Christmas flicks

 Watched a pair of favorite Christmas type movies last night.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is one that we don't miss.  I have to thank Shyam for bringing me back around to this one.  I remember getting the disc from Netflix a year or two after it came out, and it just not grabbing me.  I didn't think it was bad, but for whatever reason, it didn't snag in my consciousness.  But the way the blogosphere was working in the late 'aughts, and with Shyam mentioning how funny she thought it was when we started going out, I gave it another chance.

Yeah.  Quality flick.  Highly quotable.

A few years back, our favorite little indie cinema Central Cinema, in Knoxville, did a Christmas double feature for Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and The Nice Guys,  right around Christmas.  Shyam and I caught it on the tail end of the 3 or so day run, and had the theater almost to ourselves.  It's a small thing but it's one of my favorite memories, actually.

Hallmark does commemorative ornaments of Everything, anymore.  One of mom's favorite gifts to give is Christmas ornaments every year.  I took her up to one of the stores up in Knoxville a couple years back, and just marveled at the licensing.  Disney, Snoopy, all the major sports.  We like the Haunted Mansion and Nightmare Before Christmas stuff.  

But I would give much money for an ornament of Harry hanging from the overpass by the hand from the coffin.  Or perhaps the dog with a finger in its mouth.

Or a talking ornament saying, from above:  Merry Christmas, sorry I fucked you over.

We also watched Office Christmas Party, which I don't think gets enough love.  Fun ensemble piece.  

I could probably watch Jennifer Aniston cussing the girl in the airport lounge all day.....

A few random thoughts about driving...

 I drive a lot.  It's a good portion of my job.  During the busy part of the year, I can drive 600 or 700 miles in a week.  I have a few observations.

These are largely brought on by a trip to Chattanooga yesterday to do a little Christmas shopping, and a little browsing at a bookstore (if I'm being honest).

Just a few free floating thoughts, almost none of them new in general, or on this blog in particular:

• If you have to make more than one attempt at backing up into a parking spot?  You're defeating the purpose of backing into a parking spot.  And you're making people wait on your ass.
• If you're driving a heavy duty pickup truck?  Maybe backing into that first space in the row because it's open isn't the best option, anyway.  If it's me, and I'm driving a truck that costs as much as my parents' house when they bought it in 1988, I'm going to part on down the line, anyway.  I won't be that douche who takes 4 spots...but I'm gonna grant you that you take up 2 spots as long as you're pulling through.
• Don't be the douche who takes up two spots if you can fit in one.  
• Don't be the douche who parts in the diagonally lined spots next to handicapped spots.  My mother and I ran into that last Christmas time.  We'd stopped to get a bite to eat, and parked in the handicapped spot, since she was on a walker last Christmas.  We came back out from lunch to find a Porsche parked on those diagonal lines.  Those are for people with van side access.  Don't park there.  There's a spot in Hell for you where they play Holiday Road by Lindsey Buckingham on repeat until Kingdom Come.
• I'm not a fan of Dodge Rams.  I'm generalizing, and that's probably wrong, but there's a special breed out there driving Dodge Rams.  There's a large portion of our society who has completely bought in on the "alpha male" mentality.  They tailgate.  Try to intimidate.  They LOVE passing transfer trucks on the right.  And they treat every excursion onto the roads like it's some kind of race.  I do have a worrisome story that's happened in the past month or two where I ended up having to call the cops on a guy in a Ram acting like a fool on the interstate.  Tailgating.  Swerving.  And he took a particular ire in me when I honked as he cut me off.  I'll tell that one at a different time.
• Ford F-150's of newer vintage have a lot of the same problems.  I'm not sure where the cutoff is, but I'm usually pretty cool with older F-150's.
• I hold Kia and Lexus drivers in a lot of the same regard.  In general, they are the least likely drivers to understand the rules of the road.  They do things out of ignorance, rather than any sort of malevolence.  They are the most likely to cut people off because they don't understand where their car is in the road.  
• Tesla and Genesis drivers are moving high up on my list of cars to watch out for.  Their drivers are most likely to drive distracted.  I don't know if it's because they take safety systems for granted, or what.  But there's a lot of swerving, and a lot of driving slowly in the left lane of the interstate with these guys.  Teslas are also the least likely to brake for you in the parking lot of a shopping center.  
• Brake for people in shopping centers, guys.  That's a holdover from the old job, but it comes into play every now and then still.  Pedestrians have the right of way in a lot of those areas, anyway.  And it costs you nothing to not be a dick.  You're not in that big a hurry.
• On ramps are for acceleration.  You're supposed to be close to traveling speed by the time you reach the interstate.  I know it's not always going to work that way, especially when there are a lot of cars getting on at the same time.  But a lot of the time, it gets to be hazardous because one car is toodling toward 70 mile an hour traffic at 45 miles an hour.  Get up to speed before getting on the interstate.
• Off framps are for deceleration.  Stop slowing down ridiculously before you get off the interstate, unless there's a cloverleaf designation.  And even then, you don't need to go 45 on the interstate.
• If you can't get up to speed, or aren't comfortable traveling at the average speed of traffic on the interstate?  You don't need to be traveling on the interstate.  90% of the time, if not more, there's a parallel highway nearby that will get you where you need to go at a speed you're more comfortable with.
• Everybody who travels 75 South between Knoxville and say...Loudon and Sweetwater?  You can go faster than 63.  We don't need to go 90, but if we could go the speed limit, that would be awesome.

