Barry's Life in Napa Blog

So it's 9 days 'till Christmas and I know I should be wrapping gifts or making sugar plums or getting a tacky sweater out of mothballs, but somehow it seems more festive in my slanted mind to polish off a bottle of cab and try to wrap my weary old head around the whole Julian Assange-Wikileaks thing. So here goes. I think whistleblowers are brave, necessary people. I don't think Assange is a whistleblower. He's rather unlikable for an Aussie. He should wrestle a crocodile or something fun like that. All the "sex crimes" he's accused of are trumped up, of course. He looks a little like a young, less interesting version of Andy Warhol. He thinks he's done something really profound but all the stuff in the secret documents is just "yawn." Let's dig into the explosive secrets exposed in the diplomatic "cables" (and people are still sending cables? Is this in the parallel universe where people still use fax machines, too?) : Nations ...

Disclaimer: I suck at science. Chemistry, biology, physics - they all hate me. Sure, I can memorize some shit and pass a test, but any real understanding of why cells divide when it just seems to complicate things, or why protons and electrons continue to hang out together when they clearly have such different points of view, eludes me. Regardless, science intrigues me. It's possible to be fascinated by something while not understanding it at all. Take women, for example. But I digress. Science is the topic because of a new report in the journal Nature. Turns out there may be three times as many stars in the universe as previously believed. Last I heard, the universe is still expanding, so there's probably plenty of room for all this so you don't really need to clear out the garage. It's not like there weren't a lot of stars to begin with. Like 400,000,000,000 (400 billion) here in the good old Milky Way, and 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) in some other galaxies, a...

Jean-Paul Sarte, the French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, literary critic, and atheist, who was also known to make a crazy good stuffing, wrote the famous words "l'enfer, c'est les autres." This phrase seems unintelligible until one realizes it was written in the language called "French." It has been variously translated as "Your gravy, she is lumpy," or "Grandfather, lie on the floor until the feeling passes," but most commonly is said to mean "Hell is other people." And so, happy Thanksgiving! A survey on ivillage the other day revealed, to the surprise of absolutely no one, that about two-thirds of people think someone will get on their nerves during Thanksgiving family gatherings. The other third of people are either (a) staying home alone, or (b) doubling up on their meds, or (c) both. Even now, as millions of Americans are eviscerating small animals, peelin...

Preface: This is one of those posts where I will relate bits of my personal history that unveil the workings of my mind, and as such, may be viewed as (a) self indulgent (b) pathetic (c) whiny, or (d) all of the above. I proceed apace, undeterred. Central thesis: Halloween sucks for me. Argument: Halloween, for me, is like almost every other holiday - front-loaded with anticipation, and rarely providing a commensurate payoff. And that stems from a series of childhood incidents that left me as unfulfilled as a trick-or-treating kid who sees a toothbrush dropped into his candy bag. There were at least three elementary school Halloween disasters - my Halloween baggage. Being just as "actor-y" at age six as I am today, the selection of a costume was of immense importance. My mother always offered to sew up something, so we would peruse the Butterick patterns at J.C. Penney and I would usually find something super cool that I wanted to be. In disaster number one, I had chosen to ...

My uncle Rodney, the last of the three Martin brothers, died two days ago at 94. He was married for 72 years. It's hard to know if all those years were happy years because he was prototypically the man who wouldn't say shit if he had a mouthful, but I think he was happy. I cite this as a pre-counterpoint - a preterpoint, if you will - to what follows. I will now wage war with the concept of happy endings. (No, not that kind, you pervert.) From toddler-hood we are marinated in happy endings. Wicked queens (no, not that kind, you pervert) and ugly stepsisters and predatory wolves in the woods always get what's coming to them. Handsome princes and damsels in distress find true love and always live happily ever after. We learn fast. At about age 5, my daughter whispered to her grandma during a stressful moment in a Disney movie, "Don't worry, they get married in the end." This was a movie this child had never seen before. She was already primed to believe in happy...

The chart above shows that this post has a serious, quasi-academic quality Way back in 1984, in the Pleistocene era, there was a movie called "The Lonely Guy." I always remember it as an Albert Brooks movie, but it was Charles Grodin who actually played the title character. Sometimes hard to separate one sad sack from another I guess. This was in Grodin's BBSBWCTS (Before Becoming a Smug Bore With a Cable Talk Show) period, when he was funny on screen, and I remember having some laughs and feeling the pathos of the story. Steve Martin was in it, too, so there's that. Grodin plays Warren Evans, a man who finds his wife in flagrante with another man, gets divorced, becomes lonely and despondent, chokes on a toothpaste tube cap and dies, and is eaten by his cats before his body is discovered. Wait a minute, that's not right - this is a comedy with a Neil Simon screenplay - I think I was imagining it as a Coen Brothers movie or something. Sorry. The actual story has ...

