Gosh, a lot of people want to know the latest on Dr. Phil and Robin. Dozens of people are coming to this blog every day as a result of searching for info on the rumored split.

This is puzzling to me. Why does it matter to anyone? I wrote The Making of Dr. Phil because someone hired me to do it. Otherwise, to me Dr. Phil would just be part of the general celebrity cacophony in which we live and which I mostly ignore.

Our obsession with celebrity is loony to me. I don’t get it at all. I started to say “America’s obsession with celebrity” but changed my mind because the incident that shut me down completely on celebrity-watching was the bizarre worldwide freakout over Princess Diana’s death. WTF? I have nothing against her but still don’t understand why the whole world was sobbing and rending their garments over her demise. She was just a woman who got married and divorced. Her end was untimely and sad but I repeat---WTF? After a week of watching that incomprehensible display of inappropriate mourning, I decided to check out of the whole celebrity culture.

When I covered country music, I often was offered backstage passes to meet country stars and usually declined. I didn’t mind interviewing celebrities—especially songwriters—but saw no need to be among the faceless masses to shuffle by them just for the opportunity of shaking a famous hand and maybe getting a photo. So what? To me, that kind of contrived meet ‘n’ greet is unpleasant, even a little humiliating.

I’ve been trying to think of ways to capitalize on all this interest in Dr. Phil but can’t think of anything new to say and don’t really care. It would be great if everyone who is interested bought the book and it actually earned back my advance and paid me some royalties but I have little hope of that. And I’m certainly not interested enough to want to do my own investigation into the state of Dr. Phil’s marriage. If more information comes out on what went awry there, I will contribute my learned opinion but that’s about as far as it goes.

I had my Summer of Dr. Phil when I wrote the book and was glad when it was over. I’ve boxed up the files and put them in storage. Now all that’s left in my office is one of the enlarged book covers the publisher made for me to sit in front of when I did interviews. Ugh. I don’t even like looking at him anymore. I never really did...

Labels: celebrities, dr. phil

The heat has broken and I actually saw rain today. These are very doggie dog days here in Dallas. Hot. My god it’s been hot.

It’s too hot for anyone to do very much. My email has been nearly silent. My telephone too, though that’s not unusual. Most people know better.

I like these dead zones. Fortunately, I have enough work so that I don’t feel panicked and I like the feeling that everyone is on vacation and nothing is pressing.

The deep summer work dead zone is different from the holiday season work dead zone. Around the holidays, the city buzzes and hurries and everyone is too busy to work. In summertime, the city slumps and everyone is too lethargic to work—or do much of anything else. Traffic on the highways is thin. I went for a pedicure Monday and the salon was practically empty. I met friends for sushi today and the restaurant was uncharacteristically quiet.

This July was one of the hottest in our history. We had 16 days of 100 degrees or higher. Monday the temperature was 107 degrees.

Texas heat even looks hot. I can see it from my window. The sun is a hard, bright light and the trees and shrubbery are pale and stressed from its brutality. If the Garden Bed of Death survives this—and it is hanging on—it will be the hardiest garden on Earth. Sorry looking, but hardy.

Right now, the temperature is a balmy 89 degrees. It’s lovely, but I’m still not working very hard. It’s summertime. Who cares?

Labels: texas, weather

This is one of my brother’s early bands, The Eels, circa 1975. That’s brother Nick, doing a Harpo Marx kinda thing, second from left. He played the drums back then. (He can play about any instrument you put in his hands now.) Next to him on the couch is Chris the bass player, who was so laid back he was inside out. Last I heard, he was in some kind of metal band. And then another Chris, the temperamental genius guitarist and my ersatz brother. He and Nick were friends since elementary school and Chris spent a lot of time at our house. Sometimes I would get up late in the morning and there would be nobody in the house but Chris, sitting at our kitchen table, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.

And on the far left, holding the inert warhead in what is known among those who know it as the “Warhead Picture” is Jerry Garcia. The other Jerry Garcia.

Jerry died last week and it’s given a lot of people a lot to think about. A lot of ambivalence surrounds his death, from hepatitis C and cirrhosis of the liver. As you might imagine, with those particular causes, his death is not entirely surprising but that doesn’t make it any less sad.

Jerry was charismatic, charming, talented and a drug addict. Gosh, that’s a cliché, isn’t it? After the Eels, he played with a couple of important bands in the NY punk scene—Richard Hell and the Voidoids and James White and the Blacks.

