I have to admit, I laughed out loud when I saw the cover of this week's Boston Phoenix:


Almost as good as the "Attack of the Forty Foot Oprah" cover from last year.

Aside from the cover, their YIR issue was characteristically lackluster. The article on the (would-be) catch phrases of the year ("Don't tase me, bro!" seems to have topped a lot of lists) opened with a lengthy disclaimer about "catch phrases of the year" lists.

I think I'm right on schedule as for losing the thread, entirely, because not only did I not get the catch phrase disclaimer, with its references to Chuck Norris and "Chocolate Rain," and how apparently naff catch-phrase lists are but how we still have to have them, but I didn't get two-thirds of the catch phrases themselves. I have to check with my doc to see if my meds are causing me to miss my memes. It's not on the list of side effects on the bottle.

Of course there may be other than pharmacological reasons for missing memes. One, already amply alluded to, is that I'm about to cross the great divide into my forties (in another year-and-a-half, granted, but I'm already packing for the journey, and cruising sherpa.com for a certified guide) and couldn't care less what the latest viral video is. OK. It's true, forty is the new sixteen, and we all get a kick out of the odd "don't tase me, bro!" or "It's Britney, bitch!" But I'm not out hunting them down. And I have no water cooler to gather and pass them on around even if I were.

I'm at the tail end of the old-school belief, rapidly proving false on every front, that we have a capacity for independent thought. There's nothing wrong with memes, mind you. After all, language is a meme (or, as William S.Burroughs once said, "a virus from outer space"). You shouldn't have to find a new and original way to ask for a cup of coffee every time you want one (kudos to Starbucks for finding a way to make it seem like you invented coffee every time you order it).

It's not that independent thought itself is innate, or necessary, or desirable under all circumstances, but that it is possible at all that seems to be a more and more questionable premise these days. Information technology seems to be turning us into one single, hideous, slime-oozing meta-organism whose awful little pimply heads think, snark, and snigger in unison—or at least is showing us our heretofore undreamed-of potential to evolve into one. Looks like the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, after all.

I find this as icky a proposition as can be imagined, but that's my problem, and I'm working through it. It's just that as fun as being in on the joke is, it all screams "Invasion of the Body-snatchers!" to me. But that may be because I find myself, increasingly, in the drone class, looking around at my cohorts in the white-collar proletariat, shuttling from cubicle to cubicle, a blank look on their faces that turns into a rictus of geniality when they recognize a drone from the same hive.

We now live in Bentham's Panopticon, which he envisioned as a prison, but which might also be seen as a hive, each drone in his own cell with a DSL connection and a webcam, hoping not to miss the next wave of knowing laughter as it rattles and hums through the hive.

None of which explains why I have no idea where "my face is in hot scones" or "two girls one cup" came from, or what they mean.


My Year In Review will be coming out soon, too, by the way, and will include My Worst Habits of 2007, My Most Horrific Encounter With an Ex in The Last Year (not to be missed), and My Favorite Flames, amongst other exciting year-endiana!


I spent the day yesterday wandering aimlesslessy from stationers to stationers (wasn't that a David Bowie album from the mid-seventies?) looking for cheap yet classy Christmas cards, having determined I could wait no longer to get them in the mail. I was thinking maybe a huge asteroid would attack the earth and Christmas would be canceled. Whew, that was close, right? Or failing that, that baby Jesus would be buried under a mound of frozen snow too thick to melt by the blessed day...


...but we're supposed to have a warming trend.

Christmas cards are on that annoying border between thoughtful gesture and obligation. They're basically your working A-list. And when you get one from someone you didn't send one to, or send one to someone you didn't get one from, well, I guess it tells you something. Adjust next year's list accordingly.

I tend to put it off until the last minute, which is why I like to keep my A-list spartan. There's no fat on it. I usually thumb through my contact list in the back of this year's moleskine planner, and whoever's in there, I won't be sending a card. Because the minute I write down your number, the relationship is doomed. All of my friends know I don't know their numbers, and this is why.

I have a bigger moleskine notebook in which, after several years of not writing someone's number down, I finally do. My Christmas card A-list is in there. Those are the people who've stuck with me through years of "what's your number again?"

"Why don't you just write it down, already?" they always ask me.

"Because I like you," I always tell them. "And I'd rather lose your number than your love."

But that Moleskine is a mess. Full of cross-outs and do-overs, stickies, asterisks, footnotes, and so many arrows it looks like a flow-chart. Because people move and addresses and phone numbers change, don't they? Sometimes I have to call a cross-referenced entry to find out where one of them is. This year someone on my list got foreclosed on. No forwarding address as of yet. That's one less card I have to buy! (Always look on the bright side.)

As you can imagine, when it comes time to send my seasons greetings, even for my A-list I don't like paying full-price. But, of course, you have to wait until after Christmas to get them at a discount, and if they arrive a week or two late everybody knows your M.O. Now, you can always buy them after Christmas for the next year, but by the time the current yuletide wraps up the last thing you want to do is shop for next year's.

And you never know where you're going to be next year, do you? In that Christmas card sense. I mean, I look at the leftover cards from last year—some Maxfield Parrish snowscapes—and I'm thinking, hmm, what was I thinking? I'm so not in that dreamy 1940s Maxfield Parrish place right now.

A few years back I bought cards with the guy I was with at the time. He loved that old Rudolph The Red-nosed Reindeer Christmas Special — the one with Hermey the Dentist-Elf and The Land of the Misfit Toys. I did, too, but I couldn't quote the whole thing, like he could, forward and backward, with all the voices, and all the songs and the little dances. He was like a one-man CBS Christmas special from the '70s (that's not what broke us up — I wrote his number in my 2003 moleskine planner — it may or may not have been on purpose — but that's what did it). Anyway, I am so not in that place now, either.

One year I forced myself to buy a bunch of awful leftover cards on sale a week after Christmas, and I just kept sending them until I ran out. It took me about three years, and when finally I had to switch, people were like, wow, a new card from Mike! What's going on?? It was alarming to many on my list who had grown used to receiving my faded and yellowing fire sale salutations. After years of "a Cowboy's Christmas Prayer"...


... you can't just bust out ol' Rudolph without warning. They expected me to show up for Christmas dinner with a bone through my nose. Or a fauxhawk at the very least. "Just got your card. Have you reinvented yourself again? You're just like Madonna!"

Well, this year I'm feeling classy, like I said. And after perusing the shelves at my local Bob Slate and finding nothing that struck the right chord, I decided to go commando.  Check this baby out ...


Sorry Hillary. Oprah made me do it.