Question should NOT be what will I give up for Lent but WILL I

March 5 will mark the season of Lent.

Lent is that time of year Christians all over the world and us “lapsed Catholics” or “Chreasters” like me who according to the Urban Dictionary is defined as “someone who only goes to church on Christmas and Easter” are supposed to give up some vice we can’t live without the next forty days beginning on Ash Wednesday until Easter Sunday when Jesus Christ rose from the dead.

According to Christianity.com Lent is defined as the time Christ spent forty days and nights in the desert without food and water being tempted by Satan.

In short, we Christians are supposed to follow by Jesus’ example as a means to cleanse our sins (I haven't been to confession since Christmas Eve 1993) and be closer to God. According to crosswalk.com, however it seems Jesus Christ got the better end of the stick. His battle with Satan lasted only 40 days. In 2025 our time of fasting and giving up that one little thing between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday lasts 46 days.

Doesn’t seem fair, does it?

To be truthful, I have never taken Lent seriously which dates back to my early years in grade school at St. Louise de Marillac (1976-1984) being taught by the nuns. For much of the time from first grade to my entering junior high that’s all I heard from dad who asked me “what am I giving up for Lent?” God not only knows what I supposedly planned to give up but also knows how long it took for me to go back on my word hours later and scarf down candy, cookies and soft drinks.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve compared to my giving up something for Lent to the list of New Year’s resolutions I make up on December 31 as midnight approaches that I plan to accomplish the coming year. Every year the result is the same. I do not complete that list of resolutions, nor do I give up anything for Lent.

This year, however, I decided to take Lent seriously. I can’t explain the sudden change of heart except maybe the older one gets (certainly not the wiser in my case) one’s interests and attitudes change.

I remember the priest saying at an Ash Wednesday mass I attended one year how the one thing you give up for Lent should be something you can’t live without.

I’ve got less than half a handful of things I could go without the next six weeks.

Taking the Lord’s name in vain is one. God knows just how many times I say the “G” word multiple times on a daily basis whenever that Italian/Hispanic temper of mine kicks into overdrive – usually at work or behind the wheel.

Finding something else to say when venting my anger would indeed be a struggle if I gave that up. If I did so successfully the next six weeks, perhaps it will score me some brownie points with St. Peter as he goes through my long list of wrongdoings debating whether or not to let me through the pearly gates when I become one with the “Dark Side of The Force” and am called home by either the Almighty or 666.

I could give up diet cokes. I sometimes drink two or three a day. I know my liver and pancreas would appreciate it. So too would my doctor given my being diabetic in hopes my A1C blood sugar levels gets below six versus the 18 plus level it's been at for a while.

I could give up working the next six weeks and act like I am working. It’d be a great test to see how long I could get away with that.

I could give up pizza and pasta. The servers at Joe’s Pizza, Pizza Getti and Olive Garden would miss me given how I always show up a couple days week and know exactly what I order and where I like to sit.

Such are the things I could give up for Lent with the exception of not working. I was only kidding on that one despite what the powers-that-be at work will say during their little private “Come to Jesus” meetings they schedule with me often.

I only know two things that will happen March 5. One is whatever I give up that’s between me and God – yet another thing I heard a priest say which is whatever we give up should be private.

The other is I what I plan to eat after mass that day, if I go. My meal will either be a couple fish sandwiches from McDonalds with extra tartar sauce, grilled fish and veggies at Long John Silvers or assuming I don’t give up pasta for Lent, a large plate of angel hair with marinara sauce at Olive Garden (since I can’t eat meat that day).

Hopefully when the server asks what I want to drink I won’t say a Diet Coke and out of habit wind up drinking it not realizing that that might have been what I planned to give up.

That wouldn’t be a good start to the season of Lent now, would it?

©2/26/25

My number one New Year’s resolution for 2025 is…

Last week’s blog I wrote how I don’t take New Year’s resolutions seriously got me thinking despite my beliefs on the subject there are a few things I have been needing to do the past several years but never had the energy to begin much less complete them.

As I came up with that list of things to complete for 2025, I came up with what should be my one and only resolution for this year. Read on if you wish to know what that is, if you even care.

Here are nine things I plan to complete in 2025 and one resolution I will follow. A few of these I’ve already started.

1) Attend church services again every Sunday (or at least make an effort): I’ve attended church services off on this past year which is more than what I’ve done in previous years. Just not every Sunday like I’m supposed to. I’ve come to the realization, however, if I can’t find anything better to do on Sunday mornings then I might as well spend an hour in God’s house and pray I get through another week at work. Perhaps sometime this year I’ll go to confession. I haven’t been to confession since Christmas Eve 1994. My soul is pretty filthy to quote the nuns I had who taught me at St. Louise de Marillac school in La Grange Park, Ill. which closed after 62 years in 2020. I’ve a feeling my “soul” needs a major cleansing.

