I just watched a TCM special featuring the actor Ernest Borgnine who when the segment was filmed, was well into his 90s’. The guy is amazing! He’s coherent, articulate, compelling and most of all … interesting!

What a great life!

To have done the things he’s done and lived the life he’s lived and to still be enjoying yourself at that age. Isn’t that everybody’s dream?

Seriously?

He’s outlived all of his contemporaries and he’s still going strong. He may die tomorrow, but damn! Even if he’s gone tomorrow, what a great life!

I dunno. I’m 62 … about 35 years younger than Ernest Borgnine and I’m not at all sure that my next 35 years (if I’m lucky enough to experience them) will be half as great as what he seems to have had!

Wow! To be pushing 100 and still be having fun!

When I walked in the door, among the “new arrivals” was an extremely thick volume that had just hit the shelves by Larry McMurtry …

No, not a much appreciated re-issue in hardback of the book that made him famous, but a compilation of some of his weakest work ever, entitled “The Berrybender Narratives” …

Yes, that’s correct.

One book.

With 1,500+ pages.

Priced at $37.50 USD!

And, devoted to … combining the four individually awful books that were already published earlier, each costing around $25 bucks apiece.

I suppose you could almost have predicted that this would happen. There was absolutely no reason for the four original volumes to have been published separately. In fact, I maintain that they were so uniformly bad, that there was little justification for publishing them at all.

A short while back, I wrote a blog giving my impressions of the direction McMurtry, one of my favorite authors, has taken since hitting the literary jackpot by writing “Lonesome Dove” … my all-time favorite novel! Here, he created an epic tale that painted a huge story on an immense canvas, populated by some of the most well-developed and interesting characters ever conceived.

Of course, he’d had successful efforts prior to this. For instance, his “Last Picture Show” was a very popular novel and proved to be an extremely successful movie when it was filmed in the late 70s, as was “Terms of Endearment” later in the 80s.

But, it’s hard to argue that he really hit his stride when he conjured up the vibrant characters of aging Texas Rangers Augustus McRae and Woodrow Call, and set them in motion through the glorious “Lonesome Dove” saga and subsequent sequels and prequels.

For me, there has been no greater piece of modern fiction and no finer film adaptation than this masterpiece.

So, it troubled me to report that in the decades following his best effort, McMurtry seems to have fallen victim to the curse that has afflicted other hugely successful fiction writers like John Grisham and Stephen King, etc.

McMurtry appears to have either consciously or subconsciously decided to rest on his laurels.

Individually, each Berrybender Narrative proved worse than the one that preceded it. For a fan of McMurtry, getting through these shorter stories was difficult, but achievable when taken in smaller doses with the forlorn hope that it would get better if I just gave it time.

In the form of this one huge tome, I fear the task will prove unbearable even for the most dedicated McMurtry disciple.

Up on the rooftop
click, click, click
two-weeks for Judson
might just do the trick!

God rest ye merry gentlemen
Let nothing you dismay
’cause Judson won’t be back at work
’til after New Years Day!

Hark the herald angel speaks
Judson’s off for two whole weeks!

Yep … I’m feeling pretty happy right now.

How about you?

Not being a professional blogger or even a particularly aggressive one, I still enjoy looking at my stat report to see how much activity a particular blog may have generated.

After blogging for well over a year now, I proudly passed the 15,000 hit mark a short while back and then on November 21st, I experienced my busiest single day ever … 132 hits!

I realize this is peanuts in the grand scope of the world-wide blogosphere, but for little old me, it provided a much needed injection of enthusiasm that I hadn’t had for a while.

Then it struck me.

I actually had not posted a new blog in over two weeks, and yet, my very busiest day ever took place during this period of inactivity! I studied this situation for a while and even did some research to try to figure it out.

What I noticed quickly was that many, if not most of my hits were coming from innocuous posts I’d made months ago on such esoteric topics as the mental condition of Ignatius J. Reilly, the protagonist of the novel “Confederacy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole, the sometimes less than flattering story behind the Pilgrims and the “Mayflower”, and a brief throw-away quickie that I hacked out called “Pondering the Meaning of Life” … in which I really did very little actual pondering.

What the …. !?!

Actually, nothing I’d written lately was producing hits!

Why??

