It Was Only A Movie

Me, I miss George W. Bush. Sort of.

Conservatives are trying as hard as they can to forget Bush and his era. Now it's Obama's war, Obama's recession, Obama's stock market. Forgetting that O inherited this stuff from W is a great bit of brain work, well worthy of a party whose leaders include a radio-enabled drug addict and two children, Bobby Jindal and that eighth-grade prodigy from Georgia.

How much do I miss W? I rented Oliver Stone's movie "W."

There they all were, Cheney, Condi, Wolfie and the drunken Yalie who later got sober and tore up a few countries, including this one, worse than he ever did any bar or frat house. Josh Brolin was magnetic in a way the subject of his portrayal never was. I didn't even mind listening to him.

In the bad old days, you could watch small doses of Bush on TV or read the paper and enjoy the simple pleasures of hate and fear. You could make fun of Bush and call him names (although I can't remember any worse than "Bush"), much the way Fox News loves calling Obama a socialist while he tries to bail out Wall Street banks.

Now I can't read the paper anymore. I hate to see my guy taking a beating on every front, from Afghanistan to A.I.G. By the way, what do those two have in common? They can't be saved. How are they different? We own 80 percent of A.I.G., and the Taliban has 80 percent of Afghanistan.

I hate to see Fox News having so much fun, knocking a president and willfully forgetting their old favorite who preceded him, and drove my IRA into a ditch. Of course, the only Fox News I watch is on the Stewart and Colbert shows, because it's even funnier that way.

So I rented the movie, even though it runs two hours and twenty-nine minutes, which I think was the total time Bush served in the White House, minus vacations.

An hour and a half into the movie, the computer crashed like Merrill Lynch. The DVD was scratched, dirty or choked on a pretzel. I took it back to the video store and didn't ask for a replacement.

I know how it came out. And I can barely afford the DVD rentals.

Deep-Fried Thoughts

Which is more depressing? Having two bars in your neighborhood, Chili's and Applebee's? Or having just one bar in your neighborhood, Applebee's?

Here in Terra Linda (developed before builders were required to know Spanish) we're now stuck with just Applebee's. The other apostrophe restaurant, Chili's, closed. Such is the recession.

Even when I'm going through an alcohol-free phase, I do enjoy bars, just as I enjoy coffeehouses. Both offer observational and conversational opportunities, and bars offer more of the latter. And here's my theory: If you've never been to an Applebee's, you cannot claim to understand America.

Who was the conservative pundit who said Obama didn't seem "like the type of guy who would fit in at Applebee's salad bar"? It was David Brooks who wasn't aware that Applebee's doesn't have a salad bar. Just a bar. If he'd hang out there, he might get a little closer to his nation's pulse, even though the pulse is slightly occluded by cholesterol.

Not long ago, during happy hour (23-ounce beers for $3), a burly guy looked around Applebee's horseshoe-shaped bar and said, "I'll bet none of you have been to work today."

One guy ventured that he had. Another guy said he had been engaged in child care. Five other people, and the burly questioner, an electrician, admitted they were out of work. A couple of the people had worked in stores in the half-shuttered mall and couldn't stop returning to Applebee's for happy hour, even though they were unhappy.

The electrician said that naturally he knew I hadn't been to work. Five years of retirement can do that to you.

Since then all the happy-hour conversations seem to come back to lack of work, shrinking prospects for retirement, closing businesses and failing newspapers. As a former newspaperman I am pleased to report that working-class Americans, the Applebee's clientele, are connoisseurs of daily newspapers and will miss them.

No, they may not be connoisseurs of food. But the chips and salsa aren't bad and go well with three-buck Bud.

Red All Over

Two bad-news newspaper stories were in the New York Times this morning:

"Hearst Threatens to End San Francisco Paper."

"Post to Drop Liz Smith Column."

That would be the New York Post, and guess which story was promoted on the front page of the Times? That's right, the loss of a Post gossip columnist was more important to the gentlemen who run the Times than the possible loss of San Francisco's daily paper and its excellent coverage of Oakland.

