Category Archives: General

It’s been a while since one of Ryan Murphy’s shows has impressed me, and the last one to do so may have been the ‘Feud’ between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. That offered a different view on what might have gone on between those legendary ladies, and I am holding similar hopes for his take on ‘Capote vs. The Swans’ which reportedly chronicles the relationship between Truman Capote and his New York City socialites, almost-affectionately nicknamed the Swans. There is rich and fertile ground for exploration here, and it proves to be fascinating to see how some incredible actresses portray these incredible waterfowl. Fasten your seatbelts, I hope it’s going to be a bumpy night. 

Andy and I were watching the end of ‘The Grinch Who Stole Christmas’ when he remarked that in his childhood, the cartoon seemed to go on forever – a brief treatise on the shifting perspective of time, something that has touched this blog of late, and something that comes into play more and more the older we get. I understood exactly what he was talking about – those cartoons did seem to last for hours, with Christmas cookie breaks and bathroom runs and changing into cozy pajamas during the voluminous commercial breaks. Watching these specials was an event. 

Now, we turn on one of these Christmas shows and it’s done in at the blink of an eye, before I can pop all the blood pressure meds and allergy pills that constitute the nightly ritual. Andy and I feel the rush of time, in the loss of loved ones, in the loss of traditions that once felt unbreakable. Time, as I’ve often said, is the great equalizer. In the end, it will always win, and it will take every last one of us. 

As Andy and I navigate this next section of our lives, and the holiday seasons evolve and change, we take the Christmas specials as they come. When ‘A Christmas Story’ and ‘National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation’ run as 24/7 marathons, we let them play, nestle into our places in the family room, and indulge in what feels like forever again. 

Approaching the edge of winter, the weather shouldn’t be quite this fine, and while no one is complaining, it leaves me uneasy with the reality of global warming. Back in 1993, one of the requirements for new students at Brandeis University was to read the book ‘Beyond the Limits’ which gave very similar forecasts of what the temperatures are today. It was harrowing and depressing look at where humanity was headed, and I didn’t see then how everyone could ever be convinced to stop the slide. My pessimism has not abated, and I still don’t see it, especially as those who think it’s a conspiracy have only dug deeper into their ignorance. 

As the world slowly burns, at least we will get to gaze upon roses in December, roses of all kinds. 

A poinsettia somewhere between pink and purple is a fitting image of the conflicting things this season is inflicting right now. Grinching out, Scrooging out, whatever you want to call or consider it, I’m kind of already over the holiday season. Endeavoring to find the magic and spirit of the season will be the ultimate challenge, and every year I usually manage to meet it. This year is different in a number of respects, but family and friends will hopefully help – and I do need the help right now. On with the weekly recap, because on this blog all is always well… 

A bit of clickbait to start the week, with this gratuitous piece of hazy nakedness.

Through a prism of vibrancy.

Deodorant is now an indulgence.

A merry mocktail recipe.

She ripped my shirt open!

A horologist is not what I thought it was.

Jingle berries.

An unpopular holiday opinion.

Once upon a time I wore a dickie: a brutal confession.

Feast upon this holiday smorgasbord for days. 

How an encounter at a sex club inadvertently led to my first office job in Boston. 

A Boston office party straight out of the 90’s.

Dazzlers of the Day included Michael DiMartino, Hannah Waddingham, Paul Daigneault, and Levi Kreis.

Confession: once upon a time I wore a dickie.

Not ironically, not alone as a sexy costume, and not out of losing a bet.

(For the young of heart, mind, and body who may not know, a dickie is just the collar of a button-up shirt or turtleneck and a few inches of the surrounding fabric, designed to go under a sweater of something else to give the illusion of another layer without wearing the full shirt or turtleneck.)

