"It's Dead, Jim!"

We watched the Chelsea Handler standup on Home Box- funny and touching, especially if you’ve lost a sib- and were conked by 9:15.

But I wanted to be up at 12:00:00. To identify the dead body, as it were.

Kept waking up too soon. At 10:10, it’s still 2020. Again at 10:49. 11:28. Eleven fucking fitty.

Then I realized- it was just 2020 being 2020 down to the last second.

I finally woke at 12:12, said my rabbit rabbit rabbit (because that worked so well every time I did it in the double deuce), and went back to sleep.

This morning's gone more quickly. That's a sign of hope.

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I spent good chunks- of time and change- getting my personal Tire Fire finally sorted at the Mercedes dealership yesterday.  In addition to them needing to put new front tires on and clearing the tire idiot light that only they can clear, the service-interval nag just came on, and they told me when I got there that they couldn’t clear it without me giving them my receipt proving I had the oil change done someplace else. Which is why I hate that place with the heat of a thousand suns.  In the end, they did clear it (I remembered the windshield sticker reminding me of when the next one is, plus I found the secret-sauce video for how to clear the message myself), but it wound up taking almost twice as long as estimated because all four tires had to come off and the new ones put on the correct rims. The extra cost for THAT will be a discussion with Tommy and Crusty in the spring when the snow tires come off.

In what I hope is a sign of positive juju for '21, this was my exact mileage when leaving the joint yesterday:



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The extra time did let me finish the countdown post you saw yesterday, and I started this season's penultimate Star Trek Discovery episode.  There's a plot point in it where a Very Bad Space Villain is negotiating with a Starfleet Admiral and the subject of their past Very Bad Behavior came up. The Federation wanted a trial for past crimes; the VBSV pouted and said they should only be looking toward "the future." To which the Admiral replied,



I hope somebody shows President Biden that episode before he decides to go all nice on the crimes of the past four years- and I'm not talking about Hunter's laptop or Hillary's eeeeemailllllls.

Somebody also has to talk to Joe about reversing this hideous nonsense:

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic this past spring, distilleries across the country, including some in Rochester, halted their production of booze and pumped out countless bottles of previously scarce alcohol-based hand sanitizer. The businesses saw a need they could fill and rose to the occasion.

 Their thanks from the federal Food and Drug Administration: a $14,060 bill and the threat of a similar charge in 2021.

“I liken it to if you ask your friends to help you move, and they bought the beer, and then they charge you for the beer they brought you,” said Jason Barrett, owner of Black Button Distilling in Rochester, which produced hand sanitizer through November 30.

The distilleries made the sanitizer under emergency authorization by the FDA, which provided approved recipes for them to follow. Barrett said that at no point were distilleries told they’d have to pay a fee if they produced sanitizer.

But this past Tuesday, the FDA announced its fee schedule for facilities which produce over the counter drugs. And it also proclaimed that distilleries which produce hand sanitizer are now classified as “monograph drug facilities (MDF).” The newly approved fee schedule went into effect on Oct. 1, which is why sanitizer-producing distilleries are getting slapped with a charge now. And if they don’t unregister as an MDF by Jan. 1, they’ll be on the hook for another $14,060 for the next year.

Hey, somebody's got to pay for all those PPP grifts to Jared's LLCs. We have a DEFICIT to worry about again!

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I've done enough counting down, so I won't be counting up the 12 Days of Christmas with Bob and Doug like I did last year. Not to mention we still can't get into Canada, eh?  But I will note that the observance ends with the traditional Three Kings Day- or, as we now call it in these times:



Three Karens Day.  They ended the year in fine form, as "IPhone Irene" went all angry white lady on a Black kid in a hotel lobby- he was a guest, she wasn't-  because she thought he'd stolen her phone. A nice Uber driver brought her actual phone back to her, but only after she was filmed going Full Karen on the kid, trying to tackle him and the claiming that the video was out of context, because no racist can ever be filmed in the proper lighting.  The NYPD is now investigating her, and I expect FPT's legal team will rush to her defense once they're done with their final round of bullshit next week.

Then we can return to nationwide normalcy and a much better year.

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If you've read this far, I'm impressed. I think I solved the comment problem- Gmail was sending them to spam, along with other things I didn't want going there. I've labeled them as NOT, but I'll need to test it with a comment or two.

Cat-tharsis

If there's one Resolutionary thing I'd like to work on in 2021, at least today, I think it is this:

I can't cry. I'd like to at the right times.

Earlier this week, I heard Eleanor on the phone with her brother. He's a good egg, if slightly hard boiled and a little cracked in spots. From her end of the conversation, I heard something about the medication inhibits it, and from the context I thought she meant (and she later confirmed when I asked) that her antidepressant made it harder for her to cry.  I was a little surprised, because at least compared to me, she has at least some ability. When we've lost each of our beloved furbabies over the past 15 years- when relatives and friends have passed- even in response to particularly mean customers or other unkind words- she has shown no hesitation to sniffle or even bawl.