Of course, that's predictable, because the only bigger jokes than the Post in the Times' newsroom are San Francisco and, unintentionally funnier, the San Francisco Chronicle. To be fair, there may be little news here. Dog bites man, poops on man's paper. It's been predictable for years that the Chronicle will fold, be sold or lay off half its staff.

Unfortunately, it's been getting rid of half its staff for years, to no avail.

Does anyone mourn the possible loss of a major city's daily newspaper? Will anyone hear the tree fall in the forest? Well, at least trees won't be converted into ink-spotted white space.

At least now we know why the Chronicle is celebrating its 144th anniversary with such pomp. It did seem a curious number.

Mirror, Mirror ... Never Mind

Gradually going blind has its advantages. You get to go to Lenscrafters, pick out new glasses and change your image. Maybe you'll even see it in the mirror.

I've never minded wearing glasses. A visit to the optometrist has always been an opportunity for painless plastic or wire rim surgery. Look at that rack of glasses, and all those choices of looking like John Lennon, Elvis Costello, a Blues Brother or a professor in a department of something postmodern.

Sadly, Lenscrafters has more in the way of accountant rimless and absolutely nothing in Mickey Rourke tinted.

So there I was last week, trying on dark, clear and reading glasses, imagining my new ominous, responsible and scholarly selves, and what do I see? A guy who qualifies for the AARP discount and just got back from the dermatologist. Underneath the new specs were specks where potential growths had just been removed. They dramatically spelled out, in scab cursive, my wife's previous warning: "Just get age-appropriate glasses."

I'll bet nobody ever said that to Mickey Rourke. Damn you, unfair vanity.

Off the pig? Roast the pig!

Welcome to the new era of Obama (and maybe me coming out of an 8-year depression). Just to set the record straight: Obama is a lot more conservative than the wingnuts claim he is. For an alleged commie radical he's spending a lot of effort trying to keep Wall Street from falling into the dustbin of history. And arugula is not what we liberal elitists crave for dinner.

Give us pig meat. Roast it good. Slash it in chunks. All of it. Serve it with beans and macaroni and cheese. I'm sorry, Hannity and Limbaugh, we elitists are so far ahead of you we've come up behind you to become better cavemen. Arugula? In a pig's eye!

On Sunday I went to a birthday party for a friend who roasted a whole pig in his backyard in honor of the new age. Forty for him. Five days for Obama.

The party wasn't really for Obama, but he was the first topic of conversation and held first place until the splayed and singed porker came out of the firepit. To be precise, the caja china, a fearsome charcoal-fired device that enveloped the pig and created enough heat to crack the paving stones on which it was set.

It was fabulous, just the thing the new president would like. As Obama said, “I’m not looking for some fancy presentations or extraordinarily subtle flavors."

How about giant pans of juicy pork chunks?

My wife got an ear.

Stimulus packages under the tree

Somehow economic disasters are always our fault and our responsibility to fix.

A few years ago Americans stopped saving and started spending and borrowing like, well, Americans are always urged to. Then something went wildly wrong with the housing and financial markets. We were told we were living beyond our means, something no one mentioned to the suckers at all those mortgage closings.

The solution? The government borrowed $700 billion, or more, from us taxpayers to give to the banks that had been giddily lending to foolish people who couldn't pay it back. This was real money, not the mortgage-backed paper those banks used to build the housing crisis of cards.

Our job? Same as after 9/11. To go shopping.

Yes, the idea this Christmas season is to spend more money we don't have. Saving is a good thing, but right now Uncle Santa is getting a lot of requests for corporate bailouts (never mind who's been naughty or nice) and Wall Street and retailers really need us.

On Black Friday (a name eerily reminiscent of the names given days of stock market crashes), we did our patriotic duty and went to the mall and stimulated the economy. No one was trampled at our little mall, but plenty of people were there with us, and this year it's hard to say we're all consumerist saps.

After all, part of our family's economic stimulus plan was to buy a chest freezer for homemade stocks, soups and tomato sauce. I know all that good food will last at least through the coming year.