If you're young, smart, have a little money and don't believe in God, chances are you're looking forward to the start of your weekend and knocking back a few. In fact, chances are you don't wait for the weekend - according to the latest Gallup survey on drinking habits . Now, you could just follow that link and read the thing for yourself, but I recommend you pour yourself a fresh one and let me lay it all out for you, along with my sparkling observations of the meaning behind the data. Unlike Gallup, I have no science to back up my claims, but that's never stopped me before. First, let's qualify that first sentence: "Young" in this case means 54 or less (I like that definition of young) because the numbers are the same 18 to 54. In the 55+ range there are fewer drinkers, and I take that to mean at a certain age you either (a) lose your taste for the stuff, or (b) lose you ability to find your car keys so you can't get to the liquor store, or (c) l...

Imagine you are rich. Imagine you are rich enough to hire people to do just about anything you want. Imagine you are rich and also stupid and perhaps loathsome. Imagine your stupidity and loathsomeness keeps getting you into trouble. Imagine you are rich and quasi-powerful and your loathsome stupidity gets you into the kind of trouble that may endanger your capacity to continue being rich and quasi-powerful. Wouldn't you hire someone to protect you from yourself? Enter Mel Gibson. Imagine if charming Mel had had the sort of bodyguard who had the big guy's best interests at heart. Assigned not to keep fans and paparazzi away but to stop charming Mel from (a) driving drunk, leading to verbally abusing cops with anti-Semitic tirades, or (b) conducting repeated go-nuts-and-dial phone conversations with his ex, or (c) punching aforementioned ex, the mother of his child, in the mouth, or (d) making a film version of "Hamlet." Mel's life (and in the case of (d), my life)...

If you hang around in any profession long enough, you're bound to fuck up somehow. You get a little full of yourself and you bend the rules. (Enron, Madoff, etc) You start to feel bullet-proof and all-powerful and you think you can get away with anything. (Clinton, Tiger, etc) You make a few enemies who feel threatened and they are happy to climb into your closet and trot out all the skeletons. (Gary Hart, every televangelist, every stick-up-the-butt right-wing moralist who turns out to like gay sex in bathrooms and massage parlors, etc) But it seems popular actors have unique possession of the spectacular self-inflicted sell-out fuck up that overshadows any earlier achievement. (Nicolas Cage, etc etc etc) I feel particularly sad over Nicolas Cage's flaccidity as an actor these days because, damn, the guy coulda been a contender! Unforgettable the impression he made way back when in "Raising Arizona" - then fun stuff like "Moonstruck" and "Red Rock West...

Yesterday I heard myself use the phrase "at the end of the day." It's a pretentious phrase that tells the person you're talking to "I have now summed this up for you and there's nothing else to be said+" and one of those verbal crutches that props up the vocabulary in a moment of weakness. "At the end of the day" went rapidly from clever new expression to cliche - an overused, a ready-made set of words that takes the place of meaningful expression. You have to be careful when you start paying attention to cliches. You will hear yourself oozing them out, and hear them spurting from the mouths of your friends, and if you care about words you won't like yourself and you won't like your friends. That said, (there's one) I've got my diminished mind focused on them right now, so maybe I can get it out of my system (there's another one) if I make a list of the cliches that are annoying me the most right now. Zero sum game: every t...

"Warm bodies, I sense, are not machines that can only make money." - Ed Kowalczyk In one of the legendary wild west towns - Deadwood or Dodge City or Tombstone - they had a sign at the city limits that said something like "Now entering (legendary wild west town.) Leave your guns with the Sheriff." Having just returned from Las Vegas, I am thinking there should be a sign there offering a place to deposit your soul during your visit. Las Vegas can be blamed on Herbert Hoover. It was the building of the dam nearby that created a huge mass of restless, horny men with cash, and wherever such a huge mass is found prostitution and gambling and other vices will grow. Unlike other western towns where cattle, ore and other fast-money propositions led to rampant growth and manly indulgence (like Deadwood, Dodge and Tombstone, and even my hometown of Joplin, Missouri, which was a lead and zinc mining mecca and noted for it's wide-open nature in those days) Las Vegas did no...

