This was the first Christmas, since I've been able to read, that I didn't receive a book of any sort as a gift.  I'm not complaining.  It just seems weird.  But then I spend most of my pin money on books.  So it works out.  It's not as if I'm ever going to be without good stuff to read.

The two main things I'm reading at the moment are Zizek's Absolute Recoil and David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks.  Am enjoying both immensely.

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Santana and McLoughlin in the background working their version of "A Love Supreme" from Love, Devotion and Surrender.

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Watched The Skeleton Twins a couple of days ago.  Hader and Wig are absolutely brilliant in it.

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My father's cancer is in remission.  Which is an incredible relief.

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One of my grandsons (he's 8) got a guitar for Christmas.  I tuned it for him and tried to show him a couple beginning things.  He got very frustrated when he didn't get what to do right away (which I understand, believe me).  So I've decided that I'm just going to try to teach him when he asks me to.  I'm not going to push.

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Appearances is staggering  toward the end of the first draft.  I'll write nothing for days and then a couple of fragments will emerge. I wrote #344 today.  21 fragments to go.

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When it comes to guitar, I'm a slow learner.  Embarrassingly so.  Still, there are moments when I get lost in playing, lost in the infinity of possibilities inherent in a scale, say.  I doubt the sounds I'm making would be of much interest to anyone else.  But those moments are what sustain my effort.

On a related note, my father in a recent phone conversation said that he'd asked my youngest daughter Claire how my guitar playing was really going.  He said "Tom always tells me he's struggling with guitar, blah blah, but I suspect he's doing better than he's says."

Claire responded that the few times she's heard me practicing she thought I sounded pretty good, that in fact she'd once mistaken me for the radio.

What Claire didn't tell my Dad was that when she originally told me she'd mistaken my playing for the radio, she'd gone on to add "boring old man's radio."  Ha!

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