10086 Sunset Boulevard

What didn’t you eat this Christmas season? Creamed Corn would be my answer. This Christmas I’m pretty sure I ate everything else. I would have updated my website sooner, but I’m just now coming out of a sugar coma.

The cracked molar I had hoped would hang on just a little while longer, gave way under the strain of a mouthful of Poppycock, which is not nearly as rude as it sounds. I was stuffing my face full of it while energetically responding to an email. I didn’t realize that I’d been typing and stuffing, and that the stuffing was not coordinated with the chewing and swallowing, so when I discovered something had gone seriously wrong, I went to the bathroom mirror and saw both cheeks bulging with the mixture and wondered how in the world that had happened. That’s the end of eating at the computer. I could have choked and no one wants the word “Poppycock” in their obituary!

So, it was 4:30 on the Friday before Christmas when this incident happened and the receptionist at my dentist’s office informed me that everyone had left and wouldn’t be back for another week and a half, but had I called that morning they would have been able to accommodate me. Well, had I called that morning, I would have been psychic and hopefully avoided the whole, miserable, humiliating Poppycock episode. The receptionist recommended a dentist in the shopping mall one town over. A dentist in a shopping mall that was open the Friday evening before Christmas? Right. I went to Long’s, had a little chat with the Pharmacist and returned home with dental putty to fill the gaping hole and Ambesol for obvious reasons. I’ll await my dentist’s return next week and she’ll do a fantastic job on fixing up my tooth for a mere one thousand dollars. Ouch again.

The broken tooth did nothing to slow my eating frenzy.

We had dinner at Rona’s house on Christmas Day, where she and her husband took very good care of us. Rona decorates her home for Christmas in what I would call “Upscale Mendocino Bed and Breakfast”. Warm, muted Christmas colors, soft lights and candles. Then there’s all the things she bakes and the dinner her husband cooked. I get the feeling Martha Stewart must be lurking in the corner, just to see if it all turned out as perfectly as she planned. It did and we went off home full of Turkey and all the fixings and with an enormous plate of baked goods.

Christmas was big on sugar and short on romance. I don’t know what I’m going to do about that. Probably nothing right now. One friend suggested that perhaps the elusive man in my life was just there to help with the transition, the moving forward. He has his life so tightly structured as not to allow anyone to come too close to him. I’ve respected and understood that, but it’s one year later and I don’t know him much better than I did a year ago. I know parts of him better, but not the whole.

I don’t want to let go and yet, events of the past will not allow me to say the word “need” to any man. “I ask help of no man” has become my mantra. Sometimes a mantra through tears of frustration as I sit on the ground wondering how I could have just screwed up the water heater to the tune of $1200. And a mantra of defiance when it occurs to me that the repair man mistook me for a helpless female. He won’t make that mistake again and I made the repair myself at a cost of ten dollars and a nice boost to my confidence.

I need to keep focused on my goal and that’s to continue making things right between me and myself. I’m going to buy myself a house and there’s a lot of work to do to accomplish that goal. It’s a priority above all other wants.

Work on the book has resumed. I had no idea it would be quite this difficult or, at times, so rewarding. I tossed the first four versions of the book, not because they weren’t good, but because no matter how I chose to tell the tale of betrayal and weight loss, I was sick to the gills of my own story. Once I made it a fictional character’s story, well, then I started having some real fun with the process. This has to be the year of the book, otherwise I’ll be writing it for the next twenty years.

My New Year’s resolution? Simple; no more Poppycock.

Do you find “A Christmas Story” to be the most annoying thing about Christmas? Then read no further.

I’ve loved this movie, ever since I first saw it one summer in 1985. I had no interest in the movie, but my brother told me I had to see it. Still no interest, but after a while it was easier to see the movie than to make my excuses to him, since it was clear he was going to ask me ever single time I saw him. I didn’t have to wait until Christmas to watch it, he informed me, I could see it in July and still be glad I did.

So I watched it in July and I was glad I did. There are many things about the story that remind me of my early memories of Christmas, before leaving America at the age of nine, to live in places where Christmas was quite different. I love it because the “Mama’s Little Piggy” scene makes me laugh and laugh and laugh each and every time. I love it, because it makes me feel happy and starting this evening, it’s going to be on the TV for a whole 24 hours, which is comforting. I could wake up in the middle of the night and know that there’s something good on TV. When can you ever say that?

