1/3/05 10:06 PM: "Gentlemen! Let's broaden our minds!"

With apologies to Bic Runga for the title, we made it. Again. Somehow, undersea earthquakes and massive tsunamis notwithstanding, the human race has once again dodged the bullet of extinction by falling down out of the way, and made it into another calendar year. Big whoop.

NEW BUSINESS: So I'm crazy late on negotiating my draft to my would-be editor Jenna, which means I'm behind on my publishing schedule for Books One and Two of The Crown. That's no good. I started Book Three a few weeks ago, with four simple words: "TWENTY THOUSAND YEARS LATER ..." which I'll admit is just a framing device, as I'm bored spitless of the 21st century and strive to surpass it, even if only in text.

So, with myself back down to one night of karaoke hosting a week, I'm anxious to ramp up my writing on songs (I wanna revamp the piano/guitar line on Pearl Jam's "Black" into something less whiny) and everything else. We'll see how that goes. In a perfect world, I'd have a new album done by first quarter 2006.

DIGITAL DISPLAY: So I shlepped to the Apple Store with the very delusional but awfully sweet (in a goofy, doomed, young way) Mike McGee and his girl-toy Candy, and bought me an iBook. $973 and change, out the door. It's in my office, unopened, in the box right now.

Why? Well, next Tuesday Steve Jobs will give a keynote speech at Macworld Expo and there's a very slim chance that he'll announce a new iBook model. There's a very big chance he'll announce a new "headless" Mac that costs less than $500 and will hook up to not only existing monitors, but regular TVs, which would of course allow Apple to then rule the world. Which I want. But just in case I'm holding off on opening my tax-related purchase until I'm sure there's not a new iBook less than a week away.

If there were, I'd snatch up Mike and head back to the Apple store, return this for cash, laugh, walk right back in and buy the new one. But we'll see. I've already figured out a way around some of Apple's madness, so this may be another swing at 'em.

Still, I'm looking forward to cracking open some kind of iBook soon, and more than doubling my processing power, adding thirty three percent more hard disk space, and so on (I wanna get more RAM added as well, but that'll be later this month).

FORGIVE ME, NUMSI, I SHOULD BE PURGED: I am very sickened at myself for my behavior. In my last blog I dishonored a member of my family, and I am deeply sorry and apologetic for that. I have expressed my deep desire to atone and my frustration with myself for being so sloppy with information, the biggest commodity I have under my control. I've apologized profusely in private, as I was wholly in the wrong, and I want to do so publicly as well (without compounding the same error by mentioning the name).

Coincidentally, on December 25th, I was leaving the house of a relative after a family dinner and looked up at the sky to see what you see to your left -- a halo around the moon. Apparently, when ice crystals are in the air and the atmospheric conditions are right, such a visual phenomenon happens. I'd never seen one before. I literally stood next to my idling car (it takes time to warm up, and I wasn't that dumbstruck) for seven minutes, marveling at it. There is so much wonder and glory in the world, and I so painfully want to believe, but I just don't have it in me anymore. I found an old line I'd written, looking for a poem to fit it into, that said, "how can you inspire when you don't believe?" I don't suppose I can. I remember the intent was aimed at someone I loved who seemed more lost than I've ever been, but it seems to fit me now. Funny, that.

THE "PRINCE IN THE BACK OF APPOLONIA'S DEBUT" CROWD: Speaking of, that incident let me know I've got a considerable number of readers I didn't (and couldn't) expect. My best friend's girlfriend brough her (very cute) friends around, and I met several of them, hitting on one or two. It appears that some of them are reviewing the material here, for reasons I can't fathom (since I never got anywhere, and didn't see any room for me to do so). As well, it seems that people who know one of my exes (discussed in the aforementioned last blog) are still reading this, and sounded an alarm when I mentioned her name.

This fascinates me to no end.

I know why I do this. I'm slightly self-absorbed, and I feel a need to chronicle the events of my life, a means of justifying my existence to an indifferent and gaping maw of history. That's all one thing. But when I get the idea that people who have tangential knowledge of me are poring over this work (I am always surprised, say, when somebody I work for mentions something they read here), or people who don't have to deal with me on a regular basis ... I wonder why they find this interesting at all. Is it the same thing that drives people to watch reality and daytime talk shows? A kind of sense that other lives are somehow interesting enough to blow your valuable time researching? I can't get my brain around it, and that fascinates me, but I don't have a real way of finding out since (obviously) these people talk amongst themselves and not to me. Que sera sera ...

