Barry's Life in Napa Blog

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...