A Christmas Story geek is what I am and maybe even to the point that I’d visit the Christmas Story house in Ohio. Maybe. Not so much a geek that if I did visit, I’d pop over to the Christmas Story Museum and purchase the leg lamp to spruce up my home decor, but it’s nice to have the option. I’d have to do it right and finish up the tour by having dinner at the C and Y Chinese Restaurant, where they serve Chinese Turkey.

The house was renovated and turned into a business after it was put up for auction on eBay in 2004 for a starting price of $99,000. A fan bought it for the winning bid of $150,000.

Click to Enlarge

The ad reads:

I’m sending Chesterfields to all my friends. That’s the merriest Christmas any smoker can have - Chesterfield mildness plus no unpleasant after-taste. Ronald Reagan

 

“See Ronald Reagan starring in HONG KONG a Pine-Thomas Paramount Production, Color by Technicolor.”

Chesterfield. Buy the beautiful “Christmas-Card” Carton.

It happens to me around this time every year. Reflection. Taking a look at the year that’s just about to pass and where I am in my life. Taking a look at where I am not and figuring out what I can do about it in the coming year, or at least how I can look at it differently.

I’m trying to get a perspective. Where am I on the map of Jo Gillis?

It’s been a sad season this year. People tend to die and the holidays don’t stop them. It’s sad when people leave, but it’s sadder still when they depart just after their 50th birthday while playing a game of soccer in, what seemed, perfectly good health. It can happen, just like that. Many waves of sadness.

But, I’m rising above the blues. I’ve put up the lights, lots of twinkly white lights in the pine tree out front with a solitary reindeer that turns his head slowly from side to side. You know the ones. Nothing original, it’s the effort that matters.

To all outward appearances, and just lately inwardly, my life is boring. I am my mother’s chauffeur and gardener. She appreciates that fact and I am glad that circumstances worked out to put me in the situation to be able to do so. Occasionally I work at an organic farm a couple of days a week. I go to bed alone with a book almost every night.

The book I am currently reading is 203 Ways to Drive a Man Wild in Bed because I don’t always go to bed alone.

My other job is confidential, which is too bad, because that would certainly make for interesting reading. I was fortunate enough to make some prime contacts when I lived in Los Angeles, one of the very few perks of living with an alcoholic writer. The contacts stayed with me when he left and I’ll always appreciate their loyalty. Or maybe they stayed because I’m good at what I do and I don’t charge nearly enough. Most of the transcription is for people in the music industry, but sometimes I get some unusual side projects.

Recently I transcribed an infomercial for vibrators. I learned everything there is to know about vibrators and more. Some of them are as complicated as computers and by the time you’d read the instructions and figured out how to operate the thingy, you’d probably have forgotten what you were doing with the contraption in the first place. Too many bells and whistles… and lights. It was a surprisingly well written, entertaining and informative video. The credits rolled and I learned it was written by the aforementioned writer. Life is strange. Life mocks. You’ve got to have a sense of humor.

I saw something on the news this morning, the silliness of which reminded me of perspective and that mine is reasonably sound. Sometimes that’s all it takes.

Never, ever, not once, has my life been so empty or so dull or so pathetic that I would consider becoming an anti-gay caroler. Personally, I think that the church should throw these people’s sorry, misguided butts out of the congregation, but I imagine the clergy are more tolerant of idiots than these protesting fools are of homosexuality.

Anti-Gay Caroler Todd Braun of Citrus Heights uses this bad analogy to explain his actions:

“If you see a person walking toward a cliff you go “stop him” if he’s blind and he can’t see the cliff….”

… and in the spirit of such silliness, all I have to say about that is this:

Got nothing better to do? Take a look at this Pat Benatar Video from the early 80’s. Was that Chris Noth aka Mr. Big coming up the escalator in the subway? Can you spot the woman wearing a pink bra on the outside of her clothing? What frightens the man in the bar room dance scene? Is it their clothes? That would make sense. Not much else does.