I dunno, but I still wanted to take advantage of the jolt of adrenaline I got when I first looked at the stats, so I jumped right into a creative rant about today’s Christmas decorating and shopping rituals.

Timely, seasonal, broadly appealing … everything that I supposed a blog should be.

If material I wrote months ago still had legs, then this thing was bound to knock’em dead!

Well, “dead” would be a pretty apt description of the response.

Since writing my “sure thing” blog, my hits per day has dropped steadily from the dizzying heights of November 21, down to the current average of about 25 per day.

Don’t get me wrong, there was a time over a year ago, when I finally reached the level of averaging 25 hits per day and I thought that was pretty good. But, not now.

Hah!! Now, I’m a seasoned blogger!

And by blessing my audience with a snappy well thought out seasonal blog, I figured to reach even new heights!

NOT happening! Go figure.

In what appears to be a classic illustration of LESS is MORE, if I’m to believe my dashboard, statistically I’m better off not to write more than once or twice a month. Maybe even less often!

Of course, I’m being facetious … sort of … but not entirely.

Like I say … this blogging is a curious activity.

Post Script: When I pressed the “publish” button, I got a message that contained a series hints for driving more people to your blog. Hint #7 … Blog More Often. So there ya go! Intuitively, that makes perfect sense. In reality, I still wonder …

One … the obvious fact that the current holiday was over.

Two … the less obvious fact that the next holiday was beginning.

Well, actually it had already begun. These days, we don’t even wait to polish off the Thanksgiving leftovers before we’re off and running toward Christmas, or whatever you choose to call your winter holiday!

Why??

Well, for one thing, decorating has become such laborious task and expensive investment that you don’t feel like you can afford to do it all for a mere two-week time frame. Nope, if you’re not decorated by Thanksgiving, you’re really behind the curve … and as you observe the decorating “arms race” taking place in November, you can almost make book on which houses will still be decorated for Christmas in February …

I’ve watched with a certain degree of fascination as a fair proportion of my neighbors began the laborious task of decorating their houses for Christmas just as soon as they could rip down and store their Halloween paraphernalia.

Without even stopping long enough to consider the significant holiday in between, they began crawling along their roofs stringing miles of multi-colored lights along their gutters and strapping the life-size inflatable Santa and reindeer to their chimneys long before the last of the leaves were even off of their hardwood trees.

And as incredulous as I am at the amount of time, effort and expense that society now seems to dictate that we invest in decorating, the really unbelievable evolution that has occurred has taken place in our shopping habits!

I suppose there has always been a “Black Friday” even before they officially named the day after Thanksgiving. Even so, the biggest shopping day of the year used to be just that … the biggest “day” of the year.

How much this has changed over the past few years struck me hard as I drove my daughter to her department store job late Thursday night where her shift was to begin exactly at the stroke of midnight! That’s right, before Thursday was even in the books, Friday had begun for eager shoppers and harried store managers and employees alike.

Driving in, I was amazed to see that the shopping center, normally blacked out at this hour was as alive as any normal Saturday afternoon. Much more so in fact. The parking lots were already packed with cars and even motor homes that had carried and in some cases actually housed people determined the literally “bust” the doors in their quest for “door buster” specials.

Isn’t there something basically wrong with this entire picture?!?

Never mind that historically the word holiday is derived from the term “holy day” … even from a secular perspective (according to Webster) a holiday is defined as a period of relief … and a general exemption from work. But in a very real sense, we could now flip that definition on its head and define “holiday” as a period of greater stress and anxiety with general increase in work.

Maybe I’m just old fashioned. Heck, maybe I’m just an old fart. Probably I’m both!!

But, there’s something in me that believes it’s a problem when we’re worried about hanging Christmas lights on November 1st while waiting for the daffodils to bloom before taking them down.

And there is something basically wrong with lining up at midnight to begin a fevered aggressive rush to accomplish that which could (and probably should) be done in a leisurely and civilized manner over the subsequent couple of weeks.

Is it just me? Am I the only one who is tired of all this?

Well, if the throngs of people lined up around the entire store on Thursday night eagerly anticipating the kickoff of Black Friday is any indication, I may very well be.

And a quick assessment of the number of houses celebrating this Valentines Day by flipping the switch one more time on their icicle lights might just provide final confirmation.

Well, anyhoo … Happy Holidays!!!