(3/30 10:18 PM: See below, post updated to correct erroneous information about local mammals.)
A groundbreaking combination never before conceived…until now.
I obviously haven’t been posting much lately, and sometimes it’s because I don’t have any good ideas, or at least any good ideas that I want to bother actually turning into reality. (Sometimes it’s because I’m just lazy.) But with the passing of the vernal equinox and the coming of spring at long last, I’ve been seeking with intent towards the light and the warmth and the love, loosening up my knotted mental muscles and joints and just shooting for the moon. The result? A killer insight – take this straight to the bank: Robert de Niro is a positive thing. Thoughts are also, undeniably, a positive thing. What happens when you combine Robert de Niro with a collection of my random, unconnected thoughts conveniently displayed using bullet points? Positive + positive = pure gold, my friends.
This will be the highlight of your day.
Here are some of the things I am thinking about today, plus Robert de Niro:
- I’m a little disappointed I didn’t see more people posting pics on FB of their palm fronds this past Sunday. Why isn’t #palmgram a thing? Doesn’t anybody get excited deep down in the bosom for Palm Sunday anymore?
- I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Venus – the planet, not the razor – has been around a lot lately. It’s been lingering around the moon quite often, and you should check it out. As the sage once wrote: “The spiral light of Venus, rising first and shining best, from the northwest corner of the brand new crescent moon.” Think about it.
- It’s weird, some years I like the Rolling Stones and some years I don’t. I never mind them, but most years I don’t really like them especially much. This is one of the years where I really like the Rolling Stones, which is fine, I just didn’t really expect it to be. You just never know.
- That reminds me, actually. On my old car that I loved so much – you would find it lame or bad, but it was my favorite of life – I had a green bumper sticker that read in nice white letters, “Life is Strange.” My wife had it made up for me special, back when we were just newly dating lovebirds. It was a great sticker on a great car. When the car died, the sticker went with it. The car died when the computer that runs it fell out of the bottom of it while I was driving in the middle of busy Main Street in Keene, at 5 pm two days before Christmas a couple years back. Undoubtedly, this happened because bad things always happen in Keene, or perhaps being in Keene actually made my poor car suicidal. Or maybe she’d just had enough. We all get there one day. Until then, and perhaps afterwards (just not for us), life is strange.
- Speaking of death, I think a new unique twist on the Easter Bunny that will really hook the kids is if we start saying he has prophetic powers. We can tell the youngsters that if they catch the wily rascal of a crucifixion stand-in, he (or she? I absolutely believe a woman can be Easter Bunny) will tell them how they will die in the end. This will give them a goal with which to occupy themselves and also provide a much-needed incentive to ponder fate and mortality. #happyspring
- It’s been almost exactly two years since I came out of the closet as someone who doesn’t hate New Hampshire. I can hardly believe it’s been two whole years of not hating this state. It goes by too fast, the moments…. Anyway, I agree with myself, in this instance – what I said two years ago was right, and it’s still true. I still don’t hate it. Sometimes I secretly like it more. Don’t tell. Other days, I remember fondly my days of casual contempt and consider a return. This happened most recently yesterday. Now, while pursuing the maintenance and health of their social media accounts New Hampshire media outlets are forced quite often to share national stories unrelated to the Granite State that are also neither important nor of identifiable value. They’ve got to post something, after all. I accept it, even if it feeds my smug sense of Masshole superiority. So WMUR, the Manchester-based television station (I know, somebody gave Manchester a television station, I’m just as shocked as you are) decided yesterday, out of all the unimportant and not noteworthy non-New Hampshire content available to a television station of their (limited) stature, to post on Facebook a story about a black guy on a train in St. Louis who supposedly beat up a white guy because he didn’t seem to care about Michael Brown, and everyone else on the train watched. ZOMG. I’m sure maybe this might have actually happened, but that’s not the point. The television station in the reliably fairly conservative enclave that is ManchVegas decided Whitey New Hampshire needed reinforcement of the notion of “the violent blacks.” So, thanks for race-baiting, WMUR. But I did the thing I always do that you should never do, and I read the comments. It’s not that there were brazenly racist comments, it’s that all the comments were just various degrees of racist – ranging from the people (yes, much more than one) sharing “Stop White Genocide” memes to those inclined to whoop it up with a little #alllivesmatter. I don’t like to think I’m easily shocked, but this was disturbing. I mean, this wasn’t just hate, this was gleeful hate (and trust me, I know a little something about gleeful hate, I just don’t direct it at people because they don’t look like me), this was the kind of hate that seemed like they were just waiting for an outlet, a venue, a medium to congregate and LET IT ALL HANG OUT. Thanks, WMUR, for hosting the party.
I swore at them, but they didn’t even pay any attention to me.
(But in conclusion, for the record, if you actually don’t care about Michael Brown, fuck you.)
- Just FYI, Jon Hamm won’t say if he drinks too much because Don Draper. Where do you stand?
- I feel like nobody really wants to address opossums. When was the last time you heard of a children’s story or even an old myth in which the main character is an opossum? Do we consider their traits to be generally good or generally distasteful? I bet you can’t even answer that. I can’t. I bring this up not out of moral passion but because there’s been one who strolls on by my back door by the river sometimes, in broad daylight in the snow. At first, I thought he was probably rabid because I think they are supposed to come out at night and he didn’t seem scared of me, but I’m pretty sure rabies would have totally killed him by now, and he’s still sniveling around. That’s the thing, they sort of snivel. You can’t trust anything that snivels around. Plus, it looks like a giant white rat that was sent to kill you. A giant white rat that was sent to kill you, only it has a really cute pink nose on its weird pointy face. I think we may have our answer, but can we face the implications?
- Since I’m required (as a wizard) to talk about planting seeds in the spring, especially during the time between the equinox and the solstice (which…now that I think about it, is literally the definition of all of spring, so whatever man), so I’m just going to get it out of the way now. Hopefully you’ve figured out what you want to plant this year, what sort of shit you want to be pulling out of the ground and eating in a few months. If not, figure it out ASAP, guys. Then get to work preparing – tilling the fields and ultimately, soon, starting the planting. Because it’ll be better for you if you do this. I mean, do you want to be aware of how the changing seasons affect you or just ignore it? Maybe you just hate farmers, which is mean, but all right, come up with your own metaphor then, I don’t care. Maybe you live in the desert and nobody plants things ever, which is cool, too. The point is, this is the moment when the year really begins, the meaty action part, anyway. If you have a vague idea of what you want and where to go, it’s better than having no idea. And if you have that vague idea, you can think about what would be a good way to get started. Go with the solar current, not against. DO IT NOW. It’ll be great, or bad, but you’ll know one way or another before 2016 (unless you don’t make it).
(Don’t get me wrong, I still believe all of that and still believe it’s important, but I do get sick of saying the same things every year. That’s why I’ve bailed on two high holidays already. Don’t judge me, just read the ones I wrote last year if you need to.)
- Lastly, I just wanted to say something about celebrities.
Thanks for coming by! Have a favorite? A favorite what? you may ask. Well, a favorite picture of Robert de Niro, or a favorite one of my thoughts, of course! Go ahead and vote in the comments section for the one that means the most of you, and democracy will make angels out of each and every one of you.
UPDATE: 10:15 PM: My wife informs me that Opossums are not nearly as neglected as I had been led to believe, and one – Unc’ Billy – even broke the mammalian glass ceiling and got a starring role in a children’s book. A rodent ahead of his time. Bravo.
Christopher J. DiLoreto 