A long wall of plywood and two-by-fours. Painted white. Runs along the road for a while before petering out, its work of hiding rock piles, empty space and "clean fill" done.

This is exactly the shot I was trying to get and one of the first shots I got with a new (to me) Canon P. It uses a 35mm f/2.8 Leica-type screw-mounted lens.

So who thinks:

 a) Ana's baby is NOT Bill's but Ana is gaming the Hendricksons?

 b) this is proven only after several more plot developments when we find out that Bill has been shooting blanks for the last two seasons?

 c) JJ's playing the long con with Albie and Juniper Creek (marry the prophet's wife after having married the prophet's daughter, rising in power at the same time that Albie's (strangely only) wife Lara now has the ultimate smoking gun to use against Albie ("Hey JJ, guess what about Albie?") in an effort to seize the assets of the latter, making JJ less of an enemy threat to the Hendricksons, but only just?

 d) that if you walked in to find your closeted Mormon lover hanging from the rafters, sobbing, kissing his feet and in general leaving DNA all over the damn place is a not-good idea?

 e) The Green Family is a silent bankroller of the Families for Fundamental Change that's attacking the casino?

 f) Wanda was molested by her father ("hello baby-doll")?

 g) that Marjean is the next place the Greens will use to attack the Hendricksons?

 h) Nicki backed way off the "Bill, you're the Prophet" thing for anyone's good?

 and was that Selma in a nightgown on the bed at the Esperanza being appealed to by some old guy on bended knee?

This show just keeps getting better, and by better I mean bat-shit crazier.

Read by a single reader (sort of a rarity within the crowd-sourcing melieu that is librivox), Mirth had me completely wrapped up. 

How wrapped up?  Wrapped up like driving in the car with with this expression on my face. 

What Wharton managed to do was tell a story in which no one does a thing to harm any one else but the landscape is littered with corpses anyway.  This is due, in no small part, to the kind of inside knowledge of "polite society" that she enjoyed.  Writing from the inside, she delivers observation and commentary in perfect measure, never once succombing to the urge to editorialize.  We see Wharton's characters as they would see each other.

Altogether, an amazing read and a great way to start off the reading/listening year.  I'd used librivox to listen to another Wharton books -- The Age of Innocence -- and while it felt a little more like a Gilded Age melodrama, Wharton's ear for dialogue and the secret conversations hiding in plain sight made it a great story as well.

Someday, when I get to go back to college, I would love to do some work that examined the dystopian side of the American dream.  It would involve a critical reading of Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Drieser and Edith Wharton to see what similarities existed between their three worldviews. 

Specifically, it would delve into the psychology of the striver -- the individual who wants to advance him- or herself within a social contruct -- and how "Old Money" responded to the striver during the period between the end of the Civil War and the First World War.  There's something facinating to me in the way literature documented how Money responded to the rising middle class during this time.  Further, that set of assumptions and behaviors seems to have direct analogues in the ways that we (Americans) treat and view the rest of the world as power (geopolitical, financial) shifts from our hands into those of "upstarts" like China, India and Malaysia.

Whether my dissertation ever sees the light of day, House of Mirth is a hell of a story and easily deserves its vaunted position as one of America's "important" books.  Too bad there aren't books groups out there that reconsider old works instead of muddling about with crap like The Westfalian Cheese Ladies' Literature and Harmony Club Explains It All to You Over Cups of Tea in Urkutsk.

Thanks for reading.

So snowed in on a sleepy Saturday, I've drafted my disclosure statement.  It's the promises and premises I make to the six people who read my blog.

I am a copywriter by day, employed by Griffin Technology.  In addition to being bound by a mutual NDA signed with that company, I also operate under my company's shared policy on social media which says, to paraphrase: 

1. don't share private stuff (defined here as just about anything I see, hear, create or do related to Griffin)
2. don't say libelous or slanderous stuff
3. be clear in the fact that the things you say and post outside the company do not in any way represent the opinions and views of Griffin Technology
4. don't be an asshat on-line.

When I do talk about Griffin products or those of our competitors, I will try and make clear the fact that my opinions are mine.

I moderate comments only to ensure that discourse remains civil.  This here is a respectable establishment. We'll have no name-calling, hate speech, or flinging of mud, poo or other gross brown things or their digital equivalents.