It was the holiday season of 1995 and I was working the nightmarish shopping rush at Structure (today people may know it as Express Men, or just Express, if either is even still in existence). From my mall-eyed inexperience at the time, it felt like a dream job, but even I got bogged down in the insanity of the holidays, and working retail in December is not for the faint of heart. Dealing with the mad rush of customers is one thing, trying to keep the floor stocked and filled with merchandise was another – and both had to be done in quick and voluminous fashion. This could be sweaty and uncomfortable work.

We were supposed to wear Structure sweaters, which were hot enough on their own, but I had to be extra-festive, wanting to add the look of a red turtleneck to accent whatever red was in my sweater. The solution, without having to sweat like Whitney Houston, was to be found in the dickie. Where I managed to locate a dickie at that time evades memory – was it Jordan Marsh? Filene’s Basement? Woolworth’s? All these places date me, as if the dickie didn’t already, and all were in Downtown Crossing in Boston at the time. Whatever wayward place had it, I fell for the antiquated style idea and got my hands on not one but two (one red as mentioned, and one in a gold lamé for even extra-extra-festivity).

Look, this was a dark time. I was only just learning the basics of fashion, a little of what worked for me, and a lot of what didn’t. Like clip-on ties and costume jewelry, it was a novice’s foray into something that never should have existed in the first place.

I wore it only once, at the store, because I felt like a fraud. And I was paranoid that someone would notice and point out that I was wearing a dickie. Couldn’t get one in my mouth but had one around my neck – the irony and shame of that was enough. (The one in gold never saw the light of day, and I think that was for the best. Much to my eternal disappointment, gold lamé didn’t suit me.)

PS – It wasn’t until this year, 2023, that I finally noticed that Eddie was wearing a dickie in ‘Christmas Vacation’. I had been too obsessed with the eggnog glasses in that scene to notice, but upon seeing that, I knew I had to come clean. 

Wow – dickies and coming clean. It really is almost Christmas. 

Whenever the holiday season threatens to overwhelm, and at some point – or points – it always does, I find it helpful to pause and examine the smaller moments, the simpler moments. Toward that purpose, I look to nature, which can be found almost anywhere, even in the deepest of downtown areas. At this time of the year, particularly in a year as warm as this one has been, there are still berries and fruit and even a few flowers left, such as seen on these cotoneaster shrubs. 

Adorning herself in scarlet berries, Nature betrays her own form of seasonal celebration. Pockets of landscaping and corners of hidden yards reveal these treats if one bothers to look. I seek them out, searching for the tiny breaks in the day that they provide. It’s worrisome that it hasn’t been cold enough to move along the scene, and though that speaks to a greater danger, I’m going to be grateful for the sight, in the same way I was once happy to see roses in December. 

Feliz Navidad! As an homage to the dramatic telenovelas in which characters find themselves in ridiculously-over-the-top situations and love entanglements, Kira and I did our best to keep straight faces (even harder for me) through this nonsensical series of photos. We’ve been play-acting our way through a scandalous series of blog posts for years now, and it’s always fun to get dramatic when real-life has shitted on us drastically enough for the year. This is an escape – as so much of my time with Kira has been – and a very welcome one. There’s also a very important lesson here, one which took me entirely too many years to learn: the lesson of being a completely-ridiculous ass-hat and being ok with it, because there is no such thing as being perfect.

That lesson always proves painfully elusive as we try to make every holiday season the best holiday season, competing with childhood nostalgia, impossible-to-recreate days of the past, and a world that no longer seems to hold the most basic tenets of compassion and empathy the least bit dear. There’s a little more to that than I care to explore in this post, so I’ll focus on the acceptance of imperfection, as that’s where I need the most work. 

Every Christmas, I set out to finish my gift-shopping early, to devise a decorating system and scheme which allows for maximum enjoyment and minimum work, and to have meaningful connections at some point with the people that matter the most to me. And every Christmas, I falter and come up short. 

