Today’s the shortest day of the year. In observance, maybe I should try writing some short sentences. Not fragments. These should be real sentences. Let’s see how long I can keep it up.

Not long.

Still, though, it is the winter solstice, and through a coincidence of sun time, I distinctly remember that I started back to work at my newspaper right around the time of the summer solstice. My last full-time day is Thursday, which means I did a six-month hitch as a copy editor, and all things considered, I can’t say it was a bad time. It’s not my calling, but it was a useful interlude. At times it was like being shovel man on a coal sluice. At times I think I actually turned a sow’s ear into, if not a silk purse, perhaps a pigskin purse. I saved a few writers from themselves, couldn’t save others, wrote some good headlines, learned a bit about sports. (Yes, I was the primary sports copy editor. Talk about the blind leading the…never mind.)

My fave headline was on a story about plans for Notre Dame’s basketball teams to play more games in Fort Wayne, because they get such good crowds here: Irish I may, Irish I might see the Irish here tonight

So it’s not HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR. But I liked it.

My friend Adrianne did a summer internship on the Boston Herald copy desk. She received high praise for getting “sex phones” into a head on I-forget-the-story. Probably something about sex phones.

Headlines aren’t hard to write, but they’re hard to write well. You learn a new set of rules, and you find yourself developing strong opinions for entirely crackbrain reasons. If I weren’t already inclined to prefer the term “gay” to “same-sex” as it applies to civil unions, I would simply because it fits into a tight headline space. You learn to hate educators, because they prefer the multisyllabic and hyphenated over the simple. You develop pet peeves about certain words — “mull” and “probe” and “feds.”

But you really hate page designers who favor one-column heads. The Barry Bonds grand-jury testimony story had a one-column head order. He didn’t say he used steroids, he said he used substances, and he didn’t know what might have been in them. “Substances” didn’t fit in one column; “steroids” wouldn’t have been accurate. So I ended up writing:

Bonds:
I used
creams,
oils
blindly.

Sounds like he got a rubdown in the Tenderloin. I’ve had better days.

OK, enough copy editing. Soon I’ll be an unemployed writer again, and won’t that be fun.

Because it’s the solstice, and because we can always use a new holiday, go read the NYT story on Festivus, the “Seinfeld” holiday that makes as much sense as anything. Turns out there really is a Festivus:

The actual inventor of Festivus is Dan O’Keefe, 76, whose son Daniel, a writer on “Seinfeld,” appropriated a family tradition for the episode. The elder Mr. O’Keefe was stunned to hear that the holiday, which he minted in 1966, is catching on. “Have we accidentally invented a cult?” he wondered.

“Most of the Festivi had a theme,” he said. “One was, `Is there a light at the end of the tunnel?’ Another was, `Too easily made glad?’ “

And I thought my family was strange.

Oh, and thanks to David Edelstein, film critic for “Fresh Air” and Slate, who gave us a little shout-out today. He’d asked for the world’s worst lines from biopics, and in reporting the original results (scroll down), neglected my personal favorite. If you want to know what it is, you’ll have to hit the first link.

But it was in an Oliver Stone movie. That should tell you something.

I can’t recall what I was thinking when I rose from our basement bathroom at 4:30 a.m., freshly showered and ready for my allotted 15 breakfast minutes, but it was probably something like three more days. Three more days of rising in the middle of the night and showering in the basement so I don’t awaken my sleeping family with my morning ablutions. The dog was waiting on the basement landing, a sign he needed to take an early-morning evacuation, probably a result of all the chicken skin he cadged out of last night’s entree.

He stood up, barked once, looked toward the back yard, a very Lassie pose.

“I’m letting you out, but keep your mouth shut,” I said, opening the door. He bolted out and barked again, but in an abbreviated, “I know I’m supposed to be quiet, but this is important” way. A woman was somewhere outside, crying for help.

I stepped outside. The noise was coming from somewhere catty-corner to our back yard, close by. “Help, help, please, somebody help me,” she said. I ran to the fence and called out, “What’s wrong? What do you need?”

“Help,” she called again.

I ran back to the porch and opened the storm door. It sucked the back door shut. Locked out. At 4:30 a.m., with someone nearby crying piteously for help. In my slippers. Temperature: 9 degrees.