I'm not so sure about our money.

Surrender-Monkey Bubbly All Around

Ah, I remember it well. August 8, 1974. The day a disgraced Richard Nixon left office in a go-to-hell-icopter from the White House lawn. I went out to the local liquor store in Cambridge, Mass., and they were all sold out of champagne. A Boston Globe reporter was even in the store writing a story about the sudden statewide champagne shortage. So early this morning, I went to Safeway to get a bottle.

It was a bottle of Taittinger brut, and the sign under it said it cost $29, marked down from $50. But when the clerk rang it up the price came to $39, marked down from $60. After a price check, the clerk said I'd grabbed a more expensive Taittinger, and asked if I wanted her to get the cheaper one.

"No, this is for Obama," I said, grandly, mostly to the people waiting impatiently in line. "And if McCain wins, we've got plenty of the cheap stuff at home."

Cheers and high-fives from everyone, especially the good union clerks and baggers. This may be white suburbia, but it's Marin County, California, soon to be part of the U.S.A. again. I hope.

Thinking the unthinkable: If the unthinkable happens, we'll be drinking that very drinkable Taittinger anyway. (Warning: Severe name-dropping ahead.) The great thing about champagne, as I told Claude Taittinger when he and I were at a fancy dinner in San Francisco a few years ago, is that you drink it in very good times and bad.

"Ah, oui, mon frere," he said to me, or something like that, and I reminded him of the greatest champagne movie of all time.

Remember Bogart and Bergman in "Casablanca" when the Nazis enter Paris? They pop a bottle of bubbly.

At least in this election the nasty totalitarians aren't about to enter our capital. They're already there.

Santé, and sanity.

Over here, a small carbon sockprint

Here in the green states, the Prius is the big status symbol. Oh, hi, these cars say, I spent $24,000 on a little dolphin-shaped car and its precious-metal-laden battery so I can use less gasoline than you.

Thank God there's now a cheaper way to display your loyalty to the Earth: Fly your underwear and socks in the air.

It wasn't so long ago that drying your laundry in the backyard was a sign of poverty and tastelessness. Now all the best people are drying their clothes au naturel. The clothespin, long relegated to craft projects, has made a comeback as a pin for clothes, at least here where poor people aren't so poor as to steal your laundry off the line and there aren't many neighborhood associations banning the sight of laundry trees.

In Marin County, the sound of a dryer spinning is as shameful as the sight of a plastic shopping bag.

So for $27 I bought an expandable clothes rack. A full load of jeans dried in three hours in the summer sun.

Problem: where to hang all those pesky and thick athletic socks. Aha. About 15 years ago, when we had jobs and spent money with abandon, we bought a $300 wrought-iron torchiere that held 16 candles. We used it maybe twice during dinner parties, because it dripped wax on the rug and couldn't be trusted not to set fire to the house. Even when the candles weren't lit, they drooped every which-way.

Now the damned thing holds sixteen socks and some shirts and underwear high up in the sun. Our neighbors can see this proud status symbol over the fence and, from the size of the socks, ascertain our small carbon footprint.

The total savings: About $3 on each month's electric bill. We've turned a useless yuppie status symbol into a useful one, and in about eight years we'll have paid it off.

Illegitimi non carborundum

We're being told we can't mention Bristol Palin's out-of-wedlock pregnancy. After all, candidates' families are off-limits, except when they're herded onstage to demonstrate, say, what a wonderful mother of five a candidate is. Never mind that Sarah Palin forgot to drum in the abstinence-only lesson she wants to inflict on everyone else's children.

Fine, but you have to wonder what kind of right-wing crapstorm would have rained on the Clintons if a seventeen-year-old Chelsea had turned up unmarried and pregnant.

Yep, it would have been a Category 5 crapstorm. The Republicans have never shown any mercy for their enemies' families. John McCain provides the two prime examples, and both involve bastardy.

One was as victim, when he was smeared as the father of an illegitimate black child by Bush-backers in the 2000 South Carolina primary. The other was as victimizer when he made a joke at a 1998 Washington fundraiser. Because of the media's delicate sensibilities (for McCain mostly), the joke was never repeated verbatim for the public.

"Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly?" McCain asked the crowd of appreciative Republicans. "Because Janet Reno was her father."

We know who the real bastards are.

The Amerivore's 10

My wife the food blogger just completed a cute quiz called "The Ominivore's 100." It's a checklist of 100 required, exotic, disgusting or possibly dangerous comestibles that might have passed foodies' lips - everything from fugu, crocodile and rattlesnake to PB&J, which probably seems grotty to the Brit who made up the list.

Okay, put your flag lapel pin on your bulging tummy. Here's my list, the Amerivore's 10, the food checklist to prove you're a genuine red-white-and blue patriot with Dick Cheney autographed bypasses. Count up which of the following culinary experiences you've had and see how you scored. Git 'er done.

1. Have you been through a drive-through? Extra point for doing it in a pickup. Extra extra point for throwing the wrappers and cups in the back.
2. Have you been to a TGIFriday's, Applebee's, Chili's, Romano's Macaroni Grill, Red Lobster, Ruby Tuesday's, Bennigan's or an O'Not-This-Again's? Extra points for the last two, since one went out of business and I made up the other.
3. Have you eaten a deep-fried onion flower? The whole thing? Extra point.
4. Endless Pasta Bowl? Extra point for each refill.
5. Popcorn shrimp? Did they taste better than knots in sneaker laces? Extra point.
6. KFC Mashed Potato Bowl?
7. Buffalo wings without the bones or in any flavor other than Buffalo?
8. Sbarro's pizza? Two extra points for any more than one slice, and a bonus point if you know how to pronounce it.
9. Hummos Pit-za, or any other Rachael Ray Yum-O Family Friendly Snack? (Probably healthy, but really, "Pit-za," "Rachael Ray" or "Yum-O"?)
10. Boiled peanuts?

Just threw that last one in for old-timey cracker fun. For new-timey cracker fun, try Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Crackers.

Now add up your score. If you scored three or less, you are voting for Barack Obama. If you scored between three and eight, you are voting for John McCain. More than eight, and you'll probably die before the election.

Why I Hate the Olympics

Last night I set Stewart and Colbert on record, gritted my teeth and settled in to watch the Olympics up close and personal. This was my first look, having missed the magnificent opening ceremony with its computer-enhanced fireworks and dubbed nine-year-old songstress. Unfortunately, NBC added to Chinese Internet censorship by making it impossible for Mac users to access its Web site's replays of that opening ceremony. I guess they figure we Mac users don't matter because we think we're too smart for the Olympics.

We do. At least I do. I don't go for all that flag-waving crap, medal counts and opening graphics of past Olympics starring only American athletes. I could also do without the constant replays of the simian victory shouts of Michael Phelps. But those things are not why I hate the Olympics. Those are just the price of admission. The real torture is the first event of the evening, traditionally a sport you never heard of, with athletes you never heard of, that goes on almost as long as soccer.

Monday night it was synchronized diving, which is better than synchronized swimming because each team gets off the screen quicker due to the law of gravity. For a half hour (I quit and switched to "Antique Roadshow" at 8:30, saving Stewart and Colbert for later), pairs of adolescent guys in Speedos would leap off a platform and fly in formation into a pool while two commentators talked about their point of entry and other gibberish. Each pair of young guys then would haul themselves out of the pool and run giggling and smiling into the showers in full view of the cameras. A year or two younger and it would have been soft child porn.

"Why do they go right into the showers?" asked one commentator. "Because the pool is cold, and besides it's fun," replied the other.

At that point the only commentator I wanted to hear from was Cartman from "South Park." You know what he'd have to say about synchronized diving.

Tonight it's Stewart and Colbert live in synchronized satire, and record the Olympics. Fast forward, that's the event.

A Blurb for the 'Burbs

I was born in the 'burbs and I'll probably die in the 'burbs. In between I spent a lot of time trying to be authentic and sophisticated by living in cities where I took public transit and, when I didn't, often discovered that my car had been broken into.

