Birthday Haul

A book about Paris

A DVD about the Giants victory season last year

A gift card to Applebees

A bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon

A gift card to B&N

A check from the parents

A home-cooked filet mignon and baked pertater meal


All-in-all, not a bad take for a middle-aged, middle-income man living in Obama’s America.

What will I spend the B&N gift card on?

Not sure … but I decided to let it sit for a while in a desk drawer. I have something approaching fifty books stacked vertically atop the top of the book shelf behind me. Half science fiction paperbacks, a couple of histories, a couple of fantasies, and the remainder falling into some strange religion-philosophy-science continuum. Three-and-a-half months left in the year, I’ll probably put away around fifteen of them. Then I want to start my Philip Jose Farmer books (I have something like a dozen of them). So, books ain’t the use for that gift card.

Music? I used to be heavily into classical music. Then I began revisiting the classic rock / hard rock / grunge stuff I was into dating from my teens to thirties (I had a box of 200 CDs stolen from an apartment storage room about ten years ago, so I lost all that music then). Right now, though, I’m not really into anything definably musical.

DVDs? Two years ago I did my Hitchcock experiment. I bought Strangers on a Train with a birthday gift-card and watched it three times over three weeks, each time trying to analyze the movie in the way geeky film students would, each time spotting clues and motifs I did not see on the previous viewing. Enjoyable exercise. Should I do it again? Dunno. Maybe buy a favorite monster movie from my youth, to watch with Little One? Again, dunno.

So in the desk drawer it goes – outta my wallet, temptress! That is, until something wild and weird really inspires me. And, no doubt, it will be something right out of left field.