2) Blogging: I’ve always planned on doing a weekly blog addressing some topic I want to talk about and not what everyone in the country thinks is the flavor of the day. Time has gotten in the way of that. (I don’t get paid to blog you know!). I have been told by people the past two decades or more how my writing talents are wasted in my current job and continue to be so going on 27 years now though writing is an integral part of my work (I have to take good notes in the tickets even if it just says, “called person – went to voicemail – left message.”) This year is not only time for me to start blogging on a weekly basis but also put my writing where my mouth is and see if my talent takes me somewhere because I’ll be damned if I’m going to do my current job until retirement when there will be no social security for me to collect…which brings me to number 3.

3) Career Change: It’s not too late to make a change no matter how old I am. Money don’t buy happiness. All money does is make you do things you don’t want to do. The secret to enjoying life is doing something you enjoy doing even if it doesn’t pay well. I have no idea what my destiny is, but I know it’s definitely NOT what I’m doing now. It’s time to get a “real” job where I don’t feel like I need to take a vacation from!

4) Classes: I have tried numerous times over the years to take classes but have rarely finished. It’s hard to balance four classes and a 40-hour-a-week job I’m burned out on and yet I am not married with children, nor do I have a girlfriend in state. Yet the classes I’ve attempted to complete feel like I am working an additional 40 hours just to do the classwork. I am registered for four classes again this spring semester. I think the difference now versus previous years is I am more determined to finish my classes this time around and perhaps in the next two years or less get a degree as backup that is in addition to writing/blogging. Those of you, however, who work, are married and/or single with kids and taking four classes or more I have only one question. How the f--- do you do it????

5) Drain the Swamp: When it comes to worldly possessions you don’t take this crap with you when you die. Unless you are an Egyptian who believed like the pharaohs did and had all their possessions buried with them in the pyramids to take to the underworld. I’ve started draining the swamp already. If I can’t get my hands on a lighthouse, which will probably cost me five times more to refurbish than it will be to buy it (I may just have to settle for the LEGO one for $299) I can do with living in a “tiny home” which are equivalent to those trailer parks tornados have intense love affairs with.

6) Eat out less: Not only am I finding eating out is ridiculously expensive but is also overrated. The service half the time sucks. The food looks nothing like what is advertised. Remember the breakfast scene in “Falling Down” (1993)? Hell, the appetizers cost just as much as the meal itself. I’m finding it is cheaper to either eat at home and/or bring your lunch to work. I think this year if I’m going to continue sending my blood sugars skyrocketing and the a1c to stay in the double digits which makes me a viable candidate for a stroke or heart attack I’m going to make it worth my while. In other words, I’ll eat “real” pizza. Cicis, Domino’s, Papa Johns, and Pizza Hut is not “real” pizza. Olive Garden is “egg noodles and ketchup” and I now call Subway “Jared’s.” Do your own research if you don’t know who “Jared” is.

7) Follow a budget: I’ve never set up a monthly budget in my life…until now! Talk about a rude awakening! As the sayings go, it’s not only never too late to start a new career but also never too late to start a budget as well.

8) Go somewhere…anywhere: I’ve not had a “real” vacation in years. I am overdue for one. I need one that can last 1000 years or more. Any ideas other than a trip to “The Undiscovered Country?”

9) Take my health slightly more seriously: While five visits to the hospital since 2015 for diabetes and/or COVID issues have failed to give me pause others I’m sure would wonder if I have a death wish. Fine! I’ll take this “pain-in-the-ass” disease I got more seriously than I have since being diagnosed in 2006, but you know, diabetes is like cancer, HIV/AIDS or any other major life-threatening ailment. It’s a slow death sentence. The medications only work for so long. At least I am no longer a 300-plus-pound whale. I now continue to weigh what I was when I graduated high school in 1988 – 180 - enough to the point I got people asking me if I’m sick. Last week someone I hadn’t seen since the mid-1990s told me how she not only remembered me back when I was overweight but also had hair.

10) Just do it! Hence my number one resolution for 2025. Instead of saying I’m going to do these things on my list that I’ve meant to get to the past several years I’m going to stop saying that and just do them. In other words, JUST DO IT!

Stay tuned to 12/31/25 when I reveal if I completed ALL these things. Or maybe not. After all, nowhere on this list did I mention anything about keeping my promises.

