An improbable Yuletide message from your host.

It may shock many of you to hear this, but I have always loved Christmas. Sure, some of the attendant chores can be a pain: It's no fun stringing lights in a 16-degree wind chill and then discovering that the strand that worked perfectly when you tested it indoors no longer works when you finally get it tacked onto the fence around the deck. But even in that instance, once you get all the bugs out, and you're sipping hot chocolate as dusk arrives and you plug everything in and your little white lights instantly come alive, peeking through the accompanying pine boughs into the gathering indigo sky, and you're able to get the full effect of your handiwork for the first time... It's a great feeling. It is—dare I say it?—a joyous feeling.

I have always loved lots of things about life. And in my personal approach to daily living—that is, the little dialogue that occurs between me and me—I am upbeat and positive, expecting good things and generally seeing the glass as three-quarters full. What ticks me off is the commercialization of positivity, with the concomitant insincerity of the notion that if you pay me $9695—as James Ray's marks, uh, clients paid him—I can teach you how to apply a positive attitude to yourself as easily if you were putting on lipstick. Then there's the equally pervasive notion that by allowing you to hang with me—one thinks of Joe Vitale's obnoxious Phantom meetings—I enable you to absorb my own positivity in some osmotic way, such that my success will rub off on you. First of all, there's no evidence for the belief that Person A's path to greatness will also lead Person B to the same destination. (As I said in a recent TV interview, if it were that easy, we'd all drop out of college and become billionaires. After all, it worked for Bill Gates.) But you already know chapter and verse about that, and this started out as a Christmas post, so let's return to that theme, shall we?

In the course of my 59 years I have met so many people who trudge through life expecting nothing special. They have lost their reverence for life's grand and romantic traditions, for the things and times that are supposed to uplift us, energize us. We get jaded, cynical. "Scrooge-ified." We "outgrow" the childish enthusiasm that made certain events so magical. I'm not just talking here about formal occasions like Christmas and Easter and our birthdays, but also milestones like our first car or our first kiss or the first time we made love and really meant it. Even if those things are landmark moments, they shouldn't lose their meaning. There should be an echo of the same joy in every kiss, every time you make love, every time you look at a sunset. I think I've said this before but when I first moved to California, I lived in an area that was nestled in a valley between two minor mountain ranges. It was a gorgeous tableau—it was gorgeous each and every day—and yet I noticed that when my neighbors walked to their cars to get to work in the morning, few of them bothered to glance up. And no one ever actually paused to take it in. They didn't even look up on the cooler winter mornings when those encircling hills were likely to be capped with snow. For my neighbors, most of whom were lifelong residents, the whole panorama had become a Given, an amorphous, characterless backdrop. Those snow-capped mountains? They might as well have not even been there.

And I asked myself: How does your heart ever get that old and tired?

That's why I address this last part to the curmudgeons among us: those of you who long ago lost the joy of the season. It's been said before, but I recommend that each of you spend some time watching a child, preferably a group of children, experience Christmas. Look for the light in their eyes; drink in the giggles, the unending smiles. And now I'm going to close by getting really over-the-top syrupy, so those of you with no stomach for it may want to look away: I'm going to go Polar Express on you. Because I'm betting that somewhere deep inside, no matter how much time and distance and garbage and disappointment and sheer life has come between you and the wide-eyed child you were once, that bell is still faintly ringing. Where's the harm in trying to listen for it?

Is this tongue-in-cheek? Or just plain cheek?

Every now and then we're presented with a crystal-clear lesson in just how out of touch with Main Street America people in some walks of life truly are. That hit home for me again this morning when I saw a blurb about this piece in the January 2010 Vogue, which gives us the tragic tale of model Lara Stone: She is, you see, an elephantine size-4, complete with curves and actual "boobs" (to use the magazine's own terminology), so naturally she's having trouble navigating the fashionista world of living (for the time being) stick-figures. In the course of its sympathetic lament, the Vogue profile includes such memorable lines as "It's not easy being a four in a land of zeros" and "She has tried to lose weight with diet and exercise, but nothing worked." (I shit you not.) The article even chronicles Stone's descent into the bottle (!), where the overfed model sought refuge from her lingering body-image problems.

Fortunately for us all, there's a warm redemptive ending, as we learn that Lara has come to terms with her personal cross. "People still tell me I'm fat," she says, "but when I look in the mirror, that's not what I see."

