March 11th, 2023. Denny Crane.

March 7th we played to a collection of women realtors to celebrate International Women’s Month. It was quite a party, fundraiser, and shindig. By the end of it they were digging us, but it’s a reminder of just how much money some people have! Good dresses tho. This turned out to be a place where Kristen’s played weddings too. Lovely tent. Weird moment where the tented in area of the tent where all the servers wash dishes between things was a’buzz with activity and all the walls were quivering and a’foofin’ like poltergeist activity… or like the clinking of the silverware in that episode of Last of Us we just watched…

Saved this little guy during load-in. It’s like my cat. I mean Kristen’s cat. But teeny.

I’m trying to be good. I get up in the morning, work out on the Rowing Torture Device while watching an episode of SOMETHING and then move on with my day. I have a very, very checkered past of accomplishing this. Today was one of the good days.

I’ve been working my way back through reruns of Boston Legal, mostly because it’s there. I enjoyed watching with Heather and the Lloyds when we were home from traveling when it was fresh, but now, 15 years later, it truly hasn’t aged well in most ways. Denny Crane’s and the way he’s ennabled throughout the show is anything but funny, and terrifyingly close to believable. I don’t remember being quite so disgusted by them over a decade ago, but maybe that’s because I was in a room full of people laughing along? Who knows – a LOT of the humour hasn’t aged well, and yet the topics … though sometimes treated poorly … the topics show a strange and horrifying prescience? The overthrow of Roe vs Wade hits particularly hard, but everything from the dangers of predatory lending to manipulative media, repeated jabs at Fox News and the siloing of culture, the militarization of the police and the rate at which they kill black men.

Many, many topics that haven’t become MAINSTREAM until recent years. “Woke” before woke, it was like David E. Kelly was drawing material from Rage Against the Machine songs. The humour hasn’t aged well, but I applaud the choice of topics.

This morning it was right-to-die politics and that always hits me hard. Shirley arguing for the right to place her dementia-rotted father on a morphine drip with the underlying understanding that this was assisted suicide is dramatic and horrible and triggers all the horrors and indignities of my father in hospice.

The brotherhood between Denny and James Spaders’ Alan Shore IS a beautiful bromance, though it verges into contempt for the others’ political views frequently, the bond is a strong THING rarely modeled on television. “What a way to check out. Scotch in one hand, a steelhead in the other. And in your hands… would be me. If I could make that deal with God I’d do so right now.” Unafraid of death, afraid of doing it alone. Afraid of “checking out” unaware.

I worry about dying alone. I worry about aging gracelessly. As I get older, imagined terrors slowly erode and are replaced by the experienced horrors of Life. Unavoidable and implacable. Every day a strange balancing act weighing my hatred of the world around against my fears of leaving it.