NOWHERE FAST: As I've finally put my financial drudgery behind me, and am looking forward to more "free" time (ha ha ha ha ha), I am looking ahead to new games for my Playstation 2. No, I haven't actually completed Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (I beat the "main" storyline missions but have scores of side missions left and eleven hidden packages that elude me). I've never even put Hitman 2 or Robotech: Battlecry in the console, and it doesn't look likely that I will anytime soon (now I think of it, I may just sell Hitman 2 as it was a present I never really had much interest in -- I can kill people in funnier ways on GTA games).

No, my mind now leads me to believe my life will be sucked away by what many are calling "the best video game ever made," Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas -- a celebration of debauchery and decadence so evil and so complete that it has swallowed the social lives of at least six men I know. They've skipped work for it. They discuss it with random strangers. It's an experience.

FALLING: There's been a lot of rain in the LA area in the last few weeks. I was driving home last Tuesday night (never you mind where I was driving from) and it felt like there was literally people over my car, tossing buckets of water non stop at me. It was real weather, just like back east. I moved here to get away from all that. This wasn't in the brochures. Somebody's getting a stern email ...

VEGAS, BABY, VEGAS: On Thursday, January 20th, I'm gonna turn 32 (and there's still tons of time to get me a present). I've decided to go to Las Vegas the next night (leaving at around 2AM) and spend the weekend acting a goddamned fool. A good number of my associates from the karaoke scene and beyond will probably be tagging along. I not only expect, but actively plan for all hell to break loose. This pleases me endlessly.

Vegas.com lists rooms at the Stratosphere for an average of about $70/night for Saturday and Sunday night. That's all good. It looks probable that the trip should go all right, providing I don't take my sometimes unreliable car.

Best part -- all I gotta do is go somewhere and sing, and poof, it's a business trip. Can't beat that.

THE EVIL CLUTCHES OF CHINGY: I'm a fairly regular reader of Mark Cuban's blog -- he's the lunatic software billionaire and owner of the Dallas Mavericks. Anyway, he has an interesting bit about his interactions with hip hop, and it spawns a deluge of really disturbingly un-informed comments from the weak, the stupid and the scared (a guy actually said he'd cross the street to avoid Darius Miles, which I found crazy ... Bonzi Wells, maybe, or Rasheed Wallace, sure, but Darius is a pussycat). I respond, and that mitigates some of the foolishness, but I know it still lurks in the hearts of men. Cuban seems like a good egg, open minded and not possessed of some of the prejudice that I've experienced in a lot of people in his position. But the sheer volume of morons in the world ... it challenges me.

SPEAKING OF EVIL: One year, I broke up with a girl on Christmas Eve. She was about seventy pounds of crazy in a ten pound sack. We'd gone on about six dates, this after dating pretty randomly some years before. So the week before the 24th, she and I are hot and heavy, and she stopped me and said, "I don't believe in casual sex." I said, "okay, hang on a second." So I got up, went in the closet, and put on a tie before coming back out. She cracked up, but said that wasn't what she meant. "Do ... you wear the tie?" I asked, confused. More laughter. She said she needed to be in a less casual relationship to give up the nappy dugout. So I said, "how do you want that to work out?" She said, "Well, normally the guy makes me a pitch, like an offer, and I consider that and get back to them."

Ladies and gentlemen, come on. This is The Teez here. I'm not some slouch fresh off the bus from Pelican Bay. I'm all-league stats here. I was insulted. But she was super cute and I was leaning off of third base, so I played along. Originally, I said I'd see her twice a week, and she replied, "It'd have to be more than that, since I need to have sex more often than that." Chuckling, I had no problem with that -- I just meant seeing her at all, but if she wanted to up the ante, I was surely in for it. Wrote up this thing, long pitch, lots of benefits for everybody yadda yadda (while, admittedly, never using the word exclusive).

She took a couple of days (one past the deadline I set) and said, "I'm gonna have to reject your offer, because I don't want to have sex until I'm either living with a guy, or engaged." Again, insulted. I never needed this kind of drama. So, remembering how she said she thought it took extra care to hand write a letter, I sat down and scribbled out all the reasons why I was dumping her, especially noting that she never made a counter offer or did anything other than find problems, where I always tried to find a way to be with her. I then made her a copy of a break up song she knew I liked a lot, and left the whole shebang on her doorstep. At eleven o'clock. The night before Christmas Eve.