Well bully for you, Lara. Gee, I'm sure that the millions of size-14-and-beyond women all over America are choking back the tears, maybe even thinking about staging a benefit on your behalf.... And remember, gals, this is your media [sic] at work. This is the industry that was supposed to empower you, speak for you, make you feel good about yourself. Make you feel comfortable in your own skin.

To paraphrase the line from former New York mayor Ed Koch, "So how are they doing?"

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To continue what some perceive as my ongoing "defense" of sexual predators, this man, 25-year-old Shaun P. Austin, was sentenced to "72 to 192 years" in prison on Tuesday. That is, of course, the equivalent of a life sentence. Austin's crime consisted of having 100 images of child pornography on his home computer. That is it; that is the totality of his offense against society in this case. To be fair, this is no model citizen we're talking about. Austin, who is HIV-positive, also is accused in a separate case of having unprotected sex with underage girls. If he's convicted, and if that judge decides that the public interest is best served by locking this man up and throwing away the key for having committed that crime—a patent and despicable act of violence against another person—it'd be hard to argue. Especially given the psychiatric profiles of Austin, which are not encouraging. But life in prison for surfing child porn? I ask you to put aside your gut reactions and tell me how you can justify such extreme punishment for what is, in effect, a thought crime: a guy looking at something on a screen in the privacy of his own home. To my knowledge, even the lowlifes who produce child porn don't get those kinds of sentences, at least not the first time out.

Do you know that your fellow Americans are being questioned and (on admittedly rare occasion) arrested for frequenting other types of sites as well? Like, sites that teach you how to build bombs or wage a successful jihad? Apparently curiosity, in the form of a desire for certain types of knowledge, is illegal these days. Do you realize that spending a lot of time searching out and perusing sites put up by terrorist sympathizers may land you on a watch list, and your activities may be "tracked" thereafter? Do you know that if your school-age children talk too much about how angry they are, how they sometimes think of doing terrible things to their classmates, they may be charged with "making terroristic threats"? I've said this before, but when I was a kid in Brooklyn, we would've all been locked up; we made terrorist threats on a weekly basis. We threatened to beat the crap out of each other (and yes, sometimes acted on it), and now and then you'd open your locker and find a charming little note that said something like, "YOU'RE DEAD MEAT, SALERNO." To me, that's all part of growing up, of venting normal pubescent anger. I can't prove this, but I think that such bluster, if anything, often helps defuse situations, rather than inflaming them. It's when you don't let people vent, when you force the emotions underground, that you have the problems. But again, that's just my theory.

Regardless, this is your America, folks. Let's all sit around the Christmas tree and drink sparkling wine as it slips away.

P.S. Thursday morning, Dec. 24. The examples I could cite in support of the foregoing are legion, but I happened to notice this story in today's paper. A guy was sentenced to 60 years for killing his friend's wife. So on the one hand we have a man who kills someone and gets 60 years (with a possibility of release after 28). On the other hand we have a guy who looks at kiddie porn on his own computer and gets a minimum of 72 years. Once again, I would like this explained to me.

Jimmy's on crack, and I don't care.

Whence this practice of sending "holiday newsletters"? In fairness, I'm sure it all began some time ago, back in the era before people were in constant touch via Nextel or Twitter, when the arrival of the current newsletter each December represented a welcome way of catching up with important developments of the past year throughout the family and extended family. That said, I also sense that the practice has accelerated in recent times; certainly in this family, it has. And I have to see this as yet another outgrowth of the fulminating narcissism and "I celebrate myself!" movement that has hijacked American culture in recent decades. These things read like the self-congratulatory mini-memoirs teachers would encourage kids to write in the earliest days of self-esteem-based education. ("10 Reasons Why it's Great to be Me!") It's just that some kids never outgrew it, even now that they're in their mid-30s and have kids of their own.

One caveat, here. If you can write a comedy masterpiece, that's another story (bearing in mind that most folks who think they "write funny," well, don't. Corny is more like it.) My mother-in-law, who lives with us, has a cousin who sends just such a missive each Christmas, and we look forward to it. The woman is savvy and sly, and has perfect comedic timing, which is not easy to have in print. Above all, and this may be the key, she is self-deprecatory. In fact, the sarcastic genius of her presentation of legitimate news makes her newsletters read like parodies of the other kind, which only serves to amplify the humor.