Despite the fact that there haven't been shards of glass on my street since the recycling man dropped a Moët bottle after New Years, I still can't get over the habit of buying cars that look good with broken windows. Besides, I do drive into the city occasionally to see how the smug young urbanites (recently arrived from their parents' suburbs) are doing.

The suburbs get a bad name, and Hollywood producers never miss a chance to make fun of them from their aeries in Laurel Canyon. And now, with global warming and gasoline more expensive than microbrew, there's good reason to hate the manicured lands of the automobile addicts.

But here's why I love my 'burb and our bland little home, Casa Rancho, as we call it.

First, it really is a ranch house, sort of. We turned the lawn in the backyard into a Victory (over Safeway) Garden. Okay, we're not really surviving on our produce because onions, zucchini and jalapeños aren't basic food groups, but at least our jalapeños won't give us salmonella. In San Francisco all our backyard ever produced was fog, noise from the neighbors and a few cherry tomatoes that were supposed to be beefsteaks.

Second, I love this place despite the fact it's in much-mocked Marin County, where taxes are high and driving a 3-series BMW is akin to being on food stamps. (Break My Windows, Marin cars are telling us.) At least in Marin County we get something for our taxes. Well, don't ask me what, since there's no glass on the streets to sweep up. But at least it isn't San Francisco, which buys gas for hundreds of already overpaid high officials who commute in city cars. And neither is it Oakland where the city administrator hires all her relatives, and then warns the gangsters among them when a police raid is coming.

By the way, we do have gangsters in Marin County, and not just the ones who commute to the Financial District. Believe it or not, the previous occupants of Casa Rancho, on this cute little cul de sac, were dope dealers. Their crops, until our efficient little police force vacated the premises, were green and mostly grown indoors. On a hot day I can put my nose up to the repainted wall, breathe deeply, and, yes, get high on living here.

Who Knows Where the Timepieces Go?

The top drawer of my bureau, that's where. Right now there are 10 watches in that drawer and only one of them works. If stopped watches are right twice a day, then 18 times a day that drawer is a spot-on timekeeper. The one watch that works, my ostentatiously unfashionable Citizen dress watch, is never right, but just accurate enough to set my $30 Timex by. That's the one I actually wear.

In that drawer I have an $1,100 Tag Heuer (known as the cheapo starter Tag), a 10th anniversary gift from my wife. By our 20th anniversary its chic link band had fallen to pieces twice and no amount of wire could hold it together. The bands cost almost as much the Bush tax rebate to replace, so fuck Switzerland and its yuppie watches.

I also have my college graduation Bulova Accutron that fell off my bureau and stopped before I had even checked out of the dorm; five old Citizens and Casios; my father's old watch embossed with a Brown University insignia never saluted by moving hands; and my grandfather's gold pocket watch, as deceased as my beloved Papa. The pocket watch comes in handy for 19th-century theme parties, but why can't I throw the other watches away?

More to the point, why can't anyone make a watch that can at least make a good run against time? That $30 Timex, which I bought 15 years ago while my Tag Heuer was back home in the Alps having its first band replaced, is the only thing that's still ticking. It takes a licking, like the ad says, and it even lights up in the dark with the press of a button, but I'm getting sick of it.

My wife will tell you I'm fixated on watches, even though I only need to know the time to the nearest month. I just kind of like them as steel bling to accentuate my finely carved hand, not as status symbols like those hedge fund managers who wear their earnings statements on their wrists, or those computer geeks with their atomic watches that tell time in every zone in the galaxy.

So it's a Timex, man, and this is reverse snobbery, the best and cheapest kind of snobbery. If I had a Rolex, I'd keep it in my top drawer. And it probably wouldn't work.

Yeah, that's a Speidel watchband. The Velcro one itched.

New cliches, please

Barack Obama has been pounded as an "elitist" for saying that white males in places like Pennsylvania are clinging to guns and religion because they're bitter. And, of course, San Francisco is getting pounded because this is where Obama said it. Pat Buchanan snarled something about this city's "Chablis-and-Brie set."