So the next day I get a voice mail, sniffling and crying. "Hannibal, this is [name withheld to protect the insane]. I'm gonna be okay ... I'm gonna be okay. I respect your opinion, but I just wanted you to know that I did make a counter offer. I just think I'd be a better wife than a girlfriend. Okay. Talk to you later."

Being the vile, heartless SOB that I am, I called her on the 25th. "What counter offer?" "What difference does it make, you dumped me. I spent Christmas Eve crying." I had to hold in a laugh at that one, but forged on. "I was the one always trying to make it work, remember? I must have missed this counter offer." "I thought I was pretty clear," said she. I paused and thought, then asked incredulously, "Are you, in some backhanded way, asking me to marry you?" She said she was about a long term blah blah blah. "You're saying you're willing to spend the rest of your life, with me, on purpose?" I asked, unable to grasp this. Remember, six dates, and she didn't remember the earlier dating all that well. She said yes. I couldn't stop laughing at that one. "What's my favorite color?" I asked. No idea. "What's my mother's name?" I asked. No idea. "Don't you think you have a dangerous lack of information about me to be moving that fast?" Sidestepping, of course, the fact that I didn't wanna marry her crazy, religious nut self. She went on about how if people married, they could set patterns right at the start and avoid all the "having less sex" and all that marriages normally face. "How do you plan to fit into my life?" I asked. I'm no easy win, I'm surly, I've always worked odd hours. No idea. "Well, my offer isn't coming off the table," she sniffed. "If I get married to somebody else, that's another thing, but this is where I stand."

So I set an alarm on my PDA, to call her every Christmas Eve. "Hey, girl, still not married? Offer still on the table? Great, talk to you next year."

It's extra funny, because this is the sort of horrible thing I saw myself doing as I left my marriage. I just didn't expect the victims to deserve it so much.

THE KWANZAA PARADE: I gave out many copies of my Kwanzaa mix CD (many copies left, if you feel left out, holler. I got four DVDs -- Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Brown Sugar, Lost in Translation and School Daze. My mom, out of the blue, sent me $200. I got a $50 bonus from my karaoke boss Tony, and a $25 gift certificate from my CBR boss Jonah. Technically, I still have some Kwanzaa CDs to drop off, but I'm getting to that ... slowly but surely.

WONDER AND GLORY: From my review of Ultimate Fantastic Four ...

... the real reason I bought this was that it -- just a little, mind you -- brought on a tingle of genuine wonder in my jaded heart. That the grandeur and sheer impossibility of the Negative Zone is made real, in both script and art, balanced by Warren Ellis' constantly improving and now quite-solid grasp on the individual characters and their interplay. Plus, more fun, the FF get to blast off into something, just like the old days. Not too shabby, I must say.

... and then my review of Legion of Super-Heroes #1

Star Boy's description of why there's permanently a thousand teenagers on their lawn, or the response to "They attacked us. They said ... they'd punish us for rebelling. They said they knew better because they were adults. How is this better?" For maybe the first time since before the Quiet Darkness Saga, I believed in the Legion again. Was it the best issue ever? Nah. Not even close -- heck the Chuck Taine/Connor Kent issue from a few months ago was better as a single issue. But it gave me back something, and I can't deny how much I appreciate that. I loved the Waid/Kitson combo on Empire but this...this is something different. I'm with them until they screw this feeling up.

I really, sincerely want to believe. Some days I miss the feeling it gave me. But I don't know if I'm even built for it anymore.

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD: I feel that, in my quest for a new iBook, I've been dangerously sloppy, culminating in the aforementioned "Numsi" episode. I can't allow that. It's not me. I've lost gigs and not cared, I've slacked off on responsibilities in favor of raw cash, and I've taken my eye off the long-range pimping. That won't work. I've got to do better for myself.

RESOLVE: ... which leads perfectly into my New Year's resolutions ...

• To be at least 15% more of an asshole in 2005 than I was in 2004 (it worked well going up 30% in 2004).
• To have socked away at least $1,000 in liquid assets by this date next year (start small, as I just got myself out of 2003's madness).
• To start and stick to a vitamin regimen to supplement my crappy eating habits (because I am in my thirties now, dammit).
• To apply the principles of science to the goals of wonder and glory, consistently, all damned year.

... and that's about the size of that, bonk bonk.