(Chances are you don't give two shits about the World Cup. But if I let the occasion pass without weighing in I couldn't live with myself, so here goes.) It doesn't take much to be a guru these days. Not in the literal sense of "religious leader and spiritual teacher," but in the modified modern sense of "a n advisor or mentor; a leader or expert in a field." You can quite quickly become a guru just by being the first person to buy the latest gadget and investing the time to figure out a third of the crazy shit it will do, and voila! You will be your local iPhone guru or PS3 guru or Zune guru. Ok, never mind the Zune, nobody cares. So in that vein, I have become, to certain people, a soccer guru - wise enough to know that the rest of the world says "football" and means what we call "soccer," but only a pretentious douche will call it "football" if he/she is American - which means I know just a little bit more about the game ...

It's 4:30 in the morning and outside the air smells like summer for the first time, and I am wondering about things. Things like why every apple has to have a sticker on it that delays my first bite, and why some people are trying to provoke a(nother) war in the Middle East, and why the auto-correction logarithm in my iPhone thinks it's more likely that I'm trying to write the word "lice" than "love." And I'm thinking about the unperfect game. Every blogger and pundit worth his or her salt has long ago weighed in on this topic, I know. My turn now. Quick primer for those who don't follow baseball: a perfect game is when a pitcher gets the other team out for all nine innings and no batter reaches base. No hits, no walks, no batters hit by a pitch, no errors that allow a base runner, nothing. Nine innings of three-up-and-three-down. 27 batters come to the plate, 27 batters walk back to the dugout. It's only happened in the big leagues 18 times ...

My mother used to call out in the morning from the kitchen, "Rise and shine!" It came in a sing-songy voice that was intended to make me jump out of bed smiling, I suppose, but being an angsty teen (what other kind of teen is there?) it made me want to strangle her. When I look back on it now, it's easy to see how forced was her early-morning cheer. Up every day at 5 a.m. to make breakfast and pack a lunch for my dad, looking ahead to a day full of laborious repetition to make a home and feed the family - I wonder about the origin and the sincerity of the expression. But I know now that the presentation of a sunny demeanor to her piece of the world was as crucial in her daily agenda as the frying of eggs and the sweeping of floors - no matter what quiet despair she might indulge in after the school bus had come and gone. There is no shortage of persistently pleasant people in the world. You meet them in coffee shops and auto shops and they sell you long distance packages...

(My mother at age 18. ) I feel obliged to write about my mother today. "Obliged" is not the way you are supposed to feel on Mother's Day. I always wanted to be the loving son who doted on his mother but for some reason, some psychologically complicated reason, I could not achieve the level of devotion to her that I always thought she deserved. She was a kind, patient, giving, thoughtful woman who never did anything but love me. I loved her, too, and on an objective scale I don't think I was a bad son but I've never felt I was as good to her as I should have been. Maybe someday I will understand my feelings but today's not that day. Today I am thinking of moments... ...out in the yard with her when she made pickles in huge stoneware crocks, or watching her pluck a chicken, or do loads of laundry by hand in standing galvanized tubs, running the clothes through the wringer and hanging them on the line. ...her excitement on Election Day when our living room was th...

I would like to make the case today that reality is overrated. Reality is chock-a-block with disease, famine, genocide and infomercials. Reality imposes onerous taxation and rules and foisted Geraldo Rivera on the world. Reality has none of the redeeming qualities we seek out in our entertainments - try hard and success will come to you, the triumph of good over evil, true love always wins, bad guys get what they deserve, etc. In fact, reality likes to get right up in your face and make sure you're aware that the sleazy people usually win and have all the money, true love is irrelevant in the face of expediency, and trying hard and success are complete strangers. So in summation, reality can suck it. Counterpoint: reality, and the real people that cause it, can be damn funny. I offer as evidence two recent additions to the menu of amusing time wasters of which I am an aficionado. Shit My Dad Says is the brainchild of Justin Halpern, a guy from San Diego who started keeping track o...

Some of my friends know that I was a Girl Scout. Yes, I know, most of the male persuasion were Boy Scouts. I did some of that - Cub Scouts, Webelos (wtf?) etc - but my more formative time was spent tagging along with my mom when she was a Girl Scout leader for my sister and her friends. I learned all about making campfires and paddling canoes and, of course, lanyards, from the Girl Scouts. And let me tell you, that lanyard knowledge has served me well. There was a song - a corny song, for sure - that Girl Scouts sang back then, that said "make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other gold." I have had the simple truth of that brought home to me often of late, and feel the need to acknowledge it. A couple of months ago I had the chance to visit with C, a friend I've had since Reagan was in office. We spent one summer together and have been buds ever since. We can sit and talk like that summer was yesterday. Today I spent time with P who I've known sinc...

