You Say You Want A Resolution

by Thomas M. Pender

Coming up on the dawn of 2012 as we are, many people’s minds turn to thoughts of New Year’s resolutions.  Such optimistic folks decide on what they will accomplish in the coming calendar year, or what they will change about their lives that they do not like, or how they will improve themselves.  It’s a very admirable practice, this promising oneself to become a better person.

Making good on these promises, however, seems to be a bit of a challenge.

Statistically, the most popular resolution is weight loss and/or exercise.  From the stories I’ve heard, both from folks I know and strangers in various media, January will start off full of positive energy and dedication to the resolution, but within a few weeks, peters completely out of steam.  It seems like only the strongest can even make it to February!

I’m only speaking from an observer’s point-of-view here.  I have never made a New Year’s resolution, simply because I know myself very well.  I know I have issues with focus and diligence on non-essential long-term projects.  (Witness my barely started novel, conceived over 23 years ago!)  I don’t feel the need to purposely add pressure onto myself to accomplish feats that I procrastinate on while under no pressure whatsoever.  In fact, whenever someone asks during the holiday season if I’ve made any New Year resolutions, I usually respond, “Every year, I resolve not to make myself promises about my future behavior.”  Simplified, I don’t make New Year resolutions.

I suspect that tag-team resolutionists have a much better chance to accomplish their goals.  At least, to go the furthest in reaching their goals before giving up.  I think that a healthy environment of coaxing and partnering will add a great deal of success potential to any achievement, be it as small as organizing one’s closets or as large as quitting cigarettes.  I do feel that with a loving partner-in-resolution, I would achieve much more than I ever would have on my own.  But that’s just me.

As I do any positive, constructive goal seekers, I applaud the resolutionists, and wish them only the best.  To be completely honest, though, a date on a calendar isn’t going to spark much progress in my personal goals.  A change of calendar can’t inspire a change in mindset all on its own.

While I work on improving myself – year-‘round, mind you! – I wish everyone a happy and positive New Year!

Ten Wishes For 2012

by Thomas M. Pender

10)          Publication

9)            Meditation

8)            Salvation

7)            Vacation

6)            Elation

5)            Occupation

4)            Liquidation

3)            Visitation

2)            Procreation

and

1)            Wedding!

The Nightmare Before Christmas

by Thomas M. Pender

An old favorite returns.  You'll notice at the bottom that this poem has a dual copyright year.  This is because I originally wrote this silly romp in December 1988, but over the years I have misplaced any and every copy I ever had.  So have the people who had copies.  After running out of ideas to recover the original, I sat down this week with the original text of "A Visit From St. Nicholas" and simply reconstructed my parody.  It was pretty easy overall, since it was always a line-by-line parody, but I know some small parts are different, so I can't claim it's the original.  Still, it was fun to "rewrite."  I hope my goofier (and grosser?) readers will get a Christmas kick out of this one.  Ho ho ho, indeed!  (P.S., I came up with the title five or ten years before Tim Burton.  I can't sue because you can't "steal" a title, but just wanted my readers to know that I dreamed it up on my own.)

‘Twas the night before the night before Christmas, and all through the house,

Not a creature was stirring, ‘cept for me and my spouse;

The stockings were thrown up, quite crooked with no flair,

In haste, ‘cause the relatives soon would be there!

The children were tousled, all twisted in their beds,

While terrors of great-grandmas lurked in their heads

And the Mrs. in her work clothes, and I in my pants,

Had just settled down, ‘cause we got half a chance;

When out on the lawn, there arose such a clatter,

I sprang from my bed to see what the hell was the matter!

Away to the window I flew like a plane,

Damaged the shutters, and stuck my nose to the pane.

The moon on the breast of the new fallen snow,

Gave a luster of midday . . . so the neighbors got a show!

When what to my irritated eyes should appear

But my brother-in-law, and his roommate (the queer)

Their eyes how bloodshot, their tongues how thick

I knew in a moment I was going to be sick

More obnoxious than salesmen, these assholes they came

They knocked down our Santa, and slurred out our names:

“Hey, Rita!  Hey, Mickey!  It’s Chuck and it’s Bill!

At our holiday party, we had more than our fill.

We’ve been driving all night, going bar to bar;

We were heading on home, but only made it this far.”

Then up on the housetop, his cohort we heard

Stumbling on our shingles, so I flipped him the bird

Then in a twinkling I heard on the roof

The stumble of a drunkard (the noise was the proof!)

As I drew in my head, and was turning around

Down the chimney Chuck fell with much damage and sound

He was covered in ashes and grime, slime and dirt;

He had garbage in his pockets, and food on his shirt.

