Tom Mandel In Pop Cuture Disguise

The President’s Day Weekend was always a big moneymaker for the Little Store, an interruption in the retail slough that was otherwise winter in Monterey. It’s also coincidently the anniversary of the day in 1996 we made the decision to move to Monterey – in retrospect, a spectacularly bad decision. We moved because I thought it would be a better environment for the kids to grow up in. I think I was right about that. What I didn’t calculate into the equation was what an awful environment it would be for me personally.

So anyway, last night I dreamed I was back in Monterey on President’s Day Weekend. Of course, it didn’t look like any Monterey I knew – more like the Fez medina with narrow alleys and gypsy balconies. The TV character House was there and he’d fallen passionately in love with me and was going to leave his wife to be with me –

Here I should comment that I’ve never been able to watch House although the few times I saw it, I liked it. That’s because the character of Greg House is not only the spitting image of Tom Mandel but also behaves exactly like Tom Mandel. Tom died in 1995. We were best friends. His death was a huge loss.

Anyway, House had to go off and attend to some details before we could be together. I waited in Monterey for his return. And gradually it began to occur to me that he was not coming back, that he had abandoned me here, had picked me up by one wing like an interesting looking insect and then had put me down again to crawl away on my own.

I woke up with a feeling of immense sadness and loss…

In other news, I have been writing a lot just not here. Finished Andres Dubus III’s brilliant memoir Townie. The story of how he saves himself from a life of drugs and petty crime through violence, becomes a violence junkie and then gradually has to quit that is both remarkable and amazingly well written:

Every ninety seconds or so a hot knife seemed to push through my heart, and I had to stand and hold my breath as it passed, my shoulders rounded, my chest sunken, this feeling I’d been yanked through all the decades of my life and now I was old and dying and it was my fault.

I have this feeling often, often, often but have never been able to find the words to describe it.

WWF Update

All right, I'm a total dweeb but it gives me immense pleasure to play Words With Friends with my brilliant 25 year old son Max, he in San Francisco, me in my squalid, rual NY state cement hovel.

I picture him careening down Dolores on his bicycle in brilliant sunlight and pausing at the intersection on Market street to play C-A-U-T-I-O-N for 51 points to cream the old lady who gave birth to him. Thus does DNA get sharper and sharper with every system upgrade.