12/26/03 4:30 PM: In no particular order, here are a series of musings and random data bits floating around in my shaven pate recently.

It turns out that I am a fairly entertaining karaoke host. I've been substitute hosting for my dear friend Dana Walker at Hollywood Karaoke a few times, and aside from still not knowing where all the CDs are (ask for "Dr. Feelgood" and watch my head explode), I'm really enjoying the work. I'd like to get one or two regular nights, sooner or later. We'll see how that goes.

Saturday night I got called in to close out Dana's shift, since she seems to have a lot of confidence in me and because she had nose and ear infections after recovering from laryngitis (yikes). Anyhoo, at like five minutes to 4 (the show ends at 4AM -- I really am not intended to be out in daylight hours ...) and asks to sing. I say I'm done. She says, "I'm really good." I say I don't care. She's a white lady, late twenties or early thirties, skinny, pale, kind of somewhere between goth and punk. Anyhoo, she says, "they said if I ordered food I could sing." I shrug, and make up some cockamamie story about the manager wanting me out, and that I've gone over too often (which is a huge lie, since this is only my second show at Mel's Drive-In). She goes and bugs one of the hosts, who says it's my call (rat bastard ... I'll deal with him later). She comes back and says please. I say, "Short of a $20 tip, nothing in heaven or earth will get me to extend the show." She wanders off. Eventually, she pesters this really cool guy, who was gonna sing the last song, to give up his spot to her. She does this as the next to last person is ending their song. So she slowly picks a song, I find the CD, she gets up and says, "I don't really know this song," and proceeds to murder "#1 Crush" by Garbage (which waitress Rachel does quite well, so I know the difference). Plus, a quartet of Black people earlier that night tried -- horribly -- to play Kamikaze Karaoke (each one writes down a song number and not a name, they mix up, write names on the slips and hand 'em in, you sing whatever you drew). They fired songs off as they failed, taking up an inordinate amount of time and my energy, and left without tipping, let alone thanking me. Argh. No good deed ever goes unpunished, kids, rule 285. Don't forget it.

Red Forman, misunderstood visionary. If my great uncle were an angry white man, he'd have been Red Forman (I often note they dress alike, save my dad wore a fedora). Calling people "dumbass" often seems too forgiving. Misanthropy really is its own reward, and when I'm in my fifties (if I make it), I hope my drive and fire (personal and sexual) is as consistent. Heh.

So I'm writing this in pieces, and part of it is being done while I do my annual Kwanzaa Mix CD. I'm playing the ... fourth draft? Anyhoo, normally I go for smooth transitions between songs. Nuh uh. I had a bumpy year, so does everybody else. I am largely eschewing gifts this year in liew of giving the CD. I've had years where I spent more than $500 on Kwanzaa gifts only to get a steaming cup of "shut the f**k up." Being married almost certainly meant all the gifts I got were sucky -- lame ass candles and bath salts and crap like that. It's part of why I made my own gift guide this year, so I could avoid getting Bill Cosby sweaters or some dumb isht like that. We'll see how it works.

Anyway, I'm out this afternoon buying some of the very few gifts I will be bothered with giving this year (and in transit found the final addition for the CD, by the way, an amazing collaboration between Andre 3000 from Outkast and Norah Jones, it's so damned fly ... more on that in a sec) and I see tons of things I'd have bought people as gifts. Bruce Lee movies. Neat little gadgets. Et cetera, ad nauseum. I kept saying in my head, "ah, give 'em a CD." Watch this be the only year people pony up with great gifts. Even my boss at Comicbookresources.com got me a great gift already a $25 gift certificate at Amazon.com. It's unlike me, these days, to stress about ... well, anything. So all of a sudden I'm worried people might actually do what I tell them for, what, the first time in all of recorded freakin' history. Blah.

Which reminds me -- I'm at the paper this week, and we're getting all these "toy giveaway" press releases. Politicians, businesses, all organizing these massive efforts to hand out metric tons of shoddily made plastic crap to people who would probably prefer, I dunno, cash or a job for their folks, or a nice stable home. I always wondered why they don't just sell the toys and help stabilize the lives of as many kids as they can. Guess they'd rather see a smile for one day than to actually fix something. God, I hate people.

That's part of why I wanted to post this on December 25th (and using more photos of white people on one page than I've ever done on this site -- there's yer "white Christmas," God pound it). My little way of flipping off the world's fixation on Nimrod's Birthday Celebration, that vile figure Satan Claus (I think Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa was my favorite red-suited image I've ever seen in life ... short of, again, Red Forman telling kids what "really happened in Vietnam" on this year's holiday episode of That '70s Show), the stifling commercialization and co-opting of a holiday theoretically aimed at celebrating the birth of a guy who was nailed to a tree for saying "Hey, how about we all not be complete assholes to one another?" A pox on them all. Spider and the good doctor were right, listening to their mad, drug addled head bones.

Reading the last few paragraphs might lead you to believe I'm depressed or in a bad mood this season. Nothing could be further from the truth. I was sitting in bumper to bumper Culver City traffic Tuesday, cracking myself up with jokes and singing songs from my iPod (which may die in a few months, or not, no way of knowing, heh). I'm in such an amazing space right now, it's ridiculous. Recently someone asked me if I was happy being single. Their intention was to see if I was looking for a girlfriend (which, oddly enough, my associate John Lawson suddenly is). I responded that the answer was probably no, as lonely nights and a bed to myself are less than ideal. However, I am happy overall ("I love my life, I'm a free man/ can't win if you don't try, love and joy is mine" -- Jason Luckett, who I'll also discuss in a moment), and I'm in a place of such personal contentment with myself and the life I've built for myself and my personal space (although my landlords think I hate them, I just think they're not bringing their "A" game). I laugh for no reason. I've been certified sane by my therapist and released from regular sessions with no scheduled "check back in" date. Money's okay. Beautiful women smile at me on a regular basis. I sleep when I want to, wake when I want to, and have virtually no stress. My only concern is that I'm too indulgent of my hedonism, leaving too much for the last minute, or to chance (as I'll be at the DMV all day next Tuesday, for example, as their online appointment system was down Wednesday morning ... bastards ...). So thanks for any well-meaning concern, but no, I'm perfectly fine, happier than (maybe) I've ever been in my whole life, and moving on with things.