©1/1/25

Ringing in the new year as pointless as the time wasted making resolutions

If there is ever a holiday I don’t believe in celebrating, it’s New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. I find it equivalent to celebrating one’s birthday except I see nothing positive about it since both days mean you are now a year older and in some cases, deeper in debt.

Not only do I not know the lyrics to “Auld Lang Syne” but I have never actually seen anyone band together to sing it seconds after the clock strikes midnight. I have only seen it happen in disaster movies like "The Poseidon Adventure" (1972) moments before the little boat in a bathtub was capsized by an immense tidal wave. And when Frank Sinatra and his rat pack buddies raided the safes of several Las Vegas casinos in the original "Ocean’s 11" (1960).

When you get right down to it, New Years Eve is nothing more than a petty excuse to go out and get plastered drunk with your friends or family. It’s a chance to watch whoever it is who now hosts the celebrations from New York’s Times Square as the lighted ball comes down at the stroke of midnight.

Perhaps if you are really drunk as a result of the night’s festivities, you might not remember the moment it became Jan. 1. Perhaps you are so inebriated that you ended up kissing a complete stranger and maybe even found yourself in bed with him, her or their pet the next morning.

Or maybe you forgot that list of New Year’s Resolutions already you made just hours earlier.

Yes resolutions – the kinds of goals you set only to break one or all your promises within the baby new year’s first few hours, if not days, weeks, or maybe months before that little infant grows up to be a grouchy old man.

Or do I have to bring up all those fitness commercials from 24 Hour Fitness that you see airing the month of December that urge one to start the new year off by creating the new you?

I can’t tell you how many years, and for all I know I have probably been hearing it since birth, how many times I have heard the statements, “You should make “that” your number one new year’s resolution” and “Have you come up with any resolutions you’d like to focus on for the new year?”

Perhaps the question which should be asked is how many of you as December comes to a close sit down to take less than 30 seconds, (all right a minute) to come up with ten goals or less that you’d like to accomplish in the coming year?  Don’t tell me you actually take such a trivial tradition seriously. I don’t. I don’t think I have ever wasted more than five minutes of my time taking a pointless stroll down memory lane the last week of the year to see what improvements I can make in my life.

Why should I take such a holiday seriously or resolutions for that matter? No one else does. According to a 1/3/11 article on time.com some of the top 10 commonly broken New Year’s resolutions which I have failed to follow on a yearly basis include lose weight and get fit, eat healthier and diet, get out of debt and save money, spend more time with family, and be less stressed.

There is only one reason why we celebrate the new year and no I don’t have time (nor the space here) to giving a history lesson about where New Year's Eve celebrations came from and the different traditions other countries have. You’ll have to do that on your own.

The only reason why we celebrate New Years Eve every 12 months is because that’s how long it takes for the earth to go around the sun. If we lived on Mercury, a typical year would be 88 days according to the website, www.stardate.com. Imagine that! Less than three months, the world gets to party “like it’s 1999” as Prince spoke of in his rock song. If it turns out he or she didn’t keep up with their resolutions of less than three months ago, they can just save the list and try again the next three months. And we wouldn’t have to worry about any cold weather.

What if we lived on Saturn, however, where the time it takes for the ringed planet to go around the sun is 29.5 earth years or in this case 360 months? That’s a long time to wait for New Year’s Eve to come along but if there is any consolation, that’s more than enough time for one to complete his or her resolutions thirty times over. People will have waited to party for so long that they’ll probably want to rest the next 30 years and not worry about making a list of goals. Perhaps the entire world will just take one big long holiday that lasts the next 29.5 earth years.

I have never accomplished a single New Year's Resolution I have made over the years. Perhaps I’ll start now. The best goals to set are the ones you know you can keep so my one resolution for 2025 which I plan to keep the rest of my life, along with my refusal to celebrate Dec. 31 is I AM NOT MAKING ANY!

Happy New Year!

©12/25/24

My Top 10 Christmas Songs I Can’t Stop Listening During December (IN MY OPINION – NOT YOURS)!

Every year around this time ever since youtube’s birth in 2005 I’ve always uploaded several Christmas videos to listen to throughout the month of December until Christmas Eve.

In what is probably my second shortest blog post since the one I wrote in 2015 about what I’m thankful for on Thanksgiving here are ten holiday songs I never tire of hearing that help keep me to some extent from morphing completely into Ebenezer Scrooge. (Still waiting to be visited by three ghosts on Christmas Eve).

