Just Another Louvin Night in Paradise
Finally, I get the boys and Amy to bed on a night the little woman plays cards, and then Lars proceeds to pee himself on my side of the bed, the troubled middle child being placed there to protect against the inevitable CHAOS that naturally ensues when brothers get behind closed doors and feel compelled to keep their parents from having any televison peace. I change his underwear, gently put the little bastard into his bed, and put on The Louvin Brothers' Satan is Real, pop the only beer in the fridge, a Eurunholy undrinkable Hooegarden, and sit down to place my self-pity on the world wide web for all to feel my middle-aged pain. And as the boys deliver accapella that hell is indeed a real place, I begin to wonder if maybe they're on to something.

Perhaps the old adage about feeling sorry for yourself being a devilish business has some weight, but I'm throwing that heavy bag of wisdom out the back door and into the untended side yard. Slayer too has its own brand of sagacity.

So now that the Giants have been officially rejected from a pearly afterlife and the Raiders have confirmed their own diabolical destiny with failure and El Diablo is still at his pressbox helm and the Warriors' hopes for salvation rest with a dying and unrepentant sinner, one wonders how much Christian faith to put in a team set in the godless Silicon Valley and named after a prehistoric predator in a sport that plays on frozen water? Sometimes a sign is just a sign is just a cigar, but staring into the white void of blankness that is cyberspace and drinking a Nederlander bier brewed without holy sanction, one must wonder if the RAPTURE just might come in the form of the Minnesota Twins. Believe me, better minds than mine have wondered. And certainly better souls.

I watched the 1978 version of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers last night, which starred a strapping and permed Donald Sutherland as a Health Inspector hero fighting alien pods come to free humanity from their emotions. The pods' leader was of course Leonard Nimoy camoflouged as a new age psych guru, and while the lack of show tunes was disappointing, don't think I wasn't working an existentialist angle to avoid three days of teaching while I paired this with Camus' The Stranger. Two hours wasted on dated psychological thrillers can be transferred to unsuspecting prisoners of high school English, who one day can be subjected to aggressively stretched cinematic themes so their aging teachers can rest off their hangovers, anticipated in the year 2008, when the youngest of our brood will make it to pre-school and drive up the teacher-parent conference ratio geometrically. In my Internet Explorer Favorites, I've saved a site entitled, Existentialism in Memento, so don't think I won't play that backward card as well.

After 15 minutes of The Brothers, I must say their X-tain brand of C-W is a pleasant brand of b-music. That's a piano, can you hear it? Even got a Tex Mex feel, and these fuckers burn Catholics dead. Makes me think of Jeff Bridges in The Last Picture Show, which may remain as one of the great American films, and not only for that pool scene and those Cybil Shepherd moments of sprouting, gravity-defying boobies. Makes me almost wish I'd never set foot inside the California state limits, and that far more like-minded characters lurk in the outskirts of the great nation, sitting lonely at the end of the bar waiting to deliver hysterically snide and enlightened banter, if only I could sniff 'em from the trails of sulphur they let waft out those swinging doors.

Have a glorious day! Rejoice in God's creation!