Well, this sucks, I thought, knocking on the door, which made the dog bark, which made all the other dogs in earshot bark. No response from inside, more moaning for help somewhere in the dark. Thought: My house is for sale. There’s a key box on the front door. And I remember the combination!

Ran to the front door. Tried the combination. It didn’t work. Shitthebed. I started ringing the doorbell repeatedly. “Ohhhh help, won’t someone help me?” came the voice from the dark, followed by the comforting sound of multiple Chevy engines bearing down from two directions — the help. Ran to the curb, pointed the cops in the direction of the voice, came back to my front door. Rang again. Because while I no longer felt the need to call 911, I was still in my goddamn slippers and it was still 9 degrees. A hibernating bear came rumbling down the stairs and opened the door.

“Lock yourself out?” he said.

“You might say,” I said, running to the back to let the dog in and figure out what the hell. By now you could hear sirens, see the smoke rising against the sky. A house fire. “Husband’s still inside!” one of the police yelled at an arriving fireman. A fatal house fire, I thought, going back into the kitchen. For some reason, at that moment the kitchen cabinet popped open and out slid the roasting pan from last night’s chicken, clattering on the tile floor. If a nine-foot python had emerged from the sink drain locked in mortal combat with a rabid raccoon, I don’t think I would have been surprised. It was that kind of morning.

I skipped breakfast, called the metro desk like a good soldier, picked up a dozen doughnuts on the way in. The best thing about working for a newspaper? By the time I got to work, I knew the most important part — it wasn’t a fatal fire. An hour later, when the morning cop reporter arrived, I learned that the husband wasn’t inside, he had been out walking the dog when the fire started. (Yes, at 4:30.) It was the second police brief.

I’m always struck, when things like this happen, what a rich beat the cop shop is, at least for a reporter who likes to tell good stories. Every brush up against police news is like a glancing blow from a freight train (at least, I hasten to add, if you’re essentially a law-abiding person). Car accidents, crime, fire — these are huge events in people’s lives, and they’re frequently good stories. One morning, years ago, we had another fire in the morning here in the Fort. A passing meter reader spotted smoke, called it in and ran back to the house, where a woman dropped two young children out of a second-story window into his arms.

“Now you!” he shouted. She was already being overcome by smoke, fainted and fell out the window. The meter reader managed to break her fall and she survived with a few scratches. We got the barest details into a tight paper on deadline. The metro editor wandered over and asked the reporter who covered it for a follow for the next day’s paper.

“Why?” the reporter asked. Like: Who gives a crap? To him, it was just a no-injury fire. I thought it was a tremendous yarn, the hero meter reader who saw a 100-pound woman falling onto him and did not flinch.

Many years ago, a columnist friend of mine wrote a wonderful piece pointing this out, that every day a reporter would call “slow,” people are born, die, fall in love, divorce and do other things that don’t make the paper, or if they do, are summarized in 6-point type on an inside page of listings.

It’s all about the story.

We sold our house. Verbally, anyway.

Also, I’m opening the Wire thread early, because the season finale’s tonight, and I fear the next few days will be wack, work/chores-wise.

So to get you started, here’s a snippet from the David Simon Answers Your Questions thingie on the HBO website:

This is amazing. True story:

Melvin is now very active in Bethel A.M.E. church and outspoken against the
drug culture. It seemed perversely appropriate to cast him therefore as the
Deacon. He seems real and credible to me in the role. Having paid his debt
and served his sentence, I wish him well and look forward to getting an
expensive lesson in billiards from him.

I was right: There was a memo on the subject.

We bid on Door No. 2, a perfectly acceptable house that is, as a very serious plus, far less costly than the one we really lusted for. Alas, it was not to be. We crunched the numbers until they lay in a panting heap at our feet, and ended up with: We could do it, but it will take every dime we have. I’ve always tried to make the required things in adult life — job, house, parental responsibilities — fit the more fun parts of adult life — being able to freely curse in one’s office, taking your kid to a bar, and having a house that we own, rather than vice versa.

Thanks for all your support. Until this morning, I thought we could swing it. Then the Realtor called with his best estimate of the annual property taxes on the perfect place; they would be, almost to the penny, precisely what we pay in a year for our principle, interest, taxes and insurance on the house we live in now. Just for the taxes. Urp. That finished it off.