Ahh yes, that "other kind." They are, in a word, insufferable. I ask the authors of such tedious documents why they think it's necessary for me to know that little Tommy passed his first fully formed stool, or that Debbie started school "and now eats green beans, and seems to really enjoy them! We're so excited!" Look, if something spectacular happened to you and/or yours—and I didn't already hear about it—by all means send a little note. But please, spare me the news about how happy you (still) are at the job you've had for two decades, or that you survived another year of marriage, or that you're enrolled in a spinning class or—God help us all—you've taken up scrapbooking.

So let me put this in the form of an official request. Unless your newsletter reads something like so...

The parole hearing is next month, and we're optimistic this time; two of Bob's three victims mysteriously died, so there are fewer people to speak for the other side.... Little Lucy has graduated—from percodan to fentanyl... MaryAnne finally succeeded at fulfilling one of her life's goals. (She got a very nice thank-you note from the Birmingham football team, too.)... Meanwhile, the cops found one of the animals' heads, so Ted is going to have to be more careful about disposal...

...feel free to save a stamp and a tree by omitting me from your list. Merry Christmas and HO-HO-HO!

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Alert readers will notice that an item has been deleted from the blog. I have my reasons, and they're good ones. To those of you who took the trouble to comment in response to that item, I apologize, and I urge you to resist feeling that those efforts were wasted. We'll come back to it again when the time is right.

Give my egads to Broadway. Plus: Chuck's plane speaking.

Barring further logistical fallout from yesterday's Great Blizzard of 2009, I will be venturing into the city tomorrow (here in the Northeast, "the city" can refer to just one destination) in connection with that Potentially Very Exciting Opportunity I mentioned in passing some time back. And if I'm not as specific as I might be, or as some of you would like me to be, it's because I don't want to jinx it. Yes, it's true: I'm trying to be a positive thinker, foreclosing the prospect of a negative outcome simply by not talking about it. We all have these little superstitious bargains we make.

Each time I journey to the city, which isn't often nowadays since I spend most of my time holed up in my aforementioned basement, which is really where I ought to be for the mutual benefit of me and mankind, I find that I end up thinking about Broadway shows.

I think about how much I hate them.

Hate 'em. Two or even three hours of grotesque overacting sans nuance or subtlety, brimming with forced, cloying sentiment and/or—if it's a so-called musical—punctuated by regular outbreaks of spontaneous singing, often with marginal relevance to the action at the time, and perpetrated by individuals who, in most cases (though admittedly not all), don't so much sing as shout in a passably melodious timbre. (In my mind's eye, I see American Idol's Randy Jackson grimacing and saying, "It's pitchy, dog, a little pitchy...") I've been to a half-dozen shows in my lifetime, mostly when I was younger, and always because I felt it was "required"* or because I was discharging some romantic debt. Couldn't wait for it all to end. The one semi-exception is West Side Story, and that's only because I love the ensemble dancing in the garage scene ("Cool"). You can keep the rest of it. I actually laughed out-loud when Tony got stabbed, the whole thing was so over-staged and affected. I would've stabbed the entire cast long before that.

I don't understand the attraction. (You may have gotten that idea by now?) I think of myself as a reasonably open-minded guy, and I can at least see the appeal for others of many of the things I personally dislike, but not in this case. My inability to relate to theato-philia is so profound that I find myself thinking that Broadway, like certain other aspects of Manhattan life, is so closely identified with New York and such an embodiment of local pride that Manhattanites almost feel they have to like it, or pretend to like it, or at least defend it, lest their subscription to The New Yorker will be revoked.

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While we're on the subject of things I don't understand, we can add the recent dust-up involving Rep. Chuck Schumer, which some have framed as a symbolic mile marker in the gender wars, i.e. one that reveals the misogyny that still lingers in the soul of even the most (outwardly) enlightened male. See, our man Chuck called a female flight attendant a bitch (and not even to her face. He says, and a witness agrees, that he uttered the word under his breath as the flight attendant was walking way. Trouble is, he was overheard). Not a nice thing to do, Chuck; your mama would be very unhappy with you. However, why is this being hyperbolized and interpreted as the token of simmering gender unrest that some, like this essayist, would have you believe it is?

What's Schumer supposed to call a woman he's displeased with? (And I can think of a far worse word. I'm sure you can, too.) A prick?