Alex Khaskin - "It's Christmas Eve" from "A Christmas Horror Story"



Vince Guaraldi Trio - "Christmas Time Is Here"



Barenaked Ladies, Sarah McLachlan – "God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman/We Three Kings"



Michael Bublé – "All I Want For Christmas Is You"



Josh Groban – "Ave Maria"



Josh Groban – "O Holy Night"



John Lennon – "Happy Xmas – (War Is Over)"



Barry Manilow & Exposé – "Jingle Bells"



Dean Martin – "I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm"



Trans-Siberian Orchestra – "Christmas Canon"



©12/11/2024

What Lionsgate’s AI generated “Megalopolis” trailer finally proved about film critics

If there’s one thing Lionsgate’s latest trailer that promoted director Francis Ford Coppola’s controversial $120 million pet passion project he’d been working on since 1977, “Megalopolis”, using reported AI generated and fabricated quotes from notable reviewers of decades past bashing the filmmaker’s previous classics, it is that movie critics don’t matter.

Even if the negative pull quotes from notable reviewers Vincent Canby, Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris among them featured in the trailer were truthful critiques of the filmmaker’s classics “The Godfather” (1972), “Apocalypse Now” (1979) and “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1992) doesn’t mean everyone agreed on their assessments.

I don’t listen to the film critics. Not once in my over five decades on this planet had I ever read a review hoping the supposed know-it-all reviewers would like a movie I was planning to see.

What attracted me to the reviews from such renowned writers Richard Corliss (1944-2015) of Time, Roger Ebert (1942-2013) of the Chicago Sun-Times, Pauline Kael (1919-2001) of The New Yorker and Bruce Williamson (1927-1998) of Playboy (there was more to the risqué periodical than just the pretty pictures) was their unique writing styles.

Same reason why today the only two critics I read on occasion are Stephanie Zacharek of Time and contributor Ross Douthat of National Review.

If I had paid attention to the vitriol the critics spewed out in their columns about the following the past five decades, I’d have avoided "1941" (1979), the Airport disaster movies of the 1970s, "Alexander" (2004), "Armageddon" (1998), "Beyond the Poseidon Adventure" (1979), "Cannonball Run II" (1981), "Christopher Columbus: The Discovery" (1992), "Dune" (1984), "Eternals" (2021), "Event Horizon" (1997), "Firestarter" (1984), "Gigli" (2003), “The Invasion” (2007), “The Island of Dr. Moreau" (1996), "Last Action Hero" (1993), "The Marvels" (2023), "Police Academy" (1984), "Porky’s" (1981), "Raise the Titanic" (1980), “Rhinestone” (1984), "Snakes On a Plane" (2006), the Star Wars prequels (1999-2005), "The Swarm" (1979), “Toys” (1992), and just about everything director Zack Snyder’s churned out before entering and exiting Warner’s DC superhero franchise known to what either fans or the fantasy filmmaker himself calls the “Snyderverse”.

Oh, how my mind wonders on the mass amounts of man hours I wasted watching what critics considered celluloid junk when my time could have been spent elsewhere. It’s enough to make me wake up in a cold sweat!

No. Not really.

Seeing movies is not only all about being entertained but also in my case following the “law of contrary public opinion” Ricky Roma spoke of in "Glengarry Glen Ross" (1992)

“If everyone thinks one thing, then I say, bet the other way,” Roma said.

I don’t regret watching any of the atrocities the critics loathed. Some I liked. Some I didn’t. The ones I didn’t they at least managed to be bad enough to the point it was a fun bad movie I loved to hate. Others were guilty pleasures.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat through movies the top reviewers and audiences couldn’t stop raving about only to find myself, whether at home watching such overhyped pictures on the flatscreen or at the theater that made me want to scream at the top of my lungs the minute the credits rolled shouting, “Da f--k was this s--t?!?!”

You want examples? Here’s a few: "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968), "The Crying Game" (1992), "Howard’s End" (1992), "The English Patient" (1996), “Avatar” (2009), “Deadpool” (2016), "Black Panther" (2018), "Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood" (2019), “Avatar: The Way of Water” (2022),"Top Gun: Maverick" (2022), "Everything Everywhere All at Once" (2022), "Barbie" (2023), “Oppenheimer” (2023) and "Poor Things" (2023).

Coppola shouldn’t be upset by the false advertising Lionsgate used to promote what I and most everyone assumed at the time would be his swan song (he’s reportedly at work on two more films). The clever marketing ploy was the studio’s attempt to prove how wrong the critics have been on their opinions. They succeeded.

I, for one, loved Lionsgate’s promotional misfire which is still accessible on other YouTube channels but not from the distributor who pulled the trailer the same day it aired on the net Aug. 22. I haven’t been able to get enough of the “Megalopolis” trailer’s first 40 seconds as the falsified pull quotes raced across the screen to the tune of an updated instrumental version of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “Lacrimosa” as longtime actor and collaborator Laurence Fishburne narrated the preview’s opening with the words, “True genius is often misunderstood.”

Rest assured I will not be reading, let alone relying on what the know-it-all critics say about the film, good or bad. I will not even be upset if the picture is not another triumph like “The Godfather” and is instead another commercial failure equivalent of the 85-year-old filmmaker’s 1981 musical, “One from the Heart” and the troubled mobster production/musical want-to-be “The Cotton Club” (1984).

I’ll decide for myself when I see “Megalopolis” on IMAX opening day Sept. 27 if the directing legend’s latest “fable” inspired by the fall of Rome is “A sloppy self-indulgent movie,” “a spectacular failure”, “a beautiful mess,” or “a triumph of style over substance.” Pull quotes seen in the trailer the critics wrote about in other movies they didn’t approve of but not Coppola’s.

“Megalopolis” may not be, as Fishburne narrated in the trailer, “an event nothing can prepare you for” but seeing it on the big screen will nevertheless be an event independent of itself.

©8/28/24

Why are we so fascinated by the evil that men do?

Why are we so fascinated by the evil that men do, so much so, viewers can’t get enough of the grisly, often unsettling, hour-long crime documentaries and cheap questionable made-for-cable-TV movies of the week on Lifetime. The stories about such real-life villains from Bernie Madoff and Alex Murdaugh to mass shooters and serial killers have been rehashed several times over. What new information could one say about these no-good pieces of shit that wasn’t already revealed when they first happened years or decades ago.

Is it to introduce a new generation to their atrocities so their tales of committing one, if not all the seven deadly sins live on in infamy? Or God forbid, inspire them to commit the same crimes?

I asked myself such questions after viewing the 2016 documentary, “77 Minutes”, which explored the mass shooting at a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, California July 18, 1984, that left 21 people dead and 19 injured before the gunman was taken out by a SWAT team sharpshooter.

Ironically the time it took for authorities to get the go-ahead to stop the gunman’s rampage forty years ago is the same amount of time police in Uvalde, Texas got the order to engage an 18-year-old mass shooter who during those same “77 minutes” gunned down 19 students, two teachers and wounded 17 others May 24, 2022, at Robb Elementary School. 

Not only are the comparisons eerily similar in law enforcement's failure to immediately engage both gunmen, let alone the time the massacres began to the time they ended, but the number of dead at Robb Elementary was the same number of those killed at the McDonald's.

The mass shooting, like so many that came soon after the past four decades, was another case where evil ALWAYS triumphed over good and though the good succeeded in eventually stopping the perpetrators, or the shooters cowardly took themselves out before battling police, the damage had already been done. Lives are forever ruined. No one from those who were there who lived to tell about it to the viewers who watched the aftermath on the news or on YouTube would ever be the same.

The unspeakable tragedies stay with us long after they’ve become distant memories we hope to never look back on.

In a perfect world the minute these no-good pieces of shit departed there’d be no more retellings of their despicable life stories much to our personal glee. They’d be doing their time in the fires of Hell prior to their meeting with the Grim Reaper and being denied entrance to the pearly gates by Saint Peter and the Almighty.

The reasons why we can’t seem to get enough of hearing about these perpetrators could be numerous. Perhaps it’s because just when we thought we’d seen all the crimes various individuals have committed against society that we question if not admit being a little fascinated looking for answers on what makes someone go off the deep end? That a person with such a hatred for the Hispanic community whose victims ranged from eight months to 74-years-old could, we hoped at the time, would only be an isolated incident. In 1984 perhaps the devil was telling us “normal” people who have a respect for human life, “You ain’t seen nothing yet!”

I haven’t dwelled on the McDonald’s massacre since watching the documentary in July nor have I bothered to look up the life stories of other infamous mass murderers the past four decades.

All these monsters are the equivalent of Satan and we’re Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden being enticed to eat the forbidden fruit. I just know crime enthusiasts are salivating over producer Ryan Murphy’s next 10-episode series called “American Sports Story” chronicling the rise and fall of football star, Aaron Hernandez, which airs on FX Sept. 17.

There’s no stopping the entertainment industry and the media from churning out what’s mostly regurgitated often times over sensationalized tabloid trash.

The question is how many curious viewers can keep themselves from a taking a bite of that big rotten apple.

©7/24/24