Opinions found herein, except where noted, are my own.  That means I take responsibility for what I say here.  I try not to get the facts wrong.  When they are wrong, or incomplete, or misrepresented, I welcome the reader to point them out.  I will do my best to rectify anything in need of rectification, retract anything in need of retraction, and in general, be honest and forthright.

I give credit where credit is due.  The internet has made possible the wholesale use and repurposing of content in ways so flexible that it falls to the individual creator of content to try and respect the wishes on other content creators in how their stuff gets used.  I will link back to articles when I quote them.  I will link and cite photos and other graphics whenever I use them.  And if you're the owner of any content that I use and you don't want me to use it, I will remove it if you ask me to. 

So what I'm about.  How about you?

Thanks for reading.

5) Write a story, submit it somewhere for publication and get my first real rejection letter out of the way.  

So I wrote a list for McSweeney's Internet Tendency.  

I've been listening to librivox's free recordings of books in the public domain, specifically the third collection of Sherlock Holmes stories The Return of Sherlock Holmes; it was the inspiration for

 Twelve Suppressed Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

After about two weeks, I received word back from McSweeney's.

Yay me!  2010's is off to a great start.  Seriously.  This was a big step for me. Who knows where this will lead?  

What I'd like to do is keep submitting, though I wonder how often one submits before one's emails get summarily routed to the Trash rather than getting read and considered?

I'll make a point to post the rejected ones here once I receive word that they've been rejected so you'll get to watch.  Lucky you, right?

So instead of resolutions, I'm going public with some guidelines for 2010 ... some personal milestones that, for one reason or another, I've decided are important to me.  Take 'em or leave 'em.  I pay the registration and hosting fees on this bitch and I can do as I choose.

1) Get started on my Music City 1/2 Marathon training and keep it going post-race.  When I finished last year, the multi-month endorphin rush made me talk crazy talk ... wanted to run it next year, wanted to run 5Ks for kicks.  If you were one of the people I said this to, my apologies.  I was out of my head.  My goal is to finish, maybe with an even better time.

2) Keep an accurate list of the books I read.  I don't know why this is such a big deal for me.  But I want to do a better job of tracking how much of the written word I take in.

3) Learn how to use a flash, and start taking pictures of people.  Don't get me wrong.  I love shooting 300 frames of a pile of rusty metal as much as the next OCD fauxtographer out there.  But a recent visit to the Memphis Books Museum of Art and viewing a collection of WPA photos (disappointingly fewer than I would have liked to have seen) suggested that what my oeuvre has in obsessive detail it lacks in soul.  @griffintech photographer @bradleyspitzer publically set out last year (or the year before that) to "learn how" to shoot people.  I think he's more than succeeded.  It's time for me to nut up and ask people if I can take their picture.

4) Be a better friend.  Facebook friends are fine, but few of them would actually pick you up at the airport late at night on a rainy Sunday.  I want to give more time to the people who really matter.  And spend way less mental and emotional energy on those who don't.

5) Write a story, submit it somewhere for publication and get my first real rejection letter out of the way.  To celebrate my 20th college reunion, why not actually write some fiction and send it off somewhere to have it looked at and summarily rejected.  "I haven't written in way too long.  I need to get back into that."  Or "Well, the New Yorker rejected a story about middle-class white suburban angst I sent them.  Said something like "did not fit their needs at this time."  Which sounds better?  

6) Let my kids grow up.  They're going to whether I want them to or not.  

On of my coworkers and a group of his friends comprise a very kickin' little combo called Apollo Up!  Several of them have a seasonal side project called Partytown Hospital.  "A Very Partytown Hospital Christmas, Too! (Also)"

While I don't necessarily agree with some critics who call the album "unlistenable" or "like drinking cold medicine then pushing a drum kit down the stairs," I will own that the 12 tracks laid down do present the listener with a conundrum.

Are we listening to good musicians playing badly?  Good musicians trying really hard to play songs they've never played before and recording the first attempt?  

Or are we hearing the lost tapes of someone's brother's garage band realizing there's no way in hell they're going to be able to play a 45 minute set at Nana's nursing home despite the fact that he promised Nana it would be "no problem" to play some Christmas music at the Senior's SwingerBell Christmas Social.

