A heartwarming moment from today's 'Judge Parker'

No need to go on Maury, Randy. You are definitely the father!

I've had a love-hate relationship with the comic strip Judge Parker this year, especially when this long-running legal soap opera spent several months heaping misery and sorrow onto the smug, rich Driver family. I mean, sure, they deserved it. Big time. But after a while, enough was enough. That story seems -- at long last -- to have concluded, and the strip has shifted its focus from the Drivers to the Parkers. (Dig that symmetry, huh?) Specifically, hotheaded Randy Parker has just reunited with his estranged wife, April. And, to put it mildly, he didn't handle it well. But his temper tantrum did provide the inspiration for the parody you see at the top of this post. Here is the original for comparison.

Did someone ask for an Armadilloid version? No? Well, here's one anyway.

Isn't she lovely? Isn't she wonderful?

And why not a Mary Worth crossover, too?

I like how Wilbur's flowers match his/her glasses.

And so that was Christmas, and what did I do?

Remember that quote from Fight Club comparing Christmas trees to sex crime victims?

This song is judging me.

"Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" by John Lennon and Yoko Ono is one of those songs that has always gotten on my bad side. When I was a kid, I was just annoyed by the fact that it was draggy and sanctimonious and not in that bouncy, upbeat Frosty/Rudolph sweet spot I preferred. I tend not to like slow, serious, or sad songs about Christmas. Not now, not then.

In  my younger days, I wasn't even that keen on "Silent Night," a song I associated with the temporary and unwanted cessation of Yuletide cheer. "Silent Night" was something I had to sing in church, looking serious while pretending I wasn't thinking about what Transformers and Masters of the Universe toys I was (hopefully) going to get. (And let's be honest: the "round yon virgin" part is uncomfortable, right?) Though it wasn't actually a hymn, "Happy Xmas" had that same effect on me. That song is basically a radio station's way of saying, "Okay, stop having fun for the next few minutes and start thinking about poverty and injustice instead of gingerbread."

Nowadays, the John Lennon song bothers me for another reason. It's those goddamned judgmental opening lines: "And so this is Christmas/And what have you done?/Another year over/And a new one just begun." At a certain point in your life, you hear those lines and think, "Oh, jesus, what have I actually done this year? Pretty much two things: jack and shit. That song hates me." I mean, I went to work and paid my bills and wrote many, many, many paragraphs about Ed Wood on this blog. That was pretty much it. Sorry, starving children of pretty much everywhere. Better luck next year, downtrodden and oppressed peoples of the world. If you were counting on Joe Blevins to come to your rescue this year... well, he didn't do it. Dang me, dang me, they oughta take a rope and hang me.

And John Lennon and his preachy little song are looking down on me right now, tsk-tsking my laziness and overall indifference. Pretty much the only fun I can have with "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" is substituting the lyrics from "On Top of Spaghetti." They fit perfectly with the melody. Try it yourself sometime.

Anyway, some other notes about the Christmas that was:

• Christmas may be over, but the holiday experience definitely is not. I've got another whole day with the fam, then the wondrous gauntlet of travel awaits me. One train, then another, then a cab. (And that's if everything goes according to plan.) It's a whole thing. I'm writing this post from a cheap, crummy motel somewhere in Indiana, far from anyplace I've ever called home. My furniture misses me.

• Yes, it is wonderful to see my father, my sister, my niece, and my nephews. I love them dearly. But it is also wonderful not to see these people for a few months at a time. I love my privacy and solitude dearly as well. Sometimes, I actually get caught up in the spirit of the holidays and think, "You know, I should've gotten married or something. Maybe had kids. Gotten a real job, bought a real house, and lived a real life, like a grown up instead of an eternal adolescent." It passes, usually around the middle of the second day with the aforementioned "fam." Then I realize that the life I'm living now is the life I was meant to live. This is the best I can do.

• What's there to do in this part of the world? Not much, my friends. Not much. My dad and I took in a movie, and it was exactly the film I wanted to see today: Big Eyes. I may write a review of it. Then again, I may not. I'm capricious. For now, let me say that I liked it and would recommend it. This is a story I've been waiting years to see on the big screen, and I'm pleased with the way it was handled. If you're worried that it might be too "Tim Burton-y," let me put your mind at ease. Even Danny Elfman's score -- lighter and jazzier than usual -- is not typical of the Burton canon.