I use that last word pointedly, because it's not a term anyone would ever apply to a woman—"That Nancy, she's such a prick!"—and yet it's a word you often hear women (and men) use to describe a guy with whom they're displeased. The fact that certain words of displeasure are gender-specific doesn't imply that the use of that word represents a putdown of an entire class of people. I suspect that there might even have been a few times since the dawn of humanity when a woman referred to another woman as a bitch. Even the aforementioned essayist concedes that much.

Anyway, I suggest that from now on, whenever we want to denounce someone, we make sure to use gender-neutral terms. I recommend asshole. As that crass old bit of conventional wisdom puts it, everyone has one....

* There are some shows you sort of "have" to see to be considered socially au courant. E.g Phantom or Rent or, some years back, Les Miserables, which the theater crowd began calling "Lay Miz," and I would gag every time.

Alone together.

I was intrigued by today's Quote of the Day, from Robert Louis Stephenson:

"Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life."

Right on, Bob. And I think the line applies in spades to today's Digital Generation. Facebooking, tweeting and the rest of it may be excellent adjuncts to daily life (or respites from it), when they're regarded as tools. But when they become daily life, or even a significant part of it—when your social network* is your only network—I find that worrisome. And kind of tragic.

This, not incidentally, constitutes no small part of my objection to the SHAMsphere as well. If you haven't read the final passage of SHAM, I commend it to you now. It concerns a woman I know who uses self-help as a fantasy life, forever immersing herself in grandiose plans of what she's going to do, the life she's going to lead. Meanwhile, nothing in her real life ever changes.

* using the phrase in its more current cyber-meaning.

I'm stewed, she's screwed...and the logic is skewed?

My wife has a saying: "There's should be and there's is." Her meaning is simple: There are numerous aspects of life and/or human nature that don't make sense, that seem unfair or unfortunate, that put all the burdens on all the wrong people. And that's just how it goes; no sense arguing the point. Or so she says.

The classic example that comes up all the time with us involves adults and kids, specifically, the mingling of the former with the latter when there's no preexisting relationship between the two. I'm one of those super-grandparenty types who loves playing with kids, or just engaging them in conversation wherever I may encounter them. (By the way, that's your unshaven, unkempt-looking host being mauled by granddaughter Ava this past Thanksgiving.) I always hope to put a smile on their faces—is there ever such thing as a child smiling too much?—and to hear the sorts of wacky things they'll say to total strangers. If I'm in a supermarket and I see a couple of adorable kids a few aisles away, I'll mosey on over and begin interacting with them. If Kathy's around and she sees me doing this, she'll drop what she's doing and trail right behind me so that the parents don't see a man alone cozying up to their kids. But sometimes even that doesn't help: The parents get paranoid anyway and quickly pull their children off in another direction, giving me suspicious looks all the while.

This drives me nuts, pisses me off mightily, and it's not just that I hate being treated as if I'm a pedophile. It's that I worry about the world-view that such parents are inculcating in their young. "They're making the outside world seem like such a scary place," I lament to Kathy.

To which she'll reply, "You watch the news every night. How can you even say that with a straight face?"

"But that has nothing to do with me. I'm innocent till proven guilty. It shouldn't have to be this way. I should be able to play with those kids if I want to. It would do them good, too."

Which is when I get the inevitable lecture about the difference between should be and is.

I think of this apropos of the growing controversy over that recent piece by noted advice columnist "Ask Amy" Dickinson, in which she blamed a rape victim for putting herself in the kind of precarious situation that's likely to end in, well, rape. My wife agrees with the columnist. (For the record, my wife is also pretty hard on Beth Holloway, mother of Natalee, as well as the teachers and supposed chaperones who were along on that ill-fated trip to Aruba. "They should've known better. Who lets a young girl go off on an unsupervised trip like that in a foreign country? For God's sake, that girl spent the whole day drinking the day she disappeared!" Kathy is very consistent in this approach to life: PRUDENCE FIRST. Don't put yourself in harm's way and then cry victim later. My wife also thinks that rescue parties should not be sent out after climbers who get themselves in a pickle while scaling some remote peak. "If they're dumb enough to do that," she says, "then they shouldn't expect other people to clean up their mess.")