My friend Dave, who was close friends with Jerry from childhood, told me that when Jerry learned that he’d made it into the Voidoids, he went straight to Dave’s house and they jumped up and down and squealed like little girls.

But Jerry was a vortex of dissolution and over the years, he sabotaged himself—stealing from friends, band mates and professional associates, for example—and many (most? all?) of his friends dropped him.

One friend one time left a room leaving his wallet and Jerry alone. In the wallet was money and a note that said, “Take the money and never come back.”

At his best, Jerry was social, garrulous and a raconteur but that may be why he tried so hard to bring his friends into his drug-driven life. He liked people and didn’t want to do stuff alone. We all like friends around who share our interests. My family holds Jerry partly responsible for my brother Oliver’s descent into addiction and his ultimate death. I don’t think I ever saw Jerry again, after Oliver died in 1987, though I heard news of him now and then, none very good.

Jerry lived with his parents when he died. There was no funeral, just a viewing of the body. Dave went and a few other people. Just a handful. A small handful. After seeing what was left of Jerry, they all went out together and reminisced about Jerry’s good days, about the Jerry who charmed everyone around before he allowed himself to freefall.

Jerry was not an intimate of mine, although he was certainly part of a gang with which I ran. I still laugh to think of him telling me, when we were both older teenagers, that he likes Jewish girls “because they put out” –which is tawdry but funny anyway. (Jerry was Cuban.) I never put out for him though he once expressed a fleeting interest.

Drug addiction is so sad, so sad, so sad. It steals people away from us, sucks them into a cesspool from which many never emerge. Oliver was sucked down quickly. Jerry spun around and around into middle age before his body gave out.

Maybe Jerry was a bad person. I don’t know. He did a lot of bad things. But I think he was just broken, like Oliver. Now that he’s gone, his friends are mourning the person he once was and could have been. It’s a complicated sadness.

Labels: 1970s, death, drugs, memoir

Look here. Target is selling half a goddam shoe wheel.

Our goddam shoe wheel is still part of the family. We've had it since December 2006. Maybe some day we'll open the box.

Labels: shopping

I’ve been a really half-assed blogger recently. I apologize and blame the heat. We’re having a helluva summer here in Dallas. Yesterday hit 107 and more of the same is expected today. I try to leave the house as little as possible and my brain is sluggish.

I bought Jack a wading pool yesterday but haven’t got him in it yet. He mostly just drinks from it.

***

My latest endeavor in my quest to tame my monkey mind is clearing visual clutter from my office.

Some of you old timers may remember my blog posts about organizing for your learning style. (You can read them here and here.)

In one post, I wrote:

I also realized that I have my office set up all wrong. I have always had lots pictures and tsotskes around my desk. My idea was that lots of stuff around me would be creatively stimulating. Wrong. After this panel I realized that one reason I've been working on the living room couch so much is because the room is less cluttered. All the visual stimulation in my office feels oppressive. It turns out that just as Tom can't tune out bad music, I can't tune out visual stimulation. I am aware of it all the time and it jangles my nerves. So as soon as I get caught up on everything I need to catch up on, I am going to take down most of the photos on the wall by my desk. I removed a lot of the tstotskes last week and can breathe easier already. Who knew?

I wrote that on July 18, 2007 and I finally got around to a full-scale desk flotsam purge this weekend. It looks great but I feel a little anxious about it because I even took down the bulletin board that hung over my computer. I’ve never worked at a desk without a bulletin board.

It’s not that I used the bulletin board for reminders and important information. It was mostly a repository for photos, cartoons, postcards, ticket stubs and other junk. I rarely changed the display out, but would put stuff up there and watch it yellow and curl. I had the last Calvin and Hobbs cartoon posted since the day it ran in 1995. (Yikes. I didn’t realize it was that long until I just looked it up.)

When I told a friend who used to work at my desk while dog-sitting for us, she said she liked looking at my bulletin board, that it was full of interesting stuff. I do like the idea of other people looking at all my flotsam and thinking about what an interesting person I am. But maybe that’s an exhibitionist side of me I don’t need to indulge anymore. I yam who I yam. What have I got to prove?

Instead of flotsam, I have filled up one shelf of my desk hutch with books about writing. Surely those will be more inspiring than the little plastic figurine of a girl on a telephone. Or even the little wooden acorn.