It's in the tension between the deliberately awful and the earnest that Make's "Christmas, Too!(Also)" succeeds beyond anyone's dreams.  

According to PTH's Mike Shepard, the three guys have been playing together in bands, churches and the odd quinceañera for some number of years.  As a result, the 12 tracks committed here have a loopy kind of hung-together chemistry that makes an album that started off as a lark as damn fine listen, actually.

Too, there are the challenges presented by the  thrice-headed hound of originality, relevance and connectwithability.  After we've heard "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" in heavy rotation every year for 40 years, one has to ask, "Is there anything more this song has to say to us?"

VPHCT(A) answers with a completely un-ironic "Uh, yeah."  Performed by anyone else, these songs are so familiar to us - have been arranged, rearranged, autotuned, Chipmunkized so many times - that we don't actually hear them anymore.  Aye, these old versions are red & green pink noise ... comforting backdrops against which we can cast our frustrations, bitter family resentments and long-held anger to share it for all to see.  

Instead, (Also) has created a sonic landscape that presents something new at every turn ... drummer playing saxophone and drums at the same time?  Sure.  Complex time changes set pounding counter to a straight time backbeat?  Hellz yeah.  Vertiginous chord progressions that induce vomiting, euphoria and erections lasting more than four hours requiring a call to the family doctor?  Oh, mais OUI!

So as the group plunges into the final brash "five GOLD RINGS!" of "Twelve Days of Partytown Hospital", we realize that we've been a part of something unique.  Something we've been itchin' for for a long time.  Something transcendent.  A truly NEW album of Christmas music.

--

"Very Partytown Hospital Christmas Too! (Also)" Available in a ridiculous number of formats at partytownhospital.bandcamp.com.  Partytown Hospital are Jay Leo Phillips, Mike Shepherd, and Irredeemable Fakebook. All songs recorded live to two tracks by Mr. Phillips and mixed by Mr. Shepherd.

Possibly the best part of the site thus far is the video series documenting the long, painful journey of discovery as we realize exactly what we're in for.

Best quote from the experience so far ... "this has gone horribly wrong."

As a great personal favor to me, I'm asking all of the WebSlog Army to link (www.cesbound.com), watch (www.youtube.com)  follow (@griffintech, @cesbound) and in general see all the amazingness that can happen when a company full of alpha geeks brings its collective mind and talents to bear on a big giant rolling Brandwagen.

My family - You are everything. And I hope I show you how important you are to me every day.

Ashley - You are everything and then some.  This is our 15th Thanksgiving together. You are amazing and you make my life something new and wonderful every day.  I love you.

My friends - There aren't many of you.  And chances are better than even that I don't show you how important you are to me as you do to me. (cough coughWilliamscough...)  But I do Thank God for you and hope your family and friends are safe and warm and fed this Thanksgiving.

Books, Newspapers and Magazines - When Fiona and Isaac were born, one of my personal, semi-selfish wishes for them is that they would love and crave reading as much as I do.  They do.  I am thankful and feel unbelievably blessed to get to listen to the beautiful sound of a house full of people reading.

My job - Yeah, yeah, I know.  Work shouldn't define me.  Well guess what?  I does, at least a little bit.  I hired in with Griffin Technology (Connect to play.™) three years ago this week.  And in that three years, it feels like I've done more cool, life-changing (my life, that is) stuff than in the 17 years previous.  I'm a writer ... a person who writes for a living.  I feel like I can say that now without adding an asterisk.  Griffin got me there.  Thanks Karen, Derrick, Robert, Alex and Jennifer for believing in me.

Photography - 2009 will go down in my book as the year I learned how to take pictures.  Sitting in a hayfield focusing on a rollebale, or shooting pictures of food at Go Cart Thai, I'm learning to see the world differently. 

Living another year - Dad died three years ago.  As we all grew up and moved out, I think his favorite times of the year were the holidays, Thanksgiving especially.  While I used to look at Thanksgiving as a speedbump between Halloween and Christmas, I'm growing to see why he must have loved the last Thursday in November so much.  Dad, I miss you and love you.

While there's much more for which I'm thankful, this covers the highlights.

Happy Thanksgiving, folks.