a profound arabesque on their horizontal journey; when they "go where they need to go" it affects me (and it affected him) in the most profound way.

When music does this to me, I feel an actual physical "high." If there is a door that holds back the endorphin flood, for me, particular harmonic clusters and progressions are the key to the lock. Emily Dickinson said she "knew" poetry this way: