A lot of folks don’t know Brandi Carlile, which is a shame. I’ve been listening to her for a few years now, featuring her music here several times. She’s a wonderful talent. This year, no other artist was there for me as much as she was, in good times and in bad.

Early in the year, her live cover of The Beatles’ “I Just Saw A Face” perfectly captured the wonder and joy I felt when I looked at the woman I loved…

Then, when that romance crumbled to ash, Brandi was there…

Her lyrics and her passionate, gorgeous voice echoed the pain I was feeling, while their beauty gave me something to hold on to…

Later, when circumstances forced me to lose touch with another beloved friend (I’ll be blogging cryptically about her soon), once again I found myself playing Brandi’s songs as the soundtrack to my life…

Brandi helped me survive a really rough year, full of loss and despair. Hopefully the next time she gets to Atlanta, I’ll manage to get to the show. But there’s no question I’ll keep buying her stuff, and playing the hell out of it. You should too.

Thank you, Brandi.

Here in the Byrdcave, we’re old fans of Popeye. Not only did I watch the old cartoons countless times growing up, my son and I have each given Popeye gifts to each other. He gave me Warner Brothers’ awesome remastered collections of the classic Fleischer cartoons of the 1930s (which are wonderful, and far better than the later productions which kinda sucked); I have been giving him Fantagraphics’ gorgeous hardbacks collecting the original E.C. Segar comic strips as they come out.

Wilco, in cooperation with King Features Syndicate, has brought us the first hand-drawn Popeye cartoon in over three decades:

I hope Popeye rebounds by hooking up with Betty Boop.

If you never saw them, or need a reminder, or it’s just been too long, here’s one of the Fleischer classics, from 1936, in amazing quality:

And for bonus giggles, here’s a commercial featuring Popeye and Bluto that drove right wingers crazy when it aired:

UPDATE: Of course, now that I think about it, if we watch the Fleischer first, then the Wilco, then the Minute Maid cartoon, maybe we’re actually getting the full story of Popeye’s romantic life…

I always wanted to use this tune as background for a balls-to-the-wall fight sequence in a movie.

From 1987,  Duran Duran’s guitarist Andy Taylor (backed up by Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols) shows he can take off the mascara and crank out some actual rock.

Chuck Norris is a dingleberry on the ass of cinema and a toxic boil of  a man.

I’ve blogged about this before, in which I grumped about the Chuck Norris jokes that are so widespread, aggrandizing a man who in no way deserves it, and I offered up my own Chuck Norris jokes to replace them.

I just updated that post with new jokes. You can read ‘em all here.

Yeah, I know. Electroshock therapy? A good memory?

Yep.

I’ve struggled greatly, for years, with chronic, terrible depression, and I’ve done therapy and all sorts of self help and multifarious concoctions of antidepressant meds, but nothing actually worked to any significant degree. I finally got desperate and started looking into electroshock, or as it’s known these days, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).

During my research, I had the incredible misfortune of finding out about a newer, kinder and gentler, sort of brain zapping using magnets. This is called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and it was allegedly less traumatic and in general a lot easier than ECT. The problem was, it was still expensive, and unlike ECT, which has been an accepted and effective treatment for years, it wasn’t covered by insurance.

But I was assured by the shrink offering the treatment (Dr. Brian Teliho in Atlanta) that I had a good 80% chance or so of getting at least most of my expenses reimbursed, so I decided to take the chance. I went through a several weeks long course of treatment and spent $9000. It was the worst money I’ve ever spent. I got no benefits from the process whatsoever, the good doctor did absolutely no follow-up with me, and, naturally, my insurance flat out refused to pay anything at all back.

This made me even more depressed. (If you’re curious about TMS, please check out my post about the experience in which I went into a lot more detail).

Electroshock seemed inevitable. But I put it off until I had my heart absolutely shattered by someone I loved and then figured “What the fuck?”

I blogged about the whole experience at length last year (you can find the posts among those listed in the “Depression” topic in the sidebar). I saw definite benefits, and few downsides, though it did seem to temporarily throw my emotional self control to the winds, which had unfortunate fallout in my personal life. But afterward, I became a much better me, almost a younger me, but more focused and capable than I ever actually had been when I was younger.

Most of that has unfortunately worn off, and I’m back to the old struggle. But in at least two ways I still benefit enough to be happy I did it. The first is that the insomnia I had been suffering for months, which was just getting worse and worse (I’d go weeks at a time on three or four hours of sleep a night), went away and has not returned. This alone is worth the money (which, thanks to insurance, was a hell of a lot less than I wasted on TMS) because the lack of good sleep was making me very unhealthy and driving me crazy.

The second is that the migraines I’d suffered for years, often two or three times a month, have mostly fled as well. I have had a headache here or there, bad enough to consider a migraine, which lasted two to four days…but they haven’t been as agonizing as those I had been having.

Also, in memory, the weeks I spent going in, several times a week, to be stabbed with IV’s, rolled around on a gurney, and brain-blasted with electricity, seem almost like a vacation. It was a regimen of hope, time spent trying to swim up from the darkness. It was a nurturing ritual, when in my life I overall have no one to nurture me. And the repeated temporary death of anesthesia brought a certain peace to my soul…

Little Juliet puts the Rebecca Blacks of the world in their place.

Newt Gingrich.

Newt. Fucking. Gingrich.

This is how bad things have gotten.

I think it’s time to revisit a post I did a while back. It’s primarily about lies in politics, but has a good amount of information about Gingrich specifically that most people aren’t aware of. I’m pretty proud of this piece:

Pants on Fire

The past few years, I’ve started each new year with a few posts about “Good Memories” from the previous year, things that I enjoyed or that had special meaning to me. So far, this year I haven’t done that. (To see earlier good memories, just click on the “Good Memories” category in the sidebar.)

I have given a lot of thought to doing it, and have a handful of posts in mind, but motivation has been lacking. Last year was largely painful for me, and there aren’t many things that stand out as particularly “good.” And so far this year my depression has its claws in my back and when I try to move forward it just digs in deeper.

Still, the act of writing the posts, of writing at all, is a kick in the nuts to Demon Depression, and I am starting to make some headway again (he typed, hearing the rhythmic sloosh of laundry washing in the next room). So in the next week or two, I plan to get on with it.

I also plan to get back to blogging more in general again. I’ve been in a slump for a while, for a lot of reasons (many of them bad memories), and I know the world needs my wisdoms.

Last night, Stevie Nicks’s cover of “Not Fade Away” cycled up on my musical playlist and my son and I were bop-bop-bop bop-bopping around the Byrdcave, having fun. I told him it was a Buddy Holly song, so that sent us looking for Holly tunes, then we expanded out and started listening to some other early rock and roll greats.

It was only after I started playing it that I remembered how I used to sing the Elegants’ “Little Star” to him as a lullaby when he was a baby, probably the only lullaby I ever sang to him other than Springsteen’s “Pony Boy.”

Happy Holidays to everyone, whatever their faith or lack thereof. Let’s be nice to each other out there, okay?