We’ll see. I feel a little anxious about all this. I still have the bulletin board leaning up against my bookcase in case I crater and must return to my flotsam ways.

Labels: home office, organizing, personal growth

Last time I posted these, they were buried in MySpace. I watched them again and they tickled me so here they are again. Plus I need a little blogging breather so this is the easy way out.

Labels: art, fashion

I never imagined anyone would ever see my feet photos, but here they are.

Labels: photography, travel

Tom and I have been in Galveston the past couple of days. We loved it.

We did note how much our respective families-of-origin—-mine from Manhattan, his hardcore Chicago--would hate the tacky, ramshackle, moist and not particularly lovely island city. This is no place for sophisticates or poseurs.

The beaches on the Gulf of Mexico are not breathtaking. The water is warm and gentle but murky and brown and surf warning flags include one for “venomous organisms” in the water—mostly jellyfish.


And Galveston evidently lacks zoning laws, like Houston, so the collection of buildings lining busy Seawall Boulevard is a cockamamie hodgepodge with no attempt at beauty, unless you count the fake volcano on top of the Rainforest Café, which spews fire on an unpredictable schedule. It scared the crap out of me one night as I lounged on our hotel room balcony.

Once a wealthy port city to rival San Francisco, Galveston was all but wiped out in 1900 by a giant hurricane—a natural disaster unrivaled in our nation until Katrina blew through. Galveston rebuilt, but the Houston Ship Channel, which went through various stages of widening and deepening, siphoned off much of Galveston’s ship traffic and therefore wealth over the decades.

Galveston floundered through decades of casinos and crime and decay in the moist sea air, and then, in the 1980s, when Texas was shaking off the meltdown of the oil industry by investing in tourism, the island revived and now it’s a popular family vacation destination (it appears no one visits the island in summer with fewer than four children) and cruise port.


The last time I visited Galveston was the mid 1990s and I expected to see it changed, riding the wave of prosperity that has luxurified everything it washed over. But from the looks of it, new hotel development along Galveston’s seawall (built to protect the city from a repeat of the 1900 disaster) ended around 1989, unless you count the prefab chain hotels popping up here and there. Residential development is somewhat more robust, with high-end developments such as Beachtown, rising from the sands. (Beachtown is designed by the same folks, and along the same lines, as the planned communities Seaside and Rosemary Beach in Florida.) We’ll see what happens now that the bottom has dropped out of our crazy housing market.


Across the narrow island, on Galveston Bay, The Strand (modeled after London’s Strand) survived the storm and now the lovely iron-front buildings house souvenir stores of the most craptacular nature. Put down the elephant made of seashells and walk away. Nobody needs it, nobody wants it. Streets of surrounding neighborhoods are studded with spectacular Victorian historic homes and mansions, some open for touring.

We mostly bummed around the beach side. Our hotel, the San Luis Resort, has a crazy pool with grottos and waterfalls and a slide and a cool bar--poolside and swim-up--and enough children to populate one of the smaller nearby islands. We spent some time there, some time walking the long beaches, some time eating greasy seafood and more time than we intended in a semi-ersatz biker bar with a view of the beach and some of the most godawful loud cheezepop music we’ve ever suffered through. We stopped in for a quick drink and snack and hours later had new friends and a fuzzy view of things.

Galveston is hot and humid and it has many smells, among them the whang of eccentricity. It is island people and beach people and Texans and historians (the Galveston Historical Foundation is strong and motivated), all iconoclasts. It’s an urban beach town, a ripe concoction of seaside and industry. It's a tourist destination but without the sheen that has polished the authenticity right off a lot of places. (Think about Antiques Roadshow--when you strip the original finish and redo a piece of furniture, it might look prettier in a superficial sense but it loses much of its soul.)


Galveston reeks of soul. I might could live there. I might be just eccentric enough.

P.S. Good luck getting the song out of your head.

Labels: galveston, texas, travel

This is for all my sisters in boobage.

I made myself a halter top this weekend. I’m not sure what possessed me, considering that I’ve never been able to wear one. But I went on faith that the advanced bra technology I’ve been hearing about on the teevee had created a convertible bra that doesn’t suck.

Hallelujah and God bless Lilyette. This is a great bra.

Hurry and buy one. I like it so much, it's sure to be discontinued any minute.

Labels: clothes, shopping