I Saw the TV Glow

 Sat down the other night to watch this movie I Saw the TV Glow.  

It reminded me of the early 90's.  Which it's meant to, by and large...shout out to the Fruitopia machine in the background in a couple scenes.

In the early 90's my family lived back in the woods, too far from the main line to run TV Cable to.  So, we were an antenna family.  The only two things I really missed, TV-wise, were baseball and pro wrestling.

I'd been a WGN kid, so I was a Cubs fan.  We moved in the 1988 season.  Not having WGN for 1989 kinda sucked, but thew newspapers still printed line scores (at least) and box scores (some did), so you could still follow, if a day or two later.

But without cable, there was little pro wrestling to watch.  Occasionally, you'd find a WWF or WCW show floating across syndication on some fuzzy UHF channel.  Even more rarely, you'd find some local show that had managed some TV Time.  But scheduling was sporadic, and sometimes you'd set the VCR to record something coming on at 1AM on Sunday night, only to find that somebody at WFLI or some other channel had decided to show Zardoz instead.  

I found a friend at church.  We were ushers together.  Which meant that we opened doors for people needing to enter or leave the sanctuary, so the doors wouldn't make a noise when they closed.  We also took the offerings, and helped older or handicapped church members to their seats, though thinking back on it now, there were only a couple of those, and a guy named Jim, who was older than us, usually did that part.  Legally speaking, that was probably wise, though I don't think that was even in the thought process.

Anyway, one of the other ushers was a guy named Brett.  He was a couple years ahead of me in school, and we'd never interacted much, but one day I made an Undertaker reference in the vestibule when it came to how the aforementioned Jim walked.  And a friendship was born.  We talked a lot of wrestling, and it became something of an arrangement that Brett would start taping WCW Saturday Night (and later Monday Night Raw) for me.  In 1992 and 1993, this is how I watched a lot of wrestling.

We would usually pick apart the wrestling shows in intense conversations that even though I really liked pro wrestling, I was always taken somewhat aback at how intensely he was into the storylines, and how cool it would be if there were some cross promotional show where Vader and the Undertaker could have a match.

Brett's fandom, I never could completely sort out.  By 1992, I was 15 and 3 or 4 years past my true believer stage.   I always blamed a Saturday Night Main Event match between Hulk Hogan and the Honky Tonk Man for being a nail in the coffin.  HTM hit his "Shake Rattle n' Roll" neckbreaker on the Hulkster, but I said to myself "he's gonna get up" not in any sort of fannish exultation, but in admission of a tired storytelling trend.  I was never a Hulkamaniac.