Every Christmas I also intend to strip things back to basics and return to the original meaning of the season, and every season I largely fail at that too. This year, I’m doing a bit better, mostly because I’ve given up on making it perfect. I’ve limited decorating to my Mom’s new home and the condo for our Holiday Stroll and Boston Children’s Holiday Hour. I banged out this Holiday Card in a quick one-stop-shot with Suzie. My shopping’s still a bit of a mess, but I just need to organize what I already have and figure out the rest. 

There’s always going to be some unexpected drama that pops up – usually on the day of an office holiday party or on the eve of Christmas that leaves someone sore – and there’s always going to be the unavoidable let-down and post-Christmas-morning depression that reminds us the past is almost always best left in the past. Rather than fight it, which often only leads to more upset, I’m going to do my best to embrace all the quirks and set-backs of the season, to go with the flow and endeavor to be flexible and easygoing instead of digging in and being obstinate, even and especially at those times when principle and truth seem to matter. At Christmas, none of that shit matters. Eat the cookies, drink the egg nog, and tomorrow we may diet. 

When the tumult and stress of the holidays begins rearing its unwanted twin-head, I seek out little pockets of respite. A glimpse of chartreuse lemon cypress reminds of spring in hue and scent, and a scarlet stretch of poinsettias provides thrilling contrast. Despite the fiery holiday tableaux, the beauty acts as a balm the way beauty usually does. It calms and comforts the heart, even as the craziness of Christmas approaches with all its noise and might. 

If you enjoy navigating labyrinths of links, this week’s blog posts should have given you oodles upon oodles of rabbit holes and choose-your-own-adventure-style antics. Celebrating the 20th anniversary of this site continues for the rest of the month, so more revisiting of the past will undoubtedly occur before we close the book on 2023. For now, a weekly recap to whet your Monday morning appetites…

The unexpected delight of the Thanksgiving season was this reunion with our favorite babysitter – I was out visiting my brother at the bowing alley before he went on with his band, when a blast from the past brought us back almost four decades.

Thanksgiving was adorned by this appropriately-named cactus. 

All about the nog.(And someone just sent me an egg nog ice cream recipe – stay tuned… I’m like my own worst witch, fattening me up for the fire.)

A full moon fills the heart.

Walk a mile in my shoes. I dare you.

Dispelling bleakness by any means necessary.

Something comes over people the moment they start driving through a Trader Joe’s parking lot. Something really bad. Something really stupid. Something really annoying as fuck.

One of those linkalicious labyrinths I spoke of earlier in the post – this is a look back at Decembers of the past. Don’t get lost. You’ve been warned.

It’s coming on Christmas – rock out with your cock out!

Another linky, labyrinthine experience may be found here, where the holiday strolls of the past are remembered out of sheer laziness instead of writing something new. 

Time plays a part as we enter the last bit of the calendar year.

Without fanfare or hoopla or hype, I present this year’s Holiday Card.

The argument of his book.

Ben Cohen got naked for a good cause.

There were no new Dazzlers of the Day this past week, so send me some ideas of people who might thrill me, chill me, and fill me like a milkshake. ‘Tis the damn season.

They took the clocks away.

The clock that once hung at the focal point of the office, if such a thing even exists in a sea of drab cubicles, was removed, but my habit and inclination of looking at it remains. I find myself regularly looking up at its blank space, consistently checking to see where we might be at any given point in the day, and all I see is plain white wall, empty space. There is meaning in that. The universe is speaking through my fruitless searching, but what is being said I cannot quite decipher at this point.

The clock has been gone for months, maybe over a year at this point, and still I seek it out, still my eyes travel out of instinct and habit, and each time I almost catch myself as it’s happening. I know right before I scan the area that it’s not there, that it won’t be there, and yet I still look.
Perhaps time doesn’t want to be watched or measured so carefully.