A string of my Christmas lights he wore down his back,

And he looked like a douchebag I’d love to attack!

His eyes, how unfocused; his pimples, how many

And as far as cab fare, I could tell he didn’t have any.

His limp, slobbering mouth moved painfully slow,

And the beard on his chin was soggy with snow;

The stump of a cork he held tight in his teeth,

And a stench encircled his head like a wreath.

He had a fat face, and a large exposed belly

That had stains upon it of mustard and jelly.

He was unshaven and balding; a right ugly old elf,

And I cried when I saw him, in spite of myself;

A roll of his eyes, and a drop of his head

Soon gave me to know I’d never get to bed!

He spoke not a clear word, but went straight to his work:

He stumbled and broke my TV, the jerk!

And laying a finger straight up his nose

And cutting a fart, he peed in his clothes.

Cops sprang into action, and to me gave a ticket,

Then hauled ass back out, without taking either dickhead.

I explained to my wife in a note I did write:

“I’ve had it.  I took the car.  Merry Christmas.  Good night!”

written by t. michael pender, 12/22/88 and 12/24/11

©1988, 2011 T. Michael Pender.  All rights reserved.

Here In Ham-A-Lot

by Thomas M. Pender

While I tend to scoff at people who are fascinated and/or obsessed with “the royals,” I must admit I’m a bit of a Kennedyphile, which pretty much amounts to the same thing in American terms.  It’s not that I’m a fan of the clan, who were simultaneously the most successful and the most cursed family in our nation’s history.  No, “fan” is not the right word.  I guess it’s just amazing to me that so much right and wrong could dwell among and happen to the members of a single family.

As an interested party, I do seek out and absorb all the information I can on John, Bobby, Jackie, Teddy, Joseph and their ginormous family tree.  If there is a movie, book or miniseries about the turbulent lives of these people, I’ll at least give it a look.  Sometimes, this garners me even more interesting facts on the clan . . . and sometimes this is a tremendous waste of time.

Available on DVD, the 1983 TV miniseries Kennedy, starring Martin Sheen as the 35th President, is a good example of a great show, in terms of acting, research and writing, for anyone’s who’s interested.  Today, however, the topic is the more recent (as in 2011) cable miniseries The Kennedys, with Greg Kinear as JFK.

The show does have quite a bit of positive in it: Kinnear does a respectable job as John, taking on the Boston accent, the hair and the furrowed brow.  Barry Pepper, a personal Hollywood favorite of mine, does well as burdened brother Teddy, though for some reason (probably to cover the very un-Bobby twist in Pepper’s nose), this Bobby has quite the distracting proboscis.  Katie Holmes shocked me a bit by doing a decent job as Jackie.  I suppose I figured she wasn’t ready to handle this kind of serious drama, but she did.  In the acting category, the only real eyesore is Tom Wilkinson as corrupt ringleader and patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy.  Wilkinson is a great talent, to be sure, but he looks to be at least one human head taller than the real Joe, about 75 pounds heavier, and he seems to be trying to act the part, rather than just acting it.

The worst element, however, is the writing.  Totaling just eight hours, and attempting to cover 1960-68, with numerous flashbacks going back to the very early 20th Century, every historic scene seems rather rushed.  Compared to the ’83 Kennedy, this gives us less information in twice the airtime.  There also doesn’t seem to be any new information here.  If you know very little about the Kennedy years, you can learn something from this show, but if you were alive and had a television or a newspaper subscription back then, this will just seem like a very fast newsreel.  Since the Kennedys have been so overly researched, analyzed, judged and publicized over the years, I would think that any further attempts to dramatize them would at least have a fresh angle, or at least a few shocking previously-uncovered facts.  This offers none.

The worst element of the worst element is the syrupy-sugary-sweet tying up of loose ends in scenes that could never possibly have taken place, given the characters of these real people.  Jack promising Jackie he’s going to be a better husband, just an hour before he’s killed.  LBJ (who loathed the Kennedys) telling Jackie that the White House won’t be the same without her in it.  By the final episode, I was physically scoffing and rolling my eyes at these fairytale endings.

If you don’t know much about the Kennedy years and family and you’re interested, look into the Sheen show.  Whether you already know something about the clan or are looking to learn, The Kennedys will teach you nothing.