Me? I've been a fucking Vulcan for as long as I can remember.

I'm on a medication as well, but it goes back long before that.  Even in teenage days, in highly emotional experiences with friends, I felt but I did not, could not cry.  I have no earlier memories of being subjected to BOYS DON'T DO THAT from my father or other authority figure, so I don't think I had it beaten or otherwise taken out of me, unless I've got real repressed-memory issues. In earliest years, I DO remember, I had no trouble crying. But somewhere, some internal switch just turned off. Two dry eyes on the loss of both parents and of both parents-in-law. That of our oldest sister, taken way too young. My work mentor, barely a year into me being a lawyer.  Being essentially fired once. Seeing friends and clients pass. And all of those animals, most in my presence, the most recent one literally at my side in the night.  Nothing.  Happy tears don't come, either- not at weddings or births or other celebrations.  How dry I am.

It's not physiological, because every once in a blue moon, something will trigger it.  It seems to take a combination of past memory molded into a present moment, whether the trigger is real or fictional.  I cried at the sight of 1969 Mets reuniting on a ballfield, older and much grayer and many missing, 40-plus years after their triumph. Several Novembers ago, a Doctor Who special sent the waterworks off when David Bradley, playing William Hartnell playing the First Doctor for the first time, emotionally ended his final scene on the TARDIS and a brief reflection of Matt Smith, his future sortof self, appeared.

And, from very long ago, a stupid movie. About a curious cat and a pug-nosed dog.

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It was given its US release in 1986 under the name The Adventures of Milo and Otis, had a Veddy English Dudley Moore as the narrator and a decidedly country-bluegrass twang to its soundtrack, but the film is Japanese, the title characters played by Chatran and Pû, and the cinematography includes snowcapped mountains I don't think you're gonna find anywhere in the American South. I think we saw it on home video when Emily was little, but in BE KIND-REWIND days so we didn't own it and never acquired a DVD of it since.

The plot fit the pattern for setting me off: our furry heroes meet on an idyllic "farm," get lost from it and at times from each other, and spend the balance of the film trying to get home.  All I can remember about the waterworks was a moment where one or both of them are at their lowest point in the journey- missing the warmth and familiarity of "home," and then suddenly being reunited with it.  For real or in a dream, I didn't remember.

With Eleanor at work today, I decided to invest a little over an hour and just under three bucks for a Prime rental, to see if I could recapture that moment.  It seemed even likelier once I was reminded what Milo the kitten looked like:



Any passing resemblance to someone? The "actor" grows during the film, but not all that much, and his BFF is just as inspiring:



Dear friends of ours nearby have a year-old pug, who I just saw out on walkies this morning, so I figured this was the perfect opportunity for some needed catharsis.

It didn't happen.

I felt the feels, caught my breath several times at close-ups of his Bozlike resemblance, but the tears never came.

Maybe they never will.  Maybe it is just chemical and something can be added or subtracted. Maybe, as long as I am feeling the underlying things, I shouldn't worry about it. But at other extremes I can laugh so hard my sides will ache- and can get angry enough to throw (small) things (not at people).  Why was this taken off the plate?

There's a new Doctor tonight. Maybe that'll do it.

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A coda, just remembered as I think about calling my best college friends for the New Year. Know something else I haven't done since time immemorial?

Hurled. Puked. Embraced the porcelain altar. Talked to Ralph on the big white phone. Whatever your term of art is.

That's a more recent development, but is now of long standing, as well. Before that, I had a longtime reputation for being an almost casual thrower-upper. There's an underpass between the parking fields and the sand at Jones Beach where, one summer when I was maybe six, I  became family famous; on the way back to the car, after one too many over-sunned tuna sandwiches or ice creams, I stopped at a trash can in that underpass, made a reverse-peristalsis deposit, and kept walking as if nothing had happened. The roommate reminder is because, in I think our final year at Cornell, I'd gone off so much and so loudly they insisted on taking me to the Tompkins County Hospital ER on the other side of the lake. The doc introduced me to Emetrol, which was my friend for many years until the problem, seemingly permanently, went away.  I've been lucky to avoid food poisoning, and I rarely drink enough to set off a torrent.  Oddly, I am less tolerant of spicy foods than I once was, but I avoid them which may help avoiding the, um, consequences.

The rest of the orifices do what they've always done. Sneezes? Plenty, often rapid-fire, and loud. Farts? Still with us. Boogers? Check!  Coughing? I'd rather not say because of COVID questionaires, but yeah.  (The one that showed up two Novembers ago still plagues me every few days.)  So eyes and throat seem to be my weaknesses, or strengths depending on your point of view.

If I have to have them both back from time to time? I'll take that bargain.