Sorry, Pat, Chablis and Brie are for people in places like Pennsylvania. Give us a local artisanal cheese and microbrew anytime.

Okay, so we're elitist, and doesn't everybody want to be part of some kind of elite? At least we're not part of the shock-and-awe set, the oil-and-blood set or the Yale-and-Harvard neo-conservative set. The lie-and-spin set that conjured the war in Iraq is the worst kind of elite.

Even San Francisco elitists can be bitter, though, just like any unemployed Pittsburgh steelworker. No matter how elite we consider ourselves, there's always someone more elite. There's always someone richer, and he or she just might be a math student at Stanford. There's always someone more environmental, with a scheme to turn plastic bags into mosquito netting for Africans. There's always someone who gets to the new hot restaurant before you.

There are always people in San Francisco who beat you to the next big fad. For all I know, failed elitist that I am, it just might be Chablis and Brie. But I'm kind of stuck on Bud and Laughing Cow, because reverse snobbery is the only way to go in a place as expensive as this.

Another cup of coffee, another piece of my mind

This morning I went to Starbucks (only because the good downtown coffee houses are two miles and a traffic jam away) and it hadn't changed. What was all that free publicity about? All those news reports about the three-hour re-education camp for their employees last night? All that corporate foam about regaining "the soul of the past"?

Just make a decent cup of joe, for chrissakes, and stop giving them fake Italian names. Charge a little less, no, a lot less. And give James Taylor a break.

It was just the same in there. The same commuters, fueling up on burnt-tasting brew. The same unappealing brown pastries in the plastic box. The same soundtrack telling you to get out before you start yearning for elevators.

Of course, the only reason Starbucks closed down simultaneously all across the nation, like some kind of coffee brown-out, was for the publicity. (Florida was blacked out from Daytona to the Keys, and that got less publicity.) The fact is, Starbucks had to do something, what with their stock dropping, stores going belly up and the failure of their plan to put four green Dilbert-traps at every intersection and addict the nation to caffeinated hot, sweet milk priced at $5,000 a barrel.

That's what they're selling, not their coffee, which tastes like eau de ashtray.

If you want the soul of the past, go to Caffe Trieste in North Beach (or even its Sausalito branch). Or go to any coffeehouse where the only uniforms worn by baristas is inked skin and a studded nose. Hell, I even went to a Dunkin' Donuts when I was back in Massachusetts and (talk about the soul of the past) the coffee reminded me of my youth working night shifts, recovering from concerts and pulling all-nighters for exams.

Alas, I hear Dunkin' Donuts is introducing caffe lattes, or as they call them in venti-doppio land, "lattes." It just means "milk," people. It also means trouble. I want my cops drinking coffee regular. Make that "cawrfee regulah."

A mighty windy meme

There's no "I" in "meme," but there are two "me's." In fact, since I've been tagged by Chilebrown to play this game of "Things You Don't Know About Me," here are five facts about me. Rated PG for pretty gross.

1. The first live concert I attended starred the Kingston Trio.
2. The second starred Peter, Paul and Mary.
3. The third starred Bob Dylan. Most of the Brown University audience was gone by intermission because he couldn't sing.
4. That was in February, 1963, and about three years later I started claiming that Dylan was my first concert.
5. I only stayed because he'd written a couple of Peter, Paul and Mary songs.

I'm supposed to tag five more people, but I'm too much of a geezer to know how to do it. So feel free to do your own "Five Facts" meme or forward your embarrassing musical revelations to, well, me.

Raising McCain with the GOP

Everybody around here wants to know: Who're you voting for, Barack or Hillary? Everybody around here being a Democrat.

Well, I don't know. If only I were in Chicago and could vote twice. Or, here's another wish: If only I could vote for John McCain again.

That's right, I voted for him in the 2000 primary. I changed my registration to Republican so my vote would count, not for him so much, but against George W. Bush. Even then I knew the Busher was a snake in the brush and, besides, I'd met McCain and like many left-leaning media people, I leaned a little to the right and liked him. "Another media pinko for McCain," as his California campaign manager put it. At the time, in front of San Franciscans, McCain seemed so apologetic about the GOP positions on gays and abortion, almost as if this old Navy fighter jock was embarrassed by the religious nuts who dominated his party.

