I had a large Diet Coke with some Taco Bell and now I'm writing at 2:00 a.m.

When did it happen to me that going home after a night at 10:00 p.m. became "what I wanted to do."

I miss the good old days (two years ago) when I was in a co-dependent addiction fueled relationship with someone who would drag me around all hours of the night to places sooo cool, I didn't care that as a result of the lack of air conditioning in the warehouse galleries and underground bars we were in, that my balls were glued to my leg.

Now? First sign of swamp-ass and I throw in the towel and beeline home.

I almost took home another cat tonight (not that I've taken to bringing cats home, but my new thing is wanting to, so much so that my secretary finds it "necessary and proper" to call me at all hours on the weekend offering me stray cats prowling around Hialeah.)

And now that I've admitted to you just how awkward and spinstery I am of late, I'm going to put the nail in the coffin.

What was I doing while other people my age were out boozin' it up still and blowing through bags of Colombian Marching Powder and having wild monkey sex?

I came home and watched CAMP from Netflix on my brand new super expensive super HORRIBLE home theater system.

And it was 1) Perhaps the GAYEST movie ever made; and 2) Really well done, and a fucking LOT of fun to watch. Incidentially, I realized that one of the main character's father sings barbershop quartet with my father (I think it's good that Dad has a hobby...) and I met little Joanna at my brother's graduation from Maryland this summer. So, you know, that was weird.

ANYSHIZZLE,

The premise is basically one of those "Teenagers dealing with real life teen issues and learning a lot of really great lessons about life, love, and themselves." If it wasn't peppered with some really smart really subtle dark jokes with an almost imperceptible-to-the-average-viewer constant current of black humor running through it, it would be schmaltz. But it's not, it's sweet and hilarious and redeemably twisted.

It's set in a Theater Camp that does numerous productions every summer, so the story is told or highlighted with performances from the Golden Age of Broadway during the late 60s to early 80s. So, you know, there's that "we're all misfits" thing going on... which I didn't love, but got over.

Butg you know what? Most of the songs are REALLY FUCKING GOOD. I'm not a gigantic fan of musicals - people singing about things makes me uncomfortable. And not gonna lie, there were some uncomfortable moments in this movie. But there were also some absolutely awesome numbers, like "It's Turkey Lurkey Time" from 1968's "Promises, Promises" (Okay, I had to research that, I had never heard the song or heard of that show, but whatever.) that were toe-tappingly fantastic and visually awesome...

Here's the Original Cast's Version of the Song from the 1968 Tonys which I am now going to have rattling around your head for some time to come...



In Camp, it's better - well, the "Supremes" flanking the cankled girl were really good...



Ugh, I know. How gay was that?! (I'm considering using the orange and black Marimekko pattern in the set background as a wall panel to hide my electric box) Ugh, I know, how gay was THAT?! Bring it, Andy. I'm ready.

(Here's where I bring this post back full circle...) But I really enjoyed the movie, because I got some of the references that certain jokes were based on. It's because in secret, I'm plowing through an increasingly voluminous number of movies, both new, old, and super old, and as a result thereof, after all the credits had run on the movie, and we see the buried feature, where a 12 year old girl opens a door onto a stage set like a library, and turns on a lightswitch, and is wearing feathered 60s hair and a black dress, and she says, "What a dump... What's that from, George? What. A. Dump." and the husband answers "I don't know, Martha," I knew that Camp was referencing Elizabeth Taylor as Martha, in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolfe, referencing the famous Bette Davis line from Beyond the Forest...

And really, when you think about it, when I'm 80 and immoble, will I rather look back on my days carousing and smoking and dancing until 11 a.m. the next day, or will I rather look back on these days, where I watch movies and Blog on a Saturday night...?

I think you know the answer to that.

Solitude. Definitely solitude.

A Brief Open Letter to Electronics

Dear Electronics:

You are a royal pain in the ass. S-Cables and Component Cables, and non-switchability between them. Atlantic Broadband's decision to give me Eighty Hundred Billion movie channels, but no Food Network (until next weekend when a technician comes out to fix what Lazy Pants McNo English "installed" today... I used "installed" to denote the fact that he "hooked up" my Tivo, meaning he didn't hook it up until I asked, and then, I had to go through all sorts of gyrations for 2 hours to get it to work.

Did you know that your Tivo comes with these little lightbulbs in the Tivo Pack, that you can glue to the front of your Cable Box, to make the Tivo work? I didn't know that either. Thank goodness I didn't throw them out.

My sweet setup is a sweet fucking pain in my sweet ass. I wish I had money to have someone come out and fix everything, but until then I have two televisions - one for cable and one for DVDs (because my Projector isn't wired for normal crappy S-cables (the red, yellow and white ones) but only for RGB cables, which cost 75% more than normal Cables. I can use surround sound only with DVDs, and even there, I can't get my subwoofer to woof on 7.1 channel digital surround...

Is this a goddamn joke?! I'm learning a very important lesson: Expensive things only breed more expense. Got a nice car? $250 per tire. Fancy projector system? Forty dollars for a six-foot cable to make your DVD player play through the receiver, plus a $20.00 cable for the receiver to play the DVD Player's sound.

I've got wires and cords and lines snaking through my house like Mississippi tributaries.

I've got an awesome system, that delivers a mediocre result (that I can only watch in total darkness - bye-bye TV during the daytime!) and that won't rest until it's sucked every last penny out of my tight little Jew fist.

So, Electronics, and Cable, and Cables and Wires... fie on you, I say. Fie.

That is all.