Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 12/2/23
The Silly Season Kick-Off Edition
I must apologize for the lateness of the delivery here; we in Administration have been gamely trudging through the various machinations around Christmas that happen every year, hoping that somewhere amidst the toting and fetching and the making of lists and the checking of them twice that a box labeled “Christmas Spirit” wound fall from a high shelf and crack my noggin and then whammo! I got on my Christmas feet and we go about the business of being the jolliest bunch of assholes this side of the nuthouse.
Not this year. I don’t have any gas left in the tank. Now, don’t worry, all of you who are looking forward to spending a little holiday time with me; I’ll have on the Christmas fez, and the Star Wars ugly sweater t-shirt, and we’ll sing the Grinch song and you’ll get what you asked for. But as a veteran of waltzing through holidays in the midst of a catastrophic depression, I learned long ago that no one cares if you’re sad, or mad, or down, or any of it. No one does. There’s too much shit on everyone’s list, and trying to fix holiday depression with a plate of warm cookies and some pithy aphorism is like attacking a California wild fire with a squirt gun.
Oh, hey, for the record, I’m not depressed, at least, not in that above, untreated way. I’m still on my little stinky pills that even my moods out. I’m journaling, and taking mental health breaks, and I’m even doing some sitting and thinking about stuff. I don’t do it for very long, because my brain is a toilet, and thoughts just circle around my bowl until I force them down again, and if it’s a good thought, well, yippee skippy, but if it’s a bad thought, it’s like getting a song you hate stuck in your head.
The only thing I’ve learned to do in these circumstances is to simply fake it. I’ll go along to get along, and I’m hoping like hell (as has been the case in seasons past) that I find my Christmas feet sometime before December 23rd. That’s cutting it a little too close, but something tells me this is one of those “end of the bungee” years, where I’ll end up inches from the ground before I’m yanked back up again on a wave of dopamine hits from the Ghost of Christmas Past.
Mostly, I just want 2023 to be over. It’s been a struggle for most of it to find my groove and get in it. I am the world’s worst phonograph stylus, and I’m trying to play on that Monty Python album with the different random grooves in it; like I’m supposed to be hearing one thing, but it’s playing something completely different. That’s been me, for eight or nine months now.
Just 30 more days. And as much as I am dreading the forthcoming political molasses flood, for it will be a clingy, sticky, all-consuming thing, I’m much more looking forward to 2025, which will be neither an election year, nor a leap year, or anything else special and weird. It’ll just be a year, and a nice round number, at that. We’re really-really in the future, if it’s 2025 and I’m writing a paperless newsletter.
It would be nice to look around in two years and feel like we’re gonna be all right. Moving forward, or at least, not slipping backward. I’d really like to think we’re all a little smarter, maybe even a little wiser. After all, what’s the point of living through stuff if you don’t use that knowledge to make better decisions and choices? That’s going to be my Christmas wish this year; that the veil of insanity be lifted on us as a whole, and we start treating each other with a little more respect, and maybe even a little dignity. I’m going to wish for everyone’s memories to be able to reach back over Y2K into the 90s, the 80s, and maybe even the 70s if it won’t make your head explode like that guy in the movie Scanners. I am going to wish for the collective ability to apply our own learned and lived experiences to the political landscape we’ve inadvertently made for ourselves, and that we, as a people, step back from the edge of the cliff.
What I’ll probably get is a plate of brownies. With nuts.
Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review
Shining Vale (Starz)
Courtney Cox and Greg Kinnear are a married couple on the rocks. She’s a novelist who’s been slowing walking her second book, and he’s trying to get over the fact that she had a random affair with someone. Their answer was to move out into the styx, where the city is a train ride away, to the idyllic town of Shining Vale, and their big, old, creepy, kooky, spooky house, which is, of course, haunted.
This dark, dark horror comedy series is kind of perfect, in a really quirky way. For one, they manage to work a lot of story into eight 30-minute episodes. I mean, things move along and there’s no wasted space. What space there is is filled with Courtney Cox at her most strident, most profane, and most funny. Kinnear is great, too, and Mira Sorvino kicks all of the ass, especially in season 2, which is complete for binging now. It’s an example of how far television writing has come in the last twenty years.
What kept me watching was the weird little jolts I kept getting when I realized that the scene I just watched was lifted from a very famous Stephen King movie, and in Season Two, they pick up another classic to pull from. I don’t know what you call this. It’s not an Easter Egg, not really. But there are a ton of in-jokes, provided you’re a horror movie fan. Part of the fun of the story is watching some older, more, ah, established horror classics get a –for lack of a better term—a recontextualized fresh coat of paint when they are coming out of different character’s mouths. I’m trying not to give anything away because the Internet is a tire fire, so let’s just say if you’re a classic horror fan who grew up in the 1980s watching stuff, then Shining Vale will delight you and kinda creep you out in equal parts.