This year's story for Christmas, the Grateful Dead's covers of "Run Rudolph Run," our insensate world, Christmas mysteries, animated treats, settling in with a radio sitcom

Wednesday 12/17/25

I think "Love, Your Mouse" is going to be the story I send to people for Christmas this year (allowing I finish it). I had planned to go all out and try and do this other story I'm not going to mention here until I'm formally working on it, but I don't want to rush myself. There are a half dozen Christmas stories in development. I'm thinking in terms of a book of them.

But the changes in the last several days to "Mouse" make me feel very good about it. It's a story to be cherished, loved, and read a thousand times by a single reader. It was written that way. It's not just to be read once, but to be something that remains in a person's life. I described the changes that were made on Sunday in the previous entry that covered two days.

Less time was spent working on the story yesterday--maybe an hour--but more parts of it were altered. I still haven't settled on a final final sentence yet, but that's partially because I wanted a bit of time away so I could come to it with fresh eyes, so to speak. A key word in that final sentence meant that it something had to happen at two earlier instances in the story--a lot of writing is fractals--and so I made that happen and made it happen well. It's just a glorious, beautiful, essential story.

"Mouse"--and the story I shared with people last year for Christmas--aren't for this Christmas book, actually. But if you ever get to read them, you'll immediately understand how fitting they are as Christmas gifts.

I moved the Peanuts Christmas op-ed. It's a beautiful piece. That means I'm going to try and do another Christmas op-ed or two. I push. I don't sit back. Having written that piece, which had, in my view, to run this Christmas--or would only be run by someone this Christmas, I mean, though in truth its truths are timeless--it became the priority, and now that it's crossed off the list, I can get to something else.

I saw a comment once on Twitter, back when I had Twitter, that someone had posted about this journal, calling it a work of old school genius. I appreciated the favorable words--people are so loath to say anything about me and my work, for the reasons that have been discussed in these same pages--but didn't understand the "old school" part.

I'm not a type of anything. Or a throwback. Nor is genius temporal. Genius is also limiting. There is much more beyond genius. I realize where I'm going wrong, though, in parsing in this fashion. I am very exacting with words, but people will say things and it has a simple meaning to them, more of a connotation than a deep-down-at-the-bottom-of-the-letters-themselves precision. They probably just meant it wasn't reliant in any regards on the flashing light nonsense of the world as it now is. Anything typical of how people now think, write, talk, conduct themselves, post online, gyrate, etc.

I read that a spoonful of olive oil every day improves blood pressure and heart health. So I I think I'll be doing that moving forward. Extra virgin olive oil is better yet. I have a bottle and have done this each of the last two mornings.

My train back from West Medford was a half hour late Monday. There's a Dunkin' Donuts across the street. They have a large display of coffee bags that are for sale. You might be surprised how hard it can be to find these bags inside of Boston's many Dunkin' Donuts locations. I acquired several of the Midnight blend. A cold day. You wouldn't want to be waiting outside.

I brought a book with me, of course. It's called Silent Nights: Christmas Mysteries, Edited by Martin Edwards. Read Ralph Plummer's "Parlour Trick" and Edgar Wallace's "Stuffing." The former starts off promisingly enough but then turns pretty cheesy, and the latter was obviously written very fast and not worked on much. Gappy.

So little writing throughout history stands up to any scrutiny. One of the only good things about my situation that is worse than living in hell is that I can go back right now and get my work right, including doing books over again. Work that has never had a real chance. To 1. Get it right, as a thing in and of itself and 2. Should it ever have a real chance. That means doing Dark March over. For example. I need to be working much harder and in a rhythm that takes over and becomes natural and helps move me along and through what I need to move along with and get through.

Dr. Raffi and I were talking about the shootings at Brown. He doesn't understand how it can happen, to which I said, it's a horrible world, my friend. These shootings are treated as quasi-everyday events in the news. Tonally they're reported almost as if they were minor meteorological events. There isn't outrage. They're regarded as these things that just happen to happen.

Insensate. Mentally, morally, emotionally, spiritually insensate.

