A Couple of Good Things, and an Angry Day List

Family Guy's coming back. We just don't exactly where and in what order yet. I'm pleased. I didn't like it at first. But it's grown on me a little. On the whole, I still think it's hit or miss, but that can be attributed to which writers comandeered which episodes.

But when the show was on? It was damn good.

So, that makes me happy.

Also: I got the first season of West Wing on DVD at the used DVD store the other day. I've see almost all the episodes already on Bravo, but not in order, so getting to see them in sequence is a treat.

I'd never, though, seen the episode "In Excelsis Deo," which was a Christmas-time episode that first season. If I can say so....that episode is still among the show's finest. And the last quarter hour, with Toby procuring an Honor Guard for the homeless veteran who died in the winter night, along with that man's burial, is absolutely beautiful television.

Also? I'm reading Jean Shepherd's In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash part of which was the basis for the movie A Christmas Story. A lot of Shepherd's tone translates well to the movie, but there's one particular passage that caught my eye, and I thought I'd share it, from the story The Endless Streetcar Ride into The Night, and the Tin-Foil Noose, in which Ralphie goes to pick up a blind date, and is invited into his date's family's living room by his date's father, to wait:

He led me into the living room. It was an itchy house, sticky stucco walls of a dull orange color, and all over the floor this Oriental rug with the design crawling around, making loops and sworls. I sat on an overstuffed chair covered in stiff green mohair that scratched even through my slacks. Little twisty bridge lamps stood everywhere. I instantly began to sweat down the back of my clean white shirt. Like I said, it was a very itchy house. It had little lamps sticking out of the walls that looked like phony candles, with phony glass orange flames. The rug started moaning to itself....

I bring it up only because I've been in that house. Not that house, but a house that's already alien because you've never been there, but made even moreso by your own nerves and uncertainty. It just caught my eye.

Also? Tonight's my night off. So it's all good. Not quite Barry and LaVon good.....but definitely getting there.

Now, here's the ugly part.

Today's been those days where the little things are starting to get at me. I actually think of these as "Goodwill" days, in honor of my former employer...working there was an especially trying experience some days, and it often left me with something of a short fuse.

Things are better now.

But today, a lot of little things are mounting for me.

My plan is to list them here, and then leave them here. Because there's nothing serious. Nothing especially trying. Nothing, certainly, worth an entire blog post in and of itself. This is just a list of a couple of things that I've devoted more than a second's worth of irritation to in the past day, day and a half or so. I hope to be done with them by exorcisng them.

With apologies to Angry Jack, here are a few things that are making Big Stupid Tommy Angry:

--Hangnail on my ring finger

--Chapped Lips

--Laundry, and how it won't do itself

--The Other Drivers

--You Assholes who Don't Flush Public Toilets after you use them

--Sick Co-Workers

--Not Drinking Enough Water

--Dirty Apartment

--The fact that I can't remember to put the jelly back in the fridge

--Blue Raider Bookstore commercials starring Nick Daniels

--Sore Left Knee

--People Who think I'm being sanctimonious when I say Pete Rose is a shitstain and shouldn't be allowed near a Major League Clubhouse. He broke The major rule in baseball, the one that's posted everywhere, and then lied about it for 15 years. Yes. That is enough for me. And because I'm holding Pete to a higher standard doesn't mean I'm not holding the rest of baseball to that standard. Yes, the game needs a bit more fine and upstanding people playing and running it than are in place now. They're all shitstains, too, and I think baseball would be better off without a lot of them. We can start by keeping Pete out.

--The fact that I wrote a story that I thought was a comedic Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style story, until I realized it was very similar to an episode of Perfect Strangers.

--The fact that Larry and Balki married those two chicks (Jennifer and Maryanne, I believe were there names) for the last season of Perfect Strangers, and then lived together in the same house. I mean, it's a tenously stupid concept to begin with, and one that can't be tinkered with too much.

--Coming up with a story idea, writing down your idea in a quick five-word note to yourself, then finding the note, and having no idea what "Astrological Signs Forewarning Falling Spiders" means, necessarily.

--Bit my tongue a minute ago.

--Crappy Radio

--I'm not independently wealthy

--Michael Moore. Sometimes I think he's funny, for who he's trying to skewer. But today I think he's a windbag, especially for how he used those kids that got shot at Columbine in his Bowling cockumentary.

--How kids aren't being kids, anymore. They're being soccer/karate/cheerleading/schoolies. Just annoyed that a co-worker's 8-year-old has more on his plate right now than I do, and I'm managing to get more outside play time and video game time than the kid is, and I'm 26.

--I'm still not able to read books at work. I'll be glad when it warms up enough to eat outside, so that I might be able to go there, and not be bothered.

--The couch, or perhaps the roommate, has eaten all the working pens in the apartment.

I think that's it. I'll write more if I think of them. But these things, I now let go.

(Yeah. I do feel better. Kind of like after taking a dump.)