Barry's Life in Napa Blog

It's a play on words, see? I am pondering the condition known as "too much time on my hands." I am pondering this sitting in a room next to at least 75 books I have not read. A few feet away is a guitar that I play so rarely I have no calluses. I have an infinite number of browser tabs at my disposal to explore this new internet thing, a couple hundred satellite channels. And I haven't even opened my "Paparazzi" action figures playset that I got for Christmas. How is it, then, that there's a voice in my head - the voice of a whiny 12 year-old, it sounds like - that's saying "I have nothing to do." This fits into the category of First World Problems - a category of conundrums we all "suffer" with - and by "all" I mean people like me, of course. Examples from this perspective-correcting site include: “I’ve run out of obscure ethnic cuisines to impress my friends with.” “My internet-capable fridge only connects ...

A big, strong man dissolved in tears of joy...the climax of an aria...someone you love in a cap and gown...a new high score in Angry Birds - all of these things are just like the others. I speak of the moment of catharsis. Warning: Pedantry follows. Catharsis derives from the Greek word kathairein, meaning to purge, purify or clean. Aristotle used it first in a clinical sense, to describe effects of certain actions on the human body, and then later applied it metaphorically to drama and poetry. Being a $64 word, chances are more people have experienced it than have accessed the word to define the experience. Warning: Tortured metaphor follows. Catharsis is like a cheeseburger - it comes in many varieties, and you can have it your way. It's found in your direct, personal experience - when you are the one touching something universal - and vicariously, even in seeing that moment re-enacted in fiction -  and your heart leaps up. We seek it out on stages, on playing fields...

When things go wrong, there is only one thing on my mind - find someone to blame. Being the self-centered yet sensitive sociopath that I am, I rarely find my satisfactory scapegoat to be (a) me, or (b) another specific person So I am happy to report that the deficiency of blog posts on my part of late is not the fault of (a) me, or (b) another specific person But my good friend blame can be placed squarely on a faceless, heartless, brainless Corporation. (A timely scapegoat indeed, given the tenor of the times. All you one-percenter-shareholders-in-faceless-heartless-brainless corporations, take heed. I'm watching you.) The FHB Corporation in question is an alleged supplier of bandwidth, a commodity of importance to He Who Blogs - particularly he who blogs only in privacy and mostly late at night when the hour and the wine facilitates. There is a certain solitude required - a solitude the FHB Corp has refused to provide me for most of the last six months. I m...

Forgive me, readers, for I have slacked. It has been almost six months since my last post. I'm not Catholic but I heard those lines in a movie or something. This blog has lain fallow for awhile. I've had no internet since I moved from Cozy Cottage to Rancho de le Dorma  back around the 4th of July, but today I achieved connectivity with the interwebs again so, good God, let me blog! For the world has been deprived of my bloviations, and how has it survived, anyway? There's been a lot of spilt milk under the bridge in the half-a-year of my bloglessness, lots of events worthy of insightful commentary. Like the Arab Spring, for example, and also the....um...the Occupy stuff movement.. and...did you hear we got Bin Laden? Some old dude predicted the rapture twice. Sarah Palin passed the Torch of Inarticulateness to Rick Perry. And my beloved Cardinals won the World Series. And so here we are. Throughout this blog famine of mine, twos and threes of people have asked "...

A third of my hometown was blasted to splinters. In real life, tornadoes don't give you a bump on the head and send you off to Oz. They drive you to hide and cower and scream, and you hear the sounds of things flying that aren't meant to fly, and your ears pop and your skin crawls and sky is the deepest bruised black and the house blows out from around you. If you're lucky the tornado passes near you but not through you. It runs through farmland and not through the town. If you're unlucky the tornado sucks down to the ground and chews its way through your house, your neighborhood, or, in the case of Joplin, a third of the city. A day later they had counted more than a hundred dead. Tornadoes are to May in Missouri as wildfires are to California in October. In May in Missouri, any evening the thunderheads may build up and the air begins to change and you glance at the sky and wonder. Thirty years removed, I still feel the thunder and the unexpected hanging in the air...

The evangelist on TV was working up a lather, all about the book of Revelation. Smoothly building with interpretations, suspending the climactic resolution. I watched his gestures and his face, and listened to his rhythm. For the last couple of months, I had spent time watching those evangelists on TV, seeking others out on YouTube. A good actor works at his craft, and I am about to play Jim Jones, one of the most charismatic evangelists known. I'm doing my homework. Suddenly he says something that makes me want to listen more than examine. "Adam and Eve," he says, "were failures. So we are the descendants of failures." He leaves this tangent and resumes his Revelation sermon. Failures, I thought. The pulpit vernacular would call for "fall from grace" or "original sin" - not "failure." It's all about the choice of words, I thought. It's always about choices. A certain friend, if present, would remind me that actors a...

I know there are millions of people suffering somewhere, and I'm sorry about that, but look, I have problems of my own, ok? For example, basic cable. Basic cable is my lack of clean water. Basic cable is my cholera. It oppresses me. Recent attempts at viewing basic cable led me to this list of THINGS I DON'T WATCH TO WATCH 1. Any show with an acronym in the title. 2. Any show with Gary Busey in it, unless it's "The Buddy Holly Story" because that one was ok. 3. Country Music awards shows 4. Any show with an autopsy in it. (See number one above.) 5. Ads for remedies for toenail fungus. Is the need for relief from radical toenail fungus such a widespread problem it requires a comprehensive national ad campaign? Never mind, don't answer that. 6. News stories about airplane fuselages that just pop open all of a sudden. 7.Any show that displays a dead body within the first two minutes. (See numbers 4 and 1 above.) 8. Telenovelas on the Mexican channel....