But the funny thing is, I agree with the columnist, too, and logically I shouldn't, given what I said above about me and kids. I agree with Dickinson (and my wife) that while in theory a girl should be able to go anywhere she wants to go at any time of day or night, in practice it's foolish to approach life that way, so she probably shouldn't start blaming others when something goes awry. And while I also agree with feminists that a woman should have the right to say "no" at any point during sex, it's pretty dumb (and—dare I even say it?—damn inconsiderate) to use that as a rule of thumb, as it were, in your sex life. And so once again, you must at least share the blame when such an MO ends badly. I've written before that in light of the risks to young women, the he said/she said nature of date rape, and the consequences for all concerned when such accusations are made dishonestly, there should be policies in place that outline the circumstances under which a woman can make such a charge. For example, I have questioned whether a college woman who voluntarily accompanies a male student back to his dorm room should be legally allowed to allege later that she was raped. (Or, we can turn it around, if you prefer: A male student who takes a woman back to his room is relinquishing his right to a defense if he's later charged with rape. It sure would introduce a much-needed extra half-second of forethought into hook-up culture, wouldn't it?) If you don't want to have sex, don't go back to his room, or don't invite him back to yours. What's the problem? Who's being singled out? Hell, there are diners and coffee shops open 24 hours a day if all you want to do is talk.*

It's funny because there are some positions I take on this blog mostly for reasons of devil's advocacy. That's not the case today. I really believe in all the arguments that I've presented here, yet they're logically incongruous.... Hey, I never promised you a prose garden.

(Let the collective groaning begin!)

* I'm being a bit glib and simplistic here, but if that were indeed the law, certainly there could be accommodations made throughout society for young men and women who want to have some level of privacy without a woman feeling totally isolated and at the man's mercy.

I think this whole line of thought is artificial. Naturally.

I have several relatives who, for some years now, have been on a "natural" kick. They scrupulously monitor everything that comes into their homes—certainly everything that goes into their mouths—for its content, and if anything on the list of ingredients even remotely sounds like a man-made chemical, they will not eat it, wear it, whatever. Their overall MO is simple: It's organic or it's out the door.

I have a feeling I know what you're expecting at this point, and you're wrong. This is not going to be some politicized Limbaugh-esque rant about why "there's really nothing wrong with artificial substances at all, and while I'm at it, industrial pollutants are an excellent addition to the ecosystem, thank you." This is an argument for why the subject should not be viewed in simplistic terms. Natural is not in every case better than artificial, or even synonymous with "good." And artificial is hardly a synonym for bad for you.

First of all, there are lots of natural things that you wouldn't even want to be in the same room with, let alone eat. Plutonium-238 comes to mind, as do grizzly bears. Even on a less whimsical plane, Nature also gives us many poisonous plants (e.g. oleander) and dangerous bugs. Recklessly mega-dose yourself (or especially your kids) with certain vitamins or other nutrients and you can cause serious health problems. Conversely, there are thousands if not millions of altogether unnatural (i.e. artificial) things that we now depend on to sustain life. This includes, most obviously, many medicines.

On a more philosophical plane: What really determines whether or not something is "natural"? My dictionary defines natural as "existing in or formed by Nature." This means, of course, that people are products of Nature. And so it follows that the things that people produce are also products of Nature. Doesn't that make everything, including the laptop on which I'm typing this, a product of Nature? On the other hand, if you're going to argue that in order to be considered a product of Nature, something must be found in Nature in its original, unmodified state... Well, wouldn't that rule out, say, tangelos? As well as species of dogs that were cross-bred (e.g. cockapoos/labradoodles) or even just purposely bred away from their natural natures, as it were?

It is also true that lots of natural things can be used in unnatural ways for the benefit of mankind. F'rinstance, there's an entire class of blood pressure medications known as ACE* inhibitors that are derived from the venom of a South American viper. If you came by that venom the natural way—which is to say, by meeting the viper in person—you would not be that happy with the outcome. Yet processed through the unnatural ways of modern medicine, the venom is a godsend for millions of Americans. Including, recently, this one.

While I understand that we want to exercise care in what we eat (and perhaps even what we wear), I really think the whole Natural craze is about snobbery. Maybe not the usual brand of snobbery, which is rooted in money and status per se, but more an intellectual/social snobbery: We're the people who 'get it.' We're plugged-in. Such thinking seems especially prevalent among New Age types, and proceeds from a form of animism that imbues natural things with all sorts of spiritual attributes that I seriously doubt are there.

I'd stay longer but I'm off to make myself a nice bologna sandwich on enriched white bread.

* You can look up the acronym for yourself. It's really not material here.