• I checked in with the Christmas Story marathon a few times, catching a few minutes here and a few minutes there. My goal each year is to see the whole movie, just not in order. The timing didn't work out this year, though. I saw Ralphie go down the slide at Higbee's twice and beat up Scut Farkus at least once, but I never saw Flick stick his tongue to that flagpole. At least not this year.

• How was your Christmas? Good? That's super. Me, I'm just kind of relieved it's over. Aren't you? We survived, people. We made it out.

Pop culture made specifically for me

Kate "Oates" McCucci and Riki "Garfunkel" Lindhome in their IFC series. Also: a baby.

That's all of us. We're all jerks.

We all start out from a place of pure and perfect narcissism. As babies, we first acquire a sense of our own existence, and only later do we realize that -- hey! -- there are other people in the world, too, and they have thoughts and needs and opinions, just like we do. Theirs aren't as important as ours, but we have to care about them anyway or at least pretend to care for reasons of social convenience. That's the entire basis of human civilization -- people acting like they give a shit about other people. It's an extremely precarious situation; society could topple over in a light breeze, folks.

Selfishness is our natural state. It's our eternal default. Sympathy and empathy have to be learned, and we have to work on them our whole lives... and that's only if we want to! Sometimes we forget. Sometimes we try and fail. And sometimes, we don't even want to try. That's why I say I'm a believer in what I call "the essential rottenness of the human race." The rottenness is easy to understand, and it's the root cause of wars, crime, bigotry, and all sorts of cruelty.

If you're lucky, you have five working senses with which to take in information about the world and one functional brain with which to process that information. You'll never see with anyone else's eyes, hear with anyone else's ears, or think with anyone else's brain. It's only natural, then, that there will be many, many occasions in which we misunderstand each other or disregard one another's needs in favor of our own. I see it in my own life all the time. 

I can be a completely selfish, nasty, and inconsiderate bastard... and with very little prompting, too. It's not that I want to be one, mind you. Even at my worst, I'm trying to be a good guy. I just don't always (or even often) make it. Other people make niceness seem easy and natural, i.e. not a herculean effort. I envy them. I'll fess up to being a jerk, but I take no pride in my jerkishness. At the same time, I try to forgive others for their jerkishness. That's why I avoid using the term "self-indulgent." Whom can we indulge if not ourselves? Ultimately, no matter what you do, there's some internal motivation for your actions, some need or desire within yourself you are trying to satisfy. Who knows? Maybe Mother Teresa was being self-indulgent when she worked with lepers.

These are basically me at ages 10 and 8.

As a self-described narcissist , one of my persistent fantasies is that there are certain pop cultural artifacts -- mainly movies, but sometimes books, TV shows, or albums -- which are created specifically for me. The target demographic for these things is Joe Blevins and no one else. If other people like it, great. But Joe is the person we're trying to reach. 

I realize this is an absurd notion. If a movie or show reaches the public in any kind of mass-produced way, it's because some corporate weasels somewhere think there is a market for it. And this hoped-for market consists of multiple people, ideally thousands or millions of them, not one individual citizen. But, still, its a comforting, reassuring daydream. And it really does explain a lot of pop culture stuff that I enjoy. 

Before the music industry collapsed and people stopped buying CDs, I can remember long, leisurely trips to a (now long-gone) hipster record store. I'd stroll up and down the aisles, just browsing through the merchandise and occasionally being stunned by what I found. That process led me to the Orgy of the Dead soundtrack album, compilations by forgotten 1950s novelty acts like Nervous Norvus and Patience & Prudence, and two collections of quiz show themes, not to mention the entire canon of the faux-greaser gimmick group Big Daddy. I figured, who else but me would even want this stuff?

Naturally, this delusion extends to motion pictures. Every year, I try to select one movie which is geared so specifically to my tastes, interests, and fetishes that I like to pretend it was made just for me. Past honorees of this nature include Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Femme Fatale, Punch Drunk Love, The Royal Tenenbaums, Frost/Nixon, and Room 237. I don't even care what you thought of these. They weren't for you; they were for me and me alone. I knew Tenenbaums was "mine" from the second I saw the poster, because Ben Stiller's two sons look exactly like what I looked like as a kid. It was like seeing a family photo in the marquee of a multiplex. How could I not endorse that movie? This year's most likely candidate for the award? Probably the criminally underrated Muppets Most Wanted. No lie. That film is an incredible achievement.

All paranoid delusions aside, there were two cases in 2014 which made me feel like maybe pop culture was being made specifically for me.