Shock Treatment, or The Quickest Way To Halt Prying Co-Workers

by Thomas M. Pender 

Landing smack in the middle of the Bible Belt in 1999, I learned right away that the area got that name because the citizens literally carried Bibles around in their belts.  At my first job in Georgia, we got one 10-minute break in the morning, a lunch hour, and a 15-minute break in the afternoon.  By this, I mean everyone in the small company went on break at the same set times.  It was no shock to me on my first day that all the smokers immediately stood up and scurried outside like a herd of antsy buffalo.  The shock came when the remaining non-smokers brought out the scriptures!

Now, for the record, I am a Christian, and a good one.  God and Jesus and I get along just fine.  I even go to see them in church.  Forgive me, however, if I got the absolute willies when I looked around a place of business and saw person after person after person reading the Bible.  I wasn’t sure which would be less uncomfortable: going outside to watch people smoke, or sitting neck-deep in the dogma.  One person on my first day even took the time – in my first five minutes on the job, mind you – to invite me to the daily lunchtime Bible study in the conference room.

That’s okay.  You go right along and tell Moses and the gang I said “hi.”  (Shudder)

It took a month or so to really settle into this new atmosphere, but settle I did.  I worked next to two young ladies who were avid Jesus-break-takers.  As long as they didn’t try to coax or sell their Stepfordness to me, I didn’t curse or tell off-color jokes, and we got along just fine.  Both ladies were African-American, as was the woman in the small picture frame on my computer monitor, so I got lots of questions about how we met and if we were getting married and having babies.  This, too, was fine.

That December, after I’d been at the job for seven months, we were all lazing about in the last ten minutes of the last workday before the long Christmas weekend.  The ladies got into a conversation of all the baking they’d be doing, and bragging on their secret family recipes.  Out of nowhere, one of the hyper-Christian ladies next to me segues from a chocolate-infused recipe into referencing my personal life by saying, “That’s not all Tom likes that’s chocolate!”  The ladies giggled . . . for a second.

Not expecting anything near the unchurchlike comment which was thrown out, yet unshaken, I very simply raised one eyebrow, looked the Bible-thumper straight in the eye and replied, “Yep.  Chocolate tastes better.”  After the chuckling shut off to pin-drop silence, I shrugged and said, “Hey, you brought it up.”

Lessons: If you’re going to be a pious Christian, be a pious Christian.  If you’re going to try to embarrass someone with rather non-Jesus topics, expect some sort of reaction.  Lastly, and most importantly, one should never try to embarrass me.  I embarrass back.

The Well-Pressed Cowboy, And Tattling On The Mountain

by Thomas M. Pender

I’ve been a music lover since I was a toddler.  Regardless of talent, I loved singing with the television commercials, radio, records, you name it.  Unfortunately, knowing the lyrics to a song doesn’t always equal understanding the lyrics, particularly when you are very young.

My sister and I used to sing songs with our Grandpa Mac, who played the saw and the ukulele.  Since he was a Sunday school teacher, some of the first songs we ever sang were kid-level church songs.  I understood “Jesus Loves The Little Children.”  I understood “Jesus Loves Me.”  I even got the gist of “The Old Rugged Cross,” which I heard in church and, despite its somber topic, was a favorite of mine at five years old.  One song that tended to confound me, however, was “Go Tell It On The Mountain.”

English is a very delicate language, in which a single comma, letter or two-letter word can change the entire meaning of a word or sentence.  Here, the word in question is “It.”  This word sort of breezed by me in my singing.  To me, the song was about a naughty mountain that I was being instructed to turn in to the authorities.  In other words, “Go Tell On The Mountain”!  I understood that the song was (also) about the birth of Jesus, but for some unknown reason . . . and to my memory, I never actually asked . . . some mountain had done something its parents would be very upset about, and they were supposed to be informed immediately.

Don’t worry.  As I got older, I absorbed the meaning and importance of the “It.”

The other non-intentially-humorous song that made me laugh as a child was a Western song by Marty Robbins.  My dad was a big fan of his music, and he would play Robbins' album Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs a lot.  In these lyrics, cowboys, sheriffs, bandits and ranchers painted a picture of the rough and beautiful Old West.  I liked listening to the songs of the good guys and the bad guys, but the hero of one song struck me as fairly ridiculous.

In the song “Big Iron,” a Texas Ranger comes into town looking for a mean and nasty outlaw.  Everyone in town fears this outlaw, but the Ranger is bold and (spoiler alert!) guns down the criminal in the end.  How he ever succeeded in doing this was a mystery to me as a child, however, since he, as the song relates, “had a big iron on his hip”!  I had watched Mom iron.  It was a useful tool, indeed, and even a bit dangerous, due to the heat exhausted from the bottom.  Still, picturing the scene as I sang, I could never figure out how a guy with a heavy appliance designed for smoothing out clothes – and which fired no projectiles at all, unless you count steam! – on his hip was going to defeat a bandit with an actual gun.  Perhaps the lightning-fast champion got close enough to the bad guy to burn his shooting hand before he could fire?