The runner-up is in the same school district. The house is lovely, and looks just like the one I grew up in. It’ll do fine.

And now I’m sick of the whole topic. I think we kissed 24 frogs in two days, and got two princes. I’m sick of the smell of paint and hearing, “It wouldn’t be a bad place, if you redid the kitchen.” Bleah. Offer’s being made as we speak. I’ll keep you posted.

My senator is on NPR as we speak, too. He’s taking the brave, radical stand that the war in Iraq is going badly (although he was an early supporter). He keeps calling the interviewer by name — pronouncing it the way she does, “Mee-shell” — something that always gives me the creeps. It’s so Dale Carnegie, although one of my best friends does it all the time, and for him, I think it’s a memory trick he uses. However, my senator was once brilliantly described by one of his (losing) opponents something like this: “You get the idea if you peeled off his face you’d find wires underneath.” Dead on.

Oh, but it was a good day. I think any day in a week where we get to watch yet another meltdown of a family-values conservative is a good one. I’m speaking, of course, of Bernie Kerik and, to a lesser extent, his ex-girlfriend, Judith Regan.

One of these days, you think, there’ll stop being such a good living in family-values hypocrisy, but not likely soon.

Speaking of which, I liked this Salon piece on the latest O’Reilly crusade, saving Christmas. You’ll have to watch an ad to read it, but it’s worth it:

William Donahue of the arch-conservative Catholic League insisted, “Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It’s not a secret, OK? Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see the public square without nativity scenes.”

No wonder he’s always yelling. What a tool. But Salon is correct: It’s like there was a vast right-wing conspiracy memo on the subject. Last month: Alfred Kinsey was a sick, sick pervert. This month: Christmas is being crushed by anal sex-lovin’, Catholic-hatin’ JEWSJEWSJEWS.

More tomorrow.

This week’s open Wire thread. Oh my, but I think we should all start by reading some of David Simon’s postings on the HBO Wire forums:

Here’s the thing and I say it all the time and no one seems to believe it but the writers: To make a world credible and to make a story meaningful, the story must be pre-eminent, not the character. … We aren’t interested in preserving characters or featuring them more because the audience wants it. Forgive me, but the audience is like a small child. If given what they wanted every day, it would be ice cream and cake and seven hours of daytime television. Because the audience of a television show, by and large, feels an allegiance to what came before on a serial drama, to the scenes and moments and characters that are familiar or that pleased them in the past. On Homicide, everyone seemed to want every episode to end with Detective Pembleton going into the interrogation room and winning a case by an act of intellectual prowess. But having told that story, neither Andre Braugher nor the writers wanted to beat it to death. A story told is a story over and so if you don’t want to watch The Wire because anything familiar and pleasing is no longer available to you as a viewer in the amounts you desire, then okay, I understand. But you were never really watching The Wire then, in my opinion. That’s not to convince you that you shouldn’t like what you, or want what you want, or make your own choices as to what stories you wish to enjoy on television or in any other medium. But all of the angst over please don’t kill Avon, please don’t kill Stringer, please don’t kill Omar, please don’t kill Marlo, please don’t let Kima die or let McNulty get even with Rawls or whatever — what can I say? You can’t petition this show on behalf of character. We don’t care about character except to the extent that good characters serve a story well. Story is all.

And to think I said, “Please don’t kill Omar.” Now I feel bad.

But what an episode. Stringer…(strangled sob). Discuss.

Too tired to blog much of anything at the moment. Why? Just returned from a whirlwind two-day house-hunting trip to the D. You could duplicate the experience by driving 3.5 hours and then spending the next 48 hours climbing in and out of a car, followed by another 3.5 hours home. That Kate managed this trip without misbehaving significantly is only proof she is an angel sent from heaven.

We left the dog at home. Good call.

The good news: We found a house. It’s perfect in nearly every detail.

The bad news: It’s tens of thousands more than I wanted to spend. Not to mention the taxes.

The next two days will be spent figuring it out. Any advice? Leave it in the comments. P.S. I’m leaning toward buying it anyway.

Last night Kate was invited to a birthday party. She specifically asked us not to attend with her, and since we were invited to another party, and had similar thoughts about shlepping her along with us, we honored her wish. We are bad parents.