Anyway, however conservative McCain is - and he is plenty conservative - he would have been better than Bush turned out to be. He wasn't an alcoholic former prep-school cheerleader, a failure at everything, who had to overcompensate for his dad's success by adopting a cracker accent and invading Iraq, failing at that, too.

In the last few years McCain has put the "ick" in "maverick" by throwing his support to Bush's plutocratic (no relation to this blog) tax policies and threatening to keep us in Iraq for 100 years if necessary. Actuarily speaking, that's 90 years more than we can expect McCain to live and 105 years more than is good for the United States. So what's the appeal of this old goat?

Simply, Rush Limbaugh has warned that McCain's nomination would mean the destruction of the Republican Party and Ann Coulter has claimed that she would campaign for Hillary Clinton before she would endorse John McCain. All of this I want to see.

The Republican Party, as currently constituted, and as defined by a radio-enhanced drug addicts and Jimmy Choo-wearing bigots, deserves to be destroyed.

The only problem would be keeping McCain from winning the presidency. That I leave to the history-making Democratic ticket.

No Unhappy Returns

Our household, of two, not counting the dog, celebrated a new Christmas tradition yesterday. Well, it'll be a tradition next year, because it worked so spectacularly this first year.

No more guesswork about what the other person might like. We went to a major American shopping mall, gave ourselves a spending limit of $150, and bought presents for ourselves. That is, I bought presents for myself and my wife bought presents for herself. Privately.

This was harder than it appears. You walk through the mall thinking, "Oh, she might like that pashmina shawl." Then you stop yourself and say, "Of course she probably wouldn't. Pashmina is passe, and anyway, I'm shopping for me. Yay."

The deal is, though, that you don't open your own presents. You hand them to your wife Christmas morning and she gets to see the kind of idiotic stuff she wouldn't deign to give you. Sweatshirts in amusing colors. History books by unamusing authors. Then you open the presents she bought for herself and you suffer an insight into her secret desires, ones you could never satisfy during a walk through a mall.

A font program for the Macintosh computer. Face creams, morning and evening. An orange juice squeezer. An ice cream cookbook. Even though it's really a freezebook, I should have thought of that one, but wouldn't have. That's the joy of this Christmas, not to mention the joy of not having to return to the mall.

Also, I loved the sudden grammaticality of saying, "I got me some good presents."

Sweatshirts. Yeah.

Don't Trust Anyone Under 62

The first thing that happened when I retired four years ago was the onset of a strange craving to eat dinner at 5:30 p.m. The second thing was the discovery of new sections of the paper to read: the grocery inserts listing bargains that I might buy for those early dinners. Then I went down to Long's to take advantage of a sale on tuna and mayonnaise, only to find a crowd of senior citizens in a 9 a.m. rush hour of shopping carts. The tuna and mayonnaise were already gone.

That's what old people eat, and that's when I gave up tuna and mayonnaise and switched to a healthier meals, as well as ones not consumed in front of national news drug ads showing old folks ballroom dancing. Kill me when I start ballroom dancing.

A few weeks ago I felt young and joyful again, despite the fact that I was applying for Social Security in a large office slightly less joyous than the average DMV. I felt like one of the first arrivals at Woodstock. After a surprisingly short wait (there must have been a major sale at Long's), I displayed my birth certificate and military discharge to the clerk, told her I was applying two months in advance, as instructed, and proudly said, "I'm one of the first Baby Boomers."

She was duly unimpressed, even though she couldn't have heard it many times before. I was born in early January of 1946, just 10 days after the trigger was pulled on our reviled and ruling generation. Well, 10 days and nine months after the trigger was pulled. Okay, it's bad metaphor for a generation sired by men returning from war.