That's what we are. It's such an unhealthy way to be. And it's only worsening as we become more machine than human. You don't need metal parts to be a machine. It's in the thinking--or the programming, if you prefer--and in the brain.

Sat down with the various versions of the Grateful Dead's cover of Chuck Berry's "Run Rudolph Run" last night, all of which are from the first half of December 1971. The first, on December 4 at the Felt Forum, is taken at the slowest tempo. The last, on the 15th in Ann Arbor, was performed for the only time at a gig which also featured "Dark Star." You get the reindeer who knows he's the mastermind, and you get "Dark Star." That probably seems strange at first, but it's fitting. The Grateful Dead are arguably Chuck Berry's greatest interpreters. And there are some top level bands who really do Chuck Berry well--the Animals, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles.

Downloaded a nice Blu-ray copy of Meet Me in St. Louis. Did you know it was remade for television in 1959? Myrna Loy is in that one.

Had to get creative, but managed to assemble a set of the White Stripes' complete performance from the London Forum on December 6, 2001. A classic gig. A cover of Dylan's "Lovesick," though, had been excised from bootlegs, on account of the White Stripes including it on a single. The White Stripes are a band that crack down on the bootleggers. They have less out there in terms of unreleased recordings of shows than most groups. The Strokes are kind of similar that way, but not to the same degree. I had to convert the files to get them to play, and then grab "Lovesick" from another source, renumber and re-title accordingly, and then there we were.

Watched some charming animated works, including a number for movie theater and drive-in refreshment stands from a more creative time than our own. One featured a rocket ship whose crew discovered that some of the planets of our solar system aren't covered in what you might think; another involved a leprechaun at the end of the rainbow who doesn't have it quite right; the third was for Rico's Nachos, featuring Pepe, a jalapeno pepper of few words. First is from the late 1950s I'd venture, second is from 1959, and Rico and his crew from around 1980.

Then there were some Christmas ones: a 1953 telling of Frosty the Snowman as a precursor to the 1969 Rankin-Bass special, and 1959's A Christmas Tree, a Soviet film dubbed into English. I never came across this as a kid, but from what I gather, it's something of staple of some people's Christmas memories from their youth. You used to encounter these shows and special and bits and bobs on television (and the radio) that seemed as if they ended up there by accident. Of course they were programmed, but things weren't as canned. As algorithmic. I like in the latter film when Santa hops in the taxi after he lends the kid his sleigh made of stars.

Been listening to many episodes of The Great Gildersleeve, with a special focus on the Christmas ones. You get pulled into the world. The show is a spinoff from Fibber McGee and Gildersleeve adopts his niece Marjorie and nephew Leroy after their parents die in a car crash. Gildersleeve--whose first name is Throckmorton (middle initial P)--is the water commissioner of Summerfield where they live. It's a radio sitcom, so it's meant to be funny, but these are also people with concerns and things to deal with. You know their neighbors, their friends, the different personalities.

A show like this is so different from anything right now. It allows things to just happen. And you're there with these people. In one of the Christmas episodes, Gildersleeve wants to maintain a tradition that involves just the family. Himself and the two kids (Marjorie calls him "Unky," and Leroy calls him Uncle Mort). People are coming by the house, there's the buzz and the whir of bustle. The kids are reluctant. You know how kids are. They're getting older and they want to be doing new things out with their friends. The tradition is reading A Christmas Carol as a family.

The three of them start talking about ghost stories. Marjorie says she never thought of A Christmas Carol that way. Gildersleeve starts to read, and he just reads. That happens in the episode. He doesn't read for long, but he reads. And we're there. It's believable and touching. And the kids like it, too. Kids who may come back around to this later, who want that moment with their own children when the time comes.

It's a good lesson for a writer. You have to let things happen. You can't get in their way. You aren't really the maker of things happen as much as you are someone who helps steward those things in happening at their fullest. No one is going to teach anyone the likes of that in an MFA program. It would never occur to any of those people. But that's how it has to be if it's going to be any good.