The last time I remember encountering her she had towered over me by two feet, so seeing our former babysitter Theresa at eye-level was a jarring and thrilling experience. She walked into the place where my brother was playing with his band, Still Remains, on Thanksgiving Eve, and it was like we instantly went back forty years. She said we were the worst kids she ever babysat, and I took great pride in that because we worked hard for the title (at least I did, my brother would claim it was all me). A little background on my history with babysitters before we return to our reunion with Theresa:

I took babysitters as a challenge. It was a delicate balance – trying to charm them enough so they wouldn’t rat us out, while making sure we inflicted just enough psychological damage to remain indelibly unforgettable in their minds for the rest of their lives. That’s a tough task for any adult to do, yet I managed to make it happen as a wee itty-bitty one. 

For one neighborhood babysitter, we devised a path in our basement rigged with traps and falling debris. After luring her down there, we set her on her not-so-merry way, where she promptly began tripping on strings, and junk began falling in from all sides. As soon as she was entrenched in the mayhem, we shut the lights off and hurried upstairs, leaving her scrambling in the pitch black.

She never babysat for us again. 

A long-time family friend was a last-minute desperate choice as a babysitter by my parents, and we knew him quite well. He’d never babysat for us, so he didn’t quite know what we were capable of, though he found out soon enough. We’d known, and been repeatedly warned, that he was terrified of our German shepherd. My parents also strictly told us to make sure that the dog was kept in the garage at all times, and not let in the house under any circumstances. Rookie errors abounded: first of all, don’t supply me with the weakness of a babysitter unless you want it exploited. Second of all, don’t tell me not to let the dog in the house because that’s the first thing I will do as soon as I see the car round the bend of our street. 

Within minutes of my parents’ departure, I ‘accidentally’ let our giant German shepherd into the family room, while our babysitter ran for his life into the nearest room with a door – the small guest bathroom – and locked himself in. Truth be told, I don’t recall how long we let him stay in there, but I’m almost certain that eventually we got the dog back in the garage and let him out. Almost certain. 

He never babysat for us again. 

When another neighbor was coerced into babysitting for us at the last minute, I upped the torture into the mind-game realm. I collected all my allergy pills and vitamins for the day, along with a few Tic-Tacs, put them in the palm of my hand and declared that if she didn’t do what we wanted I was going to take all of these pills. Before giving her a chance to respond, I shoved them into my mouth and gulped it all down with a glass of water. 

She never babysat for us again either.

And so when Theresa came along, we didn’t expect her to last beyond the usual one-and-done. In some respect, I was probably testing who could love me in spite of my worst behavior, and so far everyone was failing miserably. (I wish I could say the testing ended there, but alas, I’m still working on things.)

Theresa came with formidable resume, being the oldest of sixteen children. There were things she had already witnessed and handled that I could barely fathom, and for two kids who had largely been left to their own devices, without the competition of younger children, or the social graces learned in such situations, my brother and I probably weren’t that much of a challenge, but still I gave her a run for her money. 

She still remembers how I removed an angelfish from our aquarium and let it fall to the floor (hello, serial killer tendencies!) and then tried to blame it on her when my parents got home. Such minor murders aside, Theresa managed to rein us in with discipline and love, getting us to do chores and work without much bother or fuss, and somehow showing us how much easier it would be if we simply behaved, while at the same time illustrating how much fun could be had as well. She was our own Mary Poppins without the up-do or British accent. We grew to respect her, and she became our favorite babysitter, returning many times until we were simply too old for any further watching. 

As she stood before me about four decades later, reminiscing about things even I didn’t remember anymore, I felt the profound and enormous shift of time. She was already retired, and already a grandmother. We moved to a quieter area, away from the crowd, and she paused and asked if I was happy. Such a simple question on its surface, but how much it conveyed, especially coming from someone who once knew me so well as a child. 

I thought about it before answering, wanting to be sure as much for her as for myself: ‘yes,’ I said. It wasn’t the loud or boisterous ‘yes’ like I thought and expected it to be when I was a kid, imagining the day I’d be an adult and free of all the childhood worries that seemed to plague me so much more than everyone else. It was a quiet and genuine ‘yes’, a soft ‘yes’ that spoke of the loss and heartache that could only make a true sense of happiness possible. 