I used to watch tons of TV. It was mostly ritual or habitual behavior. Didn't matter much what was on - just a visual chewing gum. Not unlike old people sitting on a bench just watching people go by - something to do, without doing anything. Lately (and especially since I now live in The Hell That Is Basic Cable ) I don't watch so much TV. The set's most valued function is to lull me to sleep at night and murmur softly so I can't hear the silence that reminds me that I am alone. (This system works well until the wee hours when, inevitably, someone or other suddenly pops on shouting about Jesus. More about Jesus later. Bet you can't wait for that.) But there's one program running right now that has sucked me in - Life on the Discovery Channel. I've watched my share of "nature shows" in the past - dating all the way back to Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom with Marlin Perkins. (I loved that show. It ran on Sunday nights and I loved it mostly beca...

I've never studied philosophy but I always thought I should. For someone who paid tuition to make smoke powder blow up in flashpots and learn how ladies' gloves were made from the skins of mice in the Elizabethan age, philosophy seemed like the natural next step in a progression toward an all-encompassing knowledge that was simultaneously quite useless. But just because I never studied it doesn't mean I don't consider myself something of an expert on the topic. After all, I have access to Wikipedia. Duh. Philosophy, then is: the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language.It is distinguished from other ways of addressing fundamental questions (such as mysticism, myth, or the arts) by its critical, generally systematic approach...The word "Philosophy" comes from the Greek φιλοσοφία [philosophia], which literally means "love of wisdom." I do love that wisdom. Watching Jeo...

When I was a kid there were always sweets in the house. Ice cream in the freezer, always. Those great big Hershey bars, the kind about four-by-six inches, stashed in a drawer or "hidden" in an electric fryer that sat unused on top of the fridge. And a cookie jar of some sort, on the kitchen counter, with some low quality and half-stale Fig Newtons or Nilla Wafers or some such. I knew where all the sweets lived because I was both a curious and fat kid. I made it my business to have a basic rolling inventory of everything that was in the cupboards, pantry or refrigerator. I think a "keep it away from the pudge" policy was the reason they were always trying to hide the good stuff. But being a sort of Sherlock Holmes of desserts, I sniffed it all out. That cookie jar, however, was always my last resort. If there was only one sort of crappy, cheap cookie in there, that might do in a pinch. But there was a tendency for two or three kinds of crappy, cheap cookies to end u...

Every four years I am reminded of how little I care about sports that take place on snow and ice. Believe me, I WANT to care about Amund Nordlinngsen and his quest for gold in the ski-awhile-and-shoot-a-gun-awhile event, especially in light of him losing 4 toes and the tip of his penis to frostbite during training. I WANT to care about Wang and Chen and their pursuit of the hexagonal obtuse throw in the ice dancing, especially in light of the fact that Chen's father was persecuted in Tianamen Square and lost the tip of his penis when a tank ran over it. And I especially WANT to hear more about all these people from Bob Costas or Jim Nance or whoever is talking, especially in light of the fact that Bob/Jim/Whoever has lost, or is soon to lose, the tip of his penis to something, based on the theme of this first paragraph. I WANT to care, but alas, I don't. There was a time when I really cared about the winter Olympics. I remember reverence for some Norwegian speed skater who was ...

A little more than a year ago I had approximately 4,347 channels of TV at my disposal. I was a Dish Network man, with the Ultra Supreme Omniscient package I think the called it, plus a little HBO and Showtime or Cinemax (who can tell them apart?) Today, through actions of my own, I must admit, I now dwell in the nether regions in a place called Basic Cable. Or if there's a level below that, that's what I have. Yes, I chose to leave my formerly comfortable surroundings - 42-inch HD flat screen, leather sectional, Tempur Pedic mattress, stainless steel appliances - for the sofabed, folding chair, and college-dorm type kitchen I now "enjoy." I walked away from comfort for a number of reasons - good reasons - but I never anticipated falling into the seventh level of Hell that is Basic Cable. Yes, I could buy my way back up into the clouds with Comcast, AT&T, Dish or Direct TV, but as the man sang, "money's too tight to mention" and if any more of my diet...

I've made a couple hundred posts on this blog since I started it, and I think the post about online dating got the most reaction. Did I hit a nerve there? Was I the most honest at that moment 6 months ago, and as a result sparked a lot of replies? Yeah, I think so. Since then I had a few dates that originated from one of the popular online sites, and I did my share of cruising around the lake casting my bait to see who I might catch. Can't say that I landed any keepers, but it was - interesting. And like a lot of other people I've talked to, eventually you realize you're seeing the same faces on the screen and you're thinking "is she still on here? Must be something really wrong with her" and it's likely they're seeing you the same way - "is that guy still on here? Must be something really wrong with him!" - and so the whole thing stops being interesting real quick, and then it feels kind of desperate and sad and unhealthy, and so you can...