The party was at a large American Legion hall, with several entrances. Only one seemed to be lit up, the one at the bar. “Of course it must be somewhere else in the building,” we said as we walked in. “Of course they wouldn’t allow a child’s birthday party to be held in a bar. Not in Indiana. Not even in a private club.” (Locals know the state’s laws on this subject to be utterly batsh*t, with children thought to be so delicate that they must not be exposed to the corrupting sight of a bar filled with its choir of bottles, each one holding a different formula of the devil’s potion.)

Of course we were wrong. The birthday girl’s relatives were pushing the tables together in the back. We passed through a room full of Legion drinkers, including a solitary man with a 40-ounce beer in front of him, a full ashtray and a deep concentration on the basketball game. We made the gift exchange, gave Kate the standard behave-yourself orders and took off. A couple hours later, we made our exit from our own party: “Well, gotta shove off. Need to go pick up our kid at the bar.”

Back at the Legion, karaoke night was in full swing, the usual warblers alternating with the birthday-party kids, who sang “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” as their final number before being kicked out at 9 p.m. (Legion rules — no kids after 9).

Please note I had no problem with this. In south St. Louis, where everyone else in my family grew up, this was pretty much the way it was. Kids went to bars with their parents and were served vanilla Cokes and hot dogs. Big hairy deal.

But it was just so strange, going in to kiss my sweet daughter goodnight for the last time, burying my nose in her hair to get one last whiff of her (only mothers understand how much we need to smell our kids) and thinking: This kid stinks like an ashtray.

In my high school health class — which, I must add, was an excellent health class taught by one of the world’s great straight talkers — we had units in, let me think: quack medicine, sex and reproduction, birth control, STDs, drugs and alcohol and basic self-preservation. Probably some more stuff too, but those were the biggies.

I’m sure AIDS has been added to the curriculum by now, as well as homosexuality. What else? Take your pick. Hep B? The perils of piercing? Our health seems to be in such peril.

It was a one-semester class. I have a suggestion: Make health a full-year deal and devote at least a month to studying, discussing and drilling on mental illness. Make sure every kid who makes it through the tenth grade understands depression, bipolar illness, obsessive compulsion and schizophrenia. Among other perils of the chemically unbalanced.

Why? Oh, just reading the accounts of the carnage in my hometown earlier this week, the guy who climbed onstage at a crummy rock club and killed four people. Immediately afterward, I thought what probably most of the nation thought: What a loser. Then I read the third-day stories, and the facts became all too familiar. The Dispatch won’t let you in without paid registration, so let me quote a few passages:

Initially, Gale was friendly and well-liked within their circle of friends, Johnson said. … “But after a while something happened,” he said. “He just kind of snapped. He went from being a cool guy to being a guy you didn�t want to be around.” … He and friend Jeramie Brey said they distanced themselves from Gale six years ago because his behavior drastically changed and he began to scare them. … Once, Gale showed up at Brey�s house and said he wanted to share some songs he had written. The pages of lyrics he wanted to sing, Brey recalled, were copied from Pantera. Gale argued that they were his. “He was off his rocker,” Brey said. “He said they were his songs, that Pantera stole them from him and that he was going to sue them.”

The shooter, Nathan Gale, was 25, which means his abrupt behavior change came at 19, the bullseye age for the onset of psychotic mental illness. Let’s check off the symptoms — social dysfunction, obsession, paranoia, all apparently left untreated for several years. This is just Nance here, diagnosing from the comfort of her armchair on the basis of a few newspaper articles, but I’d be willing to bet Nathan was at least a borderline paranoid schizophrenic, or may have been what they call schizotypal, more or less the same thing.

We had a case not too different here a few years ago. Guy walks into his sister’s living room and opens fire, killing all four people in the room. Why? “I thought they were talking about me.” In this case, in the Gale case, in a million other cases, I thought the same thing: Didn’t anyone figure out this guy needed to see a psychiatrist? The guy in Fort Wayne installed an electronic lock on his bedroom door and changed the combination daily, so paranoid was he about his room being entered. No one thought this was anything more alarming than an eccentricity.

The Columbus sniper of a few months back? Another lost soul, a paranoid schizophrenic who stumbled through the gaping holes in the mental-health safety net: Jen Frisby said she dated Mc-Coy for several years. The relationship ended more than two years ago because of his erratic behavior, she said, including his stated fear of the FBI.