As we shared more war-story remembrances of our babysitting years together, I realized that my brother and I may have had as much of an impact on her memory of that time as she had had on ours. On the eve of Thanksgiving, I felt grateful to re-connect with such a special person who had played such a formative part of my life. 

This red Thanksgiving cactus understood the assignment, and deigned to be in bloom on Thanksgiving Day. Mine is not always so disciplined. 

I love how these plants act so quietly unassuming most of the year, then develop their buds (if unassisted by artificial light in the evenings/afternoons) and burst into bloom seemingly overnight. It’s always a surprise – and always a welcome one. 

Mom’s holiday wreaths arrived this past week, and this one hangs in her living room. We decorated it for Christmas this weekend, transforming the space into a sparkling holiday wonderland – subdued and simple, but warm and seasonally cozy. It will form a lovely backdrop for our Sunday dinner and holiday gatherings over the next two months ~ an ideal way of making a healthy head start to the winter. On with the weekly recap…

It started with some shirtless male celebrity shenanigans. 

Billy Porter’s latest masterpiece.

The boughs of November.

A Christmas wish list no more.

Kindness cookies from the Beekman Boys and Nestle.

Gathering to find gratitude.

Ahh, those fancy napkin folds.

Holiday, masturbation, come together in every nation!

These stocks ain’t stiff.

Holiday salvo.

My bucket is about to burst, and the holidays have only just begun.

Take off that shirt, Shawn Mendes!

‘Tis the season to sleigh.

An ass-blast from the past.

Dazzlers of the Day included Barry Keoghan and Steven Sanchez.

My typical first-thing-in-the-morning action after hitting the snooze button is to groggily scroll through my phone to the blog post of the day, copy it, and send it out on my social media outlets, then go back to sleep for another ten minutes. On this morning, I realized I hadn’t even gotten around to writing the blog posts for the day, so I sent out some random memory that popped up on FaceBook then went back to sleep for another half hour since it’s Sunday. 

In the spirit of such laziness, I am writing out this intro to a post that will be largely about the past, hence these photos from well over a decade ago. Having reached the point where I could basically populate this blog from photos and stories that have already happened, it seems foolish not to take advantage of that now and then. It would allow for greater presence in the moment. 

To that end, here’s a brief list of some of the November 26ths that have come before – and it’s interesting to note how one’s insufferability can remain largely intact despite the tick of time. Happy Sunday to you – click the inks below at your own risk…

On November 26th in 2012, I was apparently much more put-together, as that was the date I premiered the Holiday Card of that year (these days I wait until at least December). I mean… Christ!

On November 26th in 2013, all I cared about was grooming.

On November 26th in 2014, it was all about getting bred.

On November 26th in 2015, it was Thanksgiving! (And there will likely be another one…)

On November 26th in 2016, we raised our glasses of Christmas cheer.

On November 26th in 2017, the spell of Savannah was pulling us all under.

On November 26th in 2018, there was this pre-holiday recap. And this wretched trip to Joann’s.

On November 26th in 2019, ice cracked in clay and the curtain went up on a host of new holiday traditions.

On November 26th in 2020, things got thankful and poetic.

On November 26th in 2021, we presented vibrant florals on Black Friday and Harry met Santa.

Finally, on November 26th last year, there was holly but no ivy, and this shirtless glimpse of the diabolical. 

… because I want that shirt for myself. 

Also check out these other Shawn Mendes posts:

• Shawn Mendes in his underwear
• Shawn Mendes shirtless
• Shawn Mendes heading into the shower
• Shawn Mendes in more underwear
• Shawn Mendes and his big stick
• Shawn Mendes naked and dazzling
• Shawn Mendes and his armpits