But around that same time, another tape of a Clash of Champions match between Ric Flair and Ricky "the Dragon" Steamboat had popped into my hands.  The WWF was theatrical, my mind reasoned, diplomatically, but Flair and Steamboat were going at it for real!

Sometimes you just want to believe, I guess.

That was 1989.  By 1992, I knew it was all predetermined, but was still a fan of the theatrics.

Brett?  I'm pretty sure was the same way, but was just getting into the stories so much that he was like a true believer.

I never knew for sure, though.  I mean, he was Intense!

Now, it's not a lot like I Saw the TV Glow and their relationship to The Pink Opaque.

I mean, I don't believe I'm a wrestler.

(Admission:  I do believe with all my heart that I am Bret "the Hitman" Hart and I am forever locked in combat with Shawn Michaels).

As for the movie.  I liked it.  I felt like it hit its marks, and it made me uncomfortable, which was much by design.  I'm coming to like Justice Smith as a performer very much, but Brigette Lundy-Paine brought the weirdie angst.  I liked her very much.

We watched it a couple nights ago, and I keep thinking about it.....

In Which He Goes Christmas Shopping

 Dear Online Nerd Diary:

Today, I wandered north with my mother to do a little Christmas shopping.  

She got a little bit done, with a couple of ideas for things to grab in the next couple of weeks (which is advantageous, since Christmas is hurtling at us startling speed, and will be here in just over a couple weeks).

I have long since opined that the line of demarcation between child and adult, for those who celebrate Christmas, lies somewhere along the same place where the child looks at a calendar and says "Aww....Christmas is ___ Days Away!" while the adult looks at the same date and says "Damn!  Christmas is ___ Days Away!"

Working in retail all those years, knowing that I'd be working 5 and 6 (and 7) days a week in December, without a lot of extra time to shop...combined with a distaste for getting out in crowds, shopping, spending money in general and standing in line..... I do a lot of my shopping early, and online.

But there is always the problem of going into the place where I keep these presents, and occasionally wandering across an item and saying "Who the Hell is this Bucket of Drywall Screws for?"

(So early is my shopping that in 2017, when I went into my Christmas box, I found something that I'd picked up in February for Dad, a couple of weeks before he died.  That was a metaphysical kick in the nuts).

But the flip side is this:  sometimes there is one person that has gotten left out over the course of the year.  I will not name them here, but I have neglected to pick up anything for them.  Not out of any intent to leave them out.  I just....haven't seen that thing that makes me think of them.

And I did not find or see that thing that makes me think of them again. No anything for them today.

But there are ideas!

All the ideas!

So, after a day in a book store, and a Hallmark store, and a women's clothing store where I simply sat in the front of the store watching videos on my phone....

I have to go back out again.  And I'll be thankful that with the business, we're in the slow part of the year (until February or so), and I have the ability to wander back out into the Public at Christmas without fear of exhaustion because my job is to be In the Public at Christmas.

As we are verging on stream of consciousness here, I would like to mention that I miss my friend Marty.  He'll have been gone 7 years this coming January.  He's the one who used the phrase "In the Public."  It was a state of mind, and sometimes you're not fit to be "in the public."  I've borrowed it from him a lot since he's passed.  I often wondered what Marty would have thought of life events from 2019 forward.  I miss that guy. 

An Admission

 Hi.  Welcome to the mostly defunct Big Stupid Tommy blog.

I used to write here a lot.  

A LOT.