I’m reminded of something a health ethicist told me once: “If a kid falls into a well, we’ll spare no expense or effort to get him out. But buy him glasses so he can see the well and not fall in? Forget it.” That’s the way it is with crazy people, the worst impulses of civil libertarians and conservatives dovetailing to turn them back out into the world untreated or badly treated or refusing treatment, until one climbs onstage at a rock club and kills four people because his favorite metal band broke up. Also, they were stealing his lyrics. I ask you.

Of course, even the people who know better don’t help. The prosecutor in Columbus wants to give the sniper the hot shot. The public demands it, I’m sure. It’s so much better to make a problem go away than deal with it.

A big story earlier this week was about old people lining up at our local coliseum for a one-time flu-shot clinic. The state got 190K doses, and they’re being distributed to the at-risk populations; it’s probably the same where you are. I read this story, complete with photos of these geezers creaking along on their walkers and quotes about why they need the vaccine (“my chemotherapy wipes out my immune system,” etc.). Then I turned the page and read about the AMA debate on whether to investigate the issue of drug reimportation, as more Americans wonder why we have to prop up the drug companies’ profit ambitions, and Canada gets a discount.

And then I sit back and smack both cheeks, remembering how, early in the year, I predicted health care would be the big domestic issue in the presidential election.

This is why I’m the smashing success I am — always with my finger on the pulse, you know.

(Long pause while I try to figure out why I thought that important.)

OK, let’s try again: Moving! Realtors! What’s up with that?

Maybe one more time: One of the first things we did after we listed our house was go to Sears and buy a new vacuum cleaner. The old one was only two years old, but in that time it managed to queer both of us on the so-called miracle of the bagless vacuum. Oh, sure, you get seduced at first, taking a few swipes across the wall-to-wall and then marveling at the wad of swirling dog hair in the cup: Wow! Cool! If you’ve ever used one of those pore strips, it’s like that — inspecting blackheads from the other direction.

After that, things went downhill. The HEPA filter was perpetually clogged, the cup leaked dust everywhere, it smelled awful and it was as loud as a 747 screaming in for a landing six inches above your head. If I was going to vacuum daily — and when your house is for sale, that’s what you do — I would need fresh equipment.

So we went old-school — bag — with improvements — HEPA. It’s red, a Kenmore. Today, when I came home from work, Alan was frantically pushing it around the kitchen. “Showing between 2 and 3,” he panted.

Regular readers know Alan has a knack for the domestic that is still revealing itself. Sometimes I tell him he has a recessive gay gene. Sometimes I call him the world’s hairiest metrosexual. But I retain the bafflement that dawned the week after we moved in together, when Alan transformed himself, in one week, from a man who owned a naugahyde rocker with a spring that poked you in the ass to a guy who haunted antique auctions, with an eye for mission oak.

This house-selling business has only brought out a different facet. He’s like a drill sergeant whose mission is to plump couch pillows. “Everyone take their shoes off! OUTSIDE!” he snarls at the kids when they come in. Of course, since he did most of the work in cleaning the place down to its tiniest crack, he has a lot at stake. Even the guppies got their tank and plastic plants spiffed up yesterday. Yesterday — this is the truth — I caught him watching Martha Stewart.

And what does he get for it? A couple who passes because we don’t have a bathroom on the main floor! The nerve.

I better get to the blogging before it’s too late:

Tom Friedman is so smart we should have elected him president. Or at least put him on the Iraq planning team.

From the WashPost, the downside of being a stoner legend. Three real-life inspirations for characters in “Dazed and Confused” fight back, with lawyers.

Lance has an amusing story about December’s favorite act of mischief — stealing the baby Jesus from Nativity scenes.

Thanks to all who wrote/left comments about the upcoming move. Frequently occasionally OK, sometimes asked questions:

Yep, the blog will continue. No, I don’t know exactly what I’ll do in Detroit just yet, other than continue freelancing and figure it out as I go. Someone sent me a quote from a book she recommended, “The Artist’s Way” — Think of yourself as an accident victim walking away from the crash. You old life has crashed and burned; your new life isn’t apparent yet. You may feel yourself to be temporarily without a vehicle. Just keep walking.

I plan to keep walking.

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