Again, it wasn’t until I was much older that I caught the slang-ness of the title.  Part of maturing is learning where you went wrong in your younger interpretations of the world, and correcting them.  In doing so, the sad attachment is that we lose the wonder of a child’s view on Life.  Somewhere, there is a fantasy land where cowboys smooth out ruffians and mountains break rules, only to be ratted out.  It doesn’t exactly sound like a bad place to be, but perhaps a bit sillier than our world.

Such dreamers of silly things and singers of silly lyrics have even been known to immortalize such fantastic images in online columns!

Play It Again, Sam Rockwell

by Thomas M. Pender

Another undersung hero of Hollywood that I greatly enjoy is, no doubt, a name you won’t recognize.  He’s been part of a couple of Tinseltown’s bigger films, so you would probably recognize Sam Rockwell’s face before his name.  His presence on the screen is completely magnetic, even in the smaller roles he has taken.  Rockwell is one of these rare talents who can humor with just the right kind of smile, frighten with another kind, and whether he’s in a comedy, drama or thriller, make you wonder what he’s up to at all times.

I first saw him in the John Turturro oddity Box of Moonlight.  I have only found Turturro himself to be entering once or twice in his entire career, but the plot intrigued me here.  Turturro plays a frustrated and pressured man who suddenly sees everything running backward around him.  Through a misadventure, he finds himself in a secluded area, where he discovers Rockwell’s eccentric character living alone.  I wanted to see this film solely based on this character, as shown in trailers.  He wears a Davy Crockett coonskin cap and a buckskin jacket, shoots at random objects with a rifle, and keeps a box in which he claims he has trapped some precious moonlight.  This is a character worth seeing!

In the excellent Michael Hoffman 1999 retelling of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Rockwell hardly has any lines at all, yet his facial expressions alone entertain in every scene we see him.  The entire production is well worth seeing, starring Kevin Kline, Michelle Pfeiffer, Rupert Everett, Stanley Tucci, and Calista Flockhart, who was cast as the flustered and desperate Helena because she was playing the flustered and desperate Ally McBeal on television at the time.  Here, again, Rockwell is practically a part of the scenery among this ensemble, but he will entertain you!

In that same year, he starred in two blockbusters: The Green Mile with Tom Hanks, and GalaxyQuest with Tim Allen.  The Green Mile was his first chance to really shine a light on himself as the killer “Wild Bill” Wharton.  His humor comes to the surface in some scenes, but mainly he is creepy in this one.  This sort of range no doubt opened even more doors.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, based on television star and producer Chuck Barris’ memoir and/or novel (depending on whom you ask) linked the eccentric actor with an eccentric person to portray: Chuck Barris, the creator of The Dating Game and the creator/host of The Gong Show.  Whether or not you believe the tale, Barris claims in the original book that he was also a government assassin while putting on silly television shows.  Rockwell was a perfect choice for this role.  He laughed at himself, at the circumstances, and the world at large.  You’ll laugh with him.

I found A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (painfully ridiculous) and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (a movie as needlessly long as the title itself) impossible to enjoy, though no blame can go to Rockwell.  I next caught Rockwell in Frost/Nixon. This is a completely dramatic part for him, and again a background role.  He grabs no spotlight here, but helps the story along with a more humble part.

I have written an entire review on 2009’s Gentleman Broncos.  This little-known, little-spoken-of gem somehow got itself attached to the much bigger film Paul by having its trailer included on the DVD.  Even more than Paul, I wanted to see Broncos based solely on this trailer.  Most people will find it either slow and boring or silly beyond repair, but it struck me just right, mainly due to Rockwell’s over-the-top, low-tech fun in a dual role.  (Well, not so much a dual role as two renditions of the same role.)  This is strictly human cartoon territory, where nothing is to be taken seriously, and Rockwell again selected a role to demonstrate an extreme into which he can stretch.

This is what draws me to actors.  Range.  So few actors these days actually have any.  Once they do two movies and people know their names, they pick easy roles and pretty much portray themselves without any acting at all.  It’s the actors who strive and reach, who can be just as dark a villain as they can be a shiny hero.  As hilarious as gut-wrenching.  I would love to see Rockwell take on strict human drama, where there is no smirking allowed, but I have no doubt he could accomplish this.

In short, if the name “Sam Rockwell” is attached to a film, you will enjoy it!