Over time, it got to be less.  Work, for one.  "Working like a Botard" was a phrase stolen from TechTV back in the day.  But there were other social media outlets.  The Facespace.  Twitter.  They took a lot of the same function, and provided a lot of the same dopamine that blogging did.  But I still did some writing over here.  For a while.  It doesn't coincide exactly, but there's a mental line of demarcation for when Dad died.  He was a big part of why I wrote here.  And then my friend Steve died.  He of Elisson fame.  And other blogging pals died, too.  Trace died this year, I was sad to learn.  and long time commentor here, and other places, Grandefille passed in the summer of 2023.  And byeond them, a lot of my blogging compatriots wandered away from it, or let it dwindle.  Bill.  Emily.  Rob.  Troy.  Even Eric.  I think Sheila is the only one from back in the day still doing her regular superlative work.

I've said it a few times over the past couple of years, but I need to start writing again.

But I said it with the same amount of conviction that I've said "I need to plant some grass seed up near the fig tree," or "I need to get some gravel for the driveway" multiple times in that span, and the results been just about the same.

So, I'm challenging myself just a little, to set up a routine.

And it's worked.  To a degree.

I've written a bit the last few days.  

And it's kinda angry.  Not the stuff I like putting up for everybody to see.

I may share it.  I dunno.  But, a condensed version, just so everybody sees where my mind's at.

A couple of years ago, I got fired from the job I'd been in for nearly a couple decades.  It came as a surprise, and the things I got fired over weren't 100% true.  I was fired for making "violent statements."  There were a couple things said....that I was tired of playing babysitter for my store's front end...that were said, and I owned that.  There were other things  that I was said to have said...that I threatened to beat an associate's ass if he didn't come to work...and that I wanted to line people up against a wall and execute them....that I didn't say.

It was sobering to have my words come back to haunt me.  It fucking destroyed me to have lies made up.

But a couple people signed a piece of paper saying that I said it.  So, I lost that job.

It sucked.  

It wasn't all bad.  It was a shitty job.  It ate too much time.  It was thankless.

I started working with Shyam's family business.  And after a year of doing that, she and I decided to purchase the business.  It's been a pretty smooth transition, if I can jinx things by saying so.  And I say so by saying there are still days I feel like I don't know what the fuck I'm doing.  But she and her family are great to work with.  And the little dramas that drove me crazy  (Come to Work, America) aren't in play at all, now.  In fact, I think I'm the one that's missed the most work, after giving myself a wicked bone bruise about a month into my tenure.  Other than that, I don't think anybody's missed any work in two years.  And if I go someplace in my delivery routes (we deliver live fishing bait to stores), where there is drama, or tension?  10 minutes later, I'm in my truck driving away from it.

I can honestly say that for the first time in my life, I really like my job.

I close this post off this way.  With an admission.  I'm scared.

Of what?  I dunno.  That's anxiety for you.  

I was never a swaggering, confident asshole.  I mean, I know that's a huge surprise from a guy who named his blog Big Stupid Tommy.  But despite all that, I was able to keep an even keel for a lot of time.  Getting fired?  It fucked with my confidence a little.  Maybe a lot.  I've been very very sensitive, about screwing up, here lately.  Which plays somewhat into why I don't write more.  I enjoy writing.  It's a minor form of therapy.  Maybe blogging is just mental masturbation, but I always felt  a little better after I did it.  Like I've taken a mental shit.  But here lately, I felt like I was screwing that up too, somehow.  So, fair warning if I'm tentative.

I still like to try to be funny.  And I do have a couple things I've written in the past few months that I think are kinda funny.  Maybe if I can find my Norm MacDonald/David Letterman space to just post it because I think it's funny, and say "fuck all" to the rest of the world.

I'd like to get past losing that job.  I'd like to get past feeling like a fuckup.  So there may be a few posts about that.  I asked Shyam if it was normal to still be pissed 2 years later.  At the people who lied.  At the people who were all to ready to believe them.  

She says it is, until the next thing to be pissed about comes along.

(There are lots of things to be pissed about, by the way.  Have you seen the world lately?)

But I'd like to work past it.  If you'll excuse me, I think that's what I'm setting as a larger goal, beyond just making myself write.

So, thanks for reading.  Bear with me....