They may have been the greatest generation, but we are the biggest and I was not waiting for 65 to get a more bountiful yet still pitiful Social Security check. I'm taking the smaller monthly version when I can, at 62. There are a lot of conservatives out there who want to undo the work of FDR and abolish Social Security. There are a lot of young people, liberal, conservative or apolitical, who also want to abolish it. We are a hated generation.

No one wants to pay into a system that subsidizes the marijuana, margaritas, mayonnaise and tunafish of an unruly crowd that once marched in the streets, lost a jungle war and parked crudely painted Volkswagen buses all over the landscape. Never mind how much wealth we created when we later cut our hair and invented iPods, Microsoft, Starbucks, hedge funds, the World Wide Web and Whole Foods.

We may have hated the system, but by now a lot of it is our creation. Still, I like that old-time Social Security system, and I'm taking advantage of it before a coalition of Democrats, Republicans and resentful baristas pry those tiny checks from our cold, gnarly hands. Power to the new old people.

For Zack

It was one of those warm, muggy October days that bring the tourists back to Cape Cod. None of us would be going to the beach, though. We were at Otis Air Force Base to meet Zack, my sister's first-born, who was coming home from Afghanistan. I had been living rather reclusively in California and hadn't seen him in six years, and never would again.

I finally understood why our leaders in Washington were so adamant about keeping images of returning coffins out of the news. It's too much to bear.

The plane had been delayed at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware for two hours. Zack's family and friends had plenty of time to sit around a ready room reacquainting, and acquainting, ourselves with each other. We told stories about Zack, a 31-year-old college graduate, filmmaker, rock musician, carpenter and movie-star handsome wit, who tried to find a new path in life by joining the Army in 2005. He became a sergeant and squad leader in two years and in April he was awarded the Bronze Star with a V for valor for rescuing two of his soldiers from a burning Humvee, badly burning his hands in the process, and still organizing a counterattack on the Taliban.

Afterwards, when he called my sister Pam, he didn't mention the Bronze Star. He said, ""Mom, I got a Purple Heart. I won't have to pay sales tax anymore."

That's the kind of young man he was, the kind of self-effacing hero he was. He stayed by the side of his more severely injured comrades in the hospital, and returned to duty in Pahktia Province near the Pakistan border. After he was killed in an ambush on Sept. 29, one of those scarred men, and others who had known Zack as a soldier, came to our sides on Cape Cod.

My sister said that Zack would have hated all the fuss, but we needed it. The family needed to meet those soldiers, and I think they liked meeting us. The extended, sometimes fractured family needed to talk to each other again, feel the hole in its fabric where Zack had been, and try to knit it together with memories and caring for each other.

Even those of us who might have doubted military ceremony needed the honor guard from the 82nd Airborne and the dozens of Cape Cod reservists, recently returned from Iraq, who lined up behind them. Sgt. Zachary D. Tellier deserved it.

We were all out on the tarmac when the plane touched down at Otis, the same base that had scrambled F-15s on afterburner in a vain attempt to stop the airliners heading for the World Trade Center. Now Afghanistan was coming back to haunt us again. We had been shedding tears, of course, trying to dry them with the occasional joke. Jokes failed.

The sadness and reality of it all clenched our hearts as we watched the plane taxi toward us. It was moving astonishingly slowly and evenly, like a funeral caisson with a steady turbine whine instead of a solitary drummer's beat.

When the aircraft came to a stop, it took a few minutes for its crew to organize the unloading of its cargo. We had time to collect ourselves - until the flag-draped coffin emerged and the honor guard slow-marched it to the hearse.

That was Zack in there. That was what it came down to. His widow Sara, an incredibly strong woman, collapsed to the tarmac as her sister tried to comfort her. I had heard sobbing in my life, but never as much as that day, and I never knew what the word "keening" meant before.

There was one photographer present, although not from the press. This was Joel, a young friend of Zack's who had lost a leg in an earlier action in Afghanistan. As the honor guard carried the coffin, Joel kept rolling his wheelchair for better angles on the homecoming of his friend. Not many people noticed but the reservists at attention behind him.

They, too, will always remember this day. Unbearable.