Which brings me to the big transition of this year, my divorce (one of the reasons I don't blog more regularly is because I kind of enjoy these long, mad rants. More bang for the buck ... anyway ...). I'm still bound by my agreement not to post anything specific that we've said, and we had lunch a week or so ago, so that falls under it. We're on good terms, not antagonistic at all, she's doing what she needs to do to cope as I work hard towards healing. I'm pretty happy in that space -- I have some regrets, but they're healthy, I still have some commitment-phobia, but that's predictable and temporary, and I'm not horribly depressed during the holidays because I am surrounded by love and positive energy. It was a painful transition, and in some ways is still painful, but it grows less so every day and I am pretty good, I think.

Or so I thought. I had a weird dream this morning about my best friend Inpu's ex wife Renae wanting to make out with me. Anyone who knows either of us knows how improbable this is -- Renae spent most of the nineties loathing me, and we've never been more than coolly cordial to one another, even at our best moments bonding over Melrose Place and Ally McBeal. Still, there she was, in my lap, frenching the hell out of me, saying that she was doing it because I'd really cleaned up in the last few months (I used to dress really sloppy, but I decided that putting on a nice shirt is a small price to pay for positive female attention and lessened suspicion from law enforcement and retail establishments). In the dream, I was stuck between arousal and horror -- you have no idea how antagonistic Renae and I have been at certain points. I told Inpu about it, and with his Psych BA he thinks it's because I'm uncofortable about his friendship with my ex at some level I don't recognize (he also noted that I've always admitted Renae was attractive, which is true). I dunno. It was weird.

So one of the songs on my Kwanzaa mix CD (available now) is by Jason Luckett, who I sometimes describe as the Bizarro Hannibal. He's got long hair, light skin, and an almost endlessly sunny disposition. Yet I can so relate to his song "lovesjoy" these days. He's one of my favorite people in the world because of his absolute contrast to me, and even in his glee and that amazing smile, he has dark edges that are fascinating as well. Plus he's a great musician with a lot of talent. I hope to get my money together and record something with him this year. Oh, if you're checking the picture against the rest here, no, Jason isn't white, but his mother is. Not that such a fact is criteria to be on this page ... oh never mind, I'll put a photo of myself up here and screw it all up.

Shoot. Forgot to email the Canadians. Have to get that done ... huh? Oh, I'm doing a writing proposal with this Canadian interest and ... well, I'll tell you if anything comes of it. Eliot knows.

I was talking last week and realized how few good holidays I've had. I've had scores of tolerable Christmases, but I had literally almost 20 bad birthdays that I can remember (I'll be thirty one in a month), long stretches of bad winter holidays (I always get bad gifts or none at all), and I've never had anything resembling a memorably good Valentine's Day. This casts not only serious aspersions on everyone I've dated at those times, but myself for allowing it. Argh.

I've decided that Outkast's Speakerboxx/The Love Below may be the most dangerous album ever recorded. On all six of my radio presets in the car -- pop stations, alt rock stations, urban contemporary, hip hop, old school soul -- you can hear "Hey Ya." The "no rap, just soul" station even played the rap version of "I Like The Way You Moved" in broad daylight. Outkast is poised to rule the world, I swear. I'm stunned and strangely proud.

There. Me and a very cute but dangerously stupid Latina I know, dancing. A multicultural page of photos, whee, aren't you just tingling in your special places right now? *Hannibal rolls his eyes*

So I'm over at Comics Ink reading books for The Buy Pile when I hear a familiar voice ask for Marvel's Truth mini series. I look up and it's my dear friend Malik Singleton, back in town from New York. I haven't talked to Malik since maybe January, despite a number of emails and messages. He was best man at my wedding. We've been dawgs since 1997. So he's wholly embarrassed, laughing and hugging me for like four minutes, knowing he's trifling and feeling horrible about it. He's unemployed and loving it after working at BlackPlanet for what felt like seven billion years, and working on his own creative endeavors. He threatened to hook up with me Saturday, but honestly, I expect him to flake. It's all good, one way or another.

I'm currently on punishment from playing my Plastation 2, because Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is too addictive. I just bought a condo that gives me a free helicopter anytime I want, which basically makes me immune to virtually any forms of capture. I stood down the police for a half hour, shooting down five helicopters, from a rooftop. I tried to figure out how to make prostitutes do things with the character, but all they do is sit there and take money. So I normally hop out and catch them before they walk away, and beat them to death with a bat or something while I take my money back. I still can't find the rocket launcher, which irks me to no end. I'm still stuck, but I'm stuck on new missions now. I found a new set of cheats and walkthroughs, so I expect to move along soon. Mmm.

I have a lot to do in the next few days. Karaoke hosting three nights in the next seven (tonight at Prince of Whales in Playa del Rey, and New Year's Eve and New Year's Night at Mel's Drive-In in Hollywood), a lot of writing to do (I'm finishing up Dancing in the Dark by hook or by crook, as I don't wanna carry that into the new year, plus that business with the Canadians), and of course my regular, busy social and family life. Mmm. Oh, and it's Kwanzaa, so no doubt something will be happening around that. Better feast than famine, I suppose, and I really am in a good -- if pensive -- place.

That's all I have to say about that right now.