Home Stretch

I hope you all have had a good Christmas/end-o’-year stretch so far. I finally got myself to the doctor on the 26th and got some meds to deal with the ear/eustachian tube pain I’d been failing to deal with for the last few weeks.

My Christmas presents consisted of watching a fun Knicks game on TV and then having A Hard Conversation with my dad’s widow about just how bad/dysfunctional my relationship with Dad was.

I managed to get through the latter without dredging up too many of the Greatest Hits and turning it into a gripe-fest. Part of my recovery from depression in the past few weeks has been learning not to use that resentment as a shield against actually grieving.

The talk was fraught, but not shattering, and afterward we joined our neighbors for their Christmas dinner. On Boxing Day I stopped by Dad’s grave and told the dirt & grass all about it.

It was kinda interesting to me that in her 30 years with him, she never really saw this side of things, but disinterest in who I really am (or fear of finding out) kinda characterized Dad’s approach to me.

Knicks game was really good, though.

Now it’s back to The Analog Desk to work on prose pieces for my book. I wrote something unexpected and beautiful yesterday, and need to do that another 30-40 more times to get this finished.

Go enjoy the last Load O’ Links for the year!

Birdy Of The Week

From Christmas morning, by Amy. Birdy’s first gotcha-versary is on Tuesday. She’s come a long way in a year. It’d be nice if she slept more like a greyhound at night, but hey.

*

This email setup runs $29/month, podcast-hosting is $25/month, and the remote recording setup is $20/month, so if you want to help out with these expenses or otherwise Contribute To The Cause, you can support the Virtual Memories Show with a one-time contribution of any size via Stripe, or a recurring one via Patreon.

And now, let’s hit the links!

Links & Such

• Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: The Guest List • Jonathan Sandler • Morten Høi Jensen • Prue Shaw • Glenn Kurtz • Jennifer Hayden • Rian Hughes

• RIP Brigitte Bardot . . . RIP James Ransone . . . RIP John Varley . . . RIP Betty Reid Soskin . . . RIP Perry Bamonte . . . RIP Bob Kafka . . . RIP Adam Hayden . . . RIP Chris Rea . . . RIP Armandino Batali . . . RIP Pat Finn . . . RIP Amos Poe . . . RIP Annette Dionne . . . RIP Mickey Lee . . . RIP Vince Zampella . . .

• Also, Jeffrey R. Holland died.

• Here’s the video of a symposium about the work of Michael Denneny, the writer/editor I found dead in his apartment in April 2023.

• Bilge Ebiri writes beautifully about Terence Malick’s Family Tree (Of Life). The doc it mentions about Ernest Becker sounds wonderful.

• After reading the article, I also tried watching Eternals to see how the Chloé Zhao’s Malick-sensibility would work with a Marvel project. I turned it off after 15 minutes, following the second fight scene between CGI monsters and disaffected superheroes. I’m glad she got paid, though.

• We watched the new Knives Out movie, Wake Up Dead Man, last night. I enjoyed it, but realized by the end that I had very little idea of what the Catholic notion of grace is. My understanding of grace, ineffable as it is, arises from Norman Maclean and A River Runs Through It (Methodist) and Malick and The Tree of Life (Episcopalian), + I suppose a side of Zen, if you call that grace. Anyway, it was a fun & thoughtful 2.5 hours.

• Martin Scorsese wrote a lovely remembrance of Rob Reiner.

• Your reminder that Galaxy Quest remains the second best Star Trek film.

• Michael Dirda wrote about Fitz-James O’Brien and the roots of science fiction.

• Speaking of science fiction, Olga Tokarczuk offers some recommendations.

• Also speaking of science fiction, Kevin Kelly contends The Singularity won’t be so singular a moment.

• Along those lines, Daniel Drezner wrote about oligarchic sovereignty extending beyond space into time, with a side order of “these tech bros are terrified of death.”

• The NYT muscled in on my Guest List territory, offering up fave reads from a couple of their book critics.

• One NYT reviewer says she’s stopped reading and prefers audiobooks, which is A Choice. I’ve never tried audiobooks, but then I don’t have a commute. When I travel, I prefer listening to music, and bring along AirPods and sometimes over-ear headphones, along with my fully loaded 320gb iPod Mini. (I’m not a streaming-music guy, and don’t have a subscription to any of those services.)

• So while I’m somewhat analog, I admit that when it comes to music, going back to cassettes would be a stretch.

• As analog stuff goes, I still reach for my trusty Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. Louis Menand writes about the future of print dictionaries, lexicographers, temporality of cute terms, and, y’know, language. (The question of including “fuck” comes up twice in the piece, Jesse Sheidlower doesn’t get a mention? Booooo.)

• Jonathan Sandler published his 2025 Graphic Memoir Year In Review.

• Publishing people snark about their industry.

• Jerry Saltz wrote about the new Nicole Eisenman show, and his 30+ years around her art.

• Fracking: still an environmental disaster.

• Is it cake? No, it’s a cult.

• 2 a.m. thought: Don Henley should have sued Richard Marx for ripping off Boys Of Summer with Should’ve Known Better.

• For my big FDA negotiation, I need to figure out how to write a couple of nested IF/THEN formulae in Excel, but until I saw this BusinessWeek article, I never knew the weird backstory of how Excel came to take over the world. (I also had no idea there were “Excel Influencers” out there: MA SHEET MA RULEZZ.)

• Jessica Winter contends 2025 was Our Lynchian Year.

Current/Recent Reading

Shadow Ticket - Thomas Pynchon

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Michael Chabon

Selected Poems - Frank O’Hara

+ the mourner’s Kaddish every morning

Sound Body, Fractured Mind

I’ve did the first 4 days of my Wed.-Sun. workout cycle, so if I get in a weights session today, I’m gold. My weight is still up, but I can shoot a pretty good post-workout selfie at almost-55 (click at your own risk), so I’ll take it. After New Year’s, I’m back to the weekly FDA meeting schedule, most of which are in person, which’ll screw up my workout-routine, but I’ll do my best.

Still not meditating as often as I’d like, but I am getting time in The Writing Chair, which is also important to reframing my brain, though to different ends.

Until Next Time

Thanks for reading this far! I’ll back on NEW YEAR’S EVE, with the year-end monologue episode, probably no new Instax, but maybe some art.

When love walks in the room / Everybody stand up / Oh, it's good, good, good / Like Brigitte Bardot,