Dolloth
 People making fun of The Family Circus is one of the most American things a patriot can do.
Somewhat related, Gary Larson tells the story of when a Dayton paper accidentally switched his Far Side caption with one for Dennis the Menace. He said the Far Side only got weirder, but the misplaced caption showing Dennis saying to his mother, "I see your little, petrified skull, labeled and sitting on a shelf somewhere" actually improved it.
Hungerford sends in this link via BoingBoing of a guy who adds Lovecraftian captions to Family Circus panels.
Here is my contribution.
The Hollywood Christmas Parade
 There is nothing wrong with The Big Lebowski except for when Walter mentions the In 'n' Out Burger near Camrose. There is no In 'n' Out Burger near Camrose. All that is near Camrose, which is a street just south of the Hollywood Bowl, is the place I parked to watch the Hollywood Christmas Parade.
(The nearest In 'n' Out Burger is located at the corner of Orange and Sunset. It is where my wife and I had our first date.)
I haven't been to a parade since hgh school, and then I was forced to march in them. It's a lot better watching them, because only in extreme circumstances might one step in horse manure. Back in high school we were always stuck behind the horses, playing "25 or 6 to 4" and a very lame version of "Shadows of the Night".
But ACI and I, as well as Steve Johnson, Robyn Simms and, later, TAARG, made it through the crowds to stand near the corner of Hollywood and Highland to watch several spruced up high school bands, downward-spiral or reality-show celebrities (exception: the great Ernie Hudson), and L.A.'s political establishment ride down Hollywood Blvd. in open-topped, shiny cars.
This was a good thing to do. I was reminded that people really take care of their vehicles here.
 There were also several hundred horses, some from the U.S. Marshalls, and some from - well, by the end of the parade I figured that anyone with a horse could get in. I determined that next year I would do a lot of horse and march in the parade.
High school bands have changed little since my time in high school. But these bands, mostly from the middle of the country and the south, often featured double drum majors and marching Sousaphones. The piccolos were underused for the most part, and wielded by fat kids.
Celebrities I saw were:
 Dick Van Patten
David Hasselhoff
Eartha Kitt
Patrick Warburton
L'il Romeo (he looked right at Steve and marked him for death)
L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa
Mickey Rooney was there and, though I have been thinking about him recently, he didn't die.
 There were also cars full of celebrities I have never heard of, including Eve La Rue. With a name like Eve La Rue, however, she should be famous. Maybe she'll marry Mickey Rooney. Sometimes the parade would stop and I would be faced with an idling car full of celebrities I'd never heard of. They looked at me, I looked at them. Because it was Hollywood, each of us mouthed the words, "Are you famous?"
The Trojans of Findlay High School in Ohio were there. I asked them to say hello to my friend Navin but they were too busy stepping in the ever-increasing mounds of horse manure.
The biggest celebrity? Astronaut Buzz Aldrin riding on the Zathura float.
No one was knifed, no children were shot by the LAPD after their fathers used them as human shields (I didn't even try), Santa Claus did make it down Santa Claus lane, and it was about 68 degrees.
 Yukio "Pat" Morita died on Thursday, around the time a group of us was talking about his work in Blansky's Beauties. His name was brought up again at my birthday party. This m0rning, I opened a birthday gift, The Autobiography of Bigfoot, in which Morita was again mentioned. It was only today I found out he'd died.
This leads me to believe that I have come in to my birthright as of yesterday, and can now kill people just by thinking about them. With great power comes great responsibility.
Maybe your mortality, not mine
 I had an excellent birthday chock full of quiet reflection, three square meals, thoughtful discourse, and lots of drinking. The staff of Tom Bergin's took very good care of me, despite being only a few hundred yards from where Biggie got jacked. Here we are in their Marty Barrett shrine, christened 2003.
My compadre Alx Meza, an artist, used the work of George Seurrat and pointilism to rationalize all manner of crimes. "You can't really quantify your life's experience until you stand away from where you are," he said. That's so much classier than what I do, which is to reference Benson and hope no one will notice my genocides and check fraud.
Tom Misuraca's balls
 I went to Thanksgiving with 32 friends from my California experiment (now in its sixth groundbreaking year!). In the three years since I've attended this particular event with this group, many of us have gotten married (or remarried) and spawned offspring. Our lives have changed considerably but we are all still svelte and glamorous, clearly benefitting from a stress-free L.A. lifestyle. Also: we're all very wealthy.
It is only in the past decade that members of my family have become my friends, but my friends have always been my family. My birth family would have never tolerated Krab-filled mushrooms or empanadas on Thanksgiving (or any day). For these options and many others I am profoundly grateful.
As Time's winged chariot draws near, we are also getting a little nostalgic. Dinner table conversation touched on Blansky's Beauties, the forgotten sixth Happy Days-related show.
More important, our Prog Rock pal Lance read Abraham Lincoln's original Thanksgiving proclamation, making us nostalgic for a time when Chief Executives were literate.
Our hosts, Sarah and Greg Thran, were as usual fantastic collective Misters Rourke to our Barbis Benton and Davids Birney.
I'm grateful for friends who can accommodate the subjects of Nancy Walker, Abraham Lincoln, and shooting a load across someone's rack (nautical jargon) in one dinner. Here are some pictures of American heroes.
 It's been a very good year. It has also been a very tough year. As I've had tough years before, I'm embarrassed that I'm involved in anything that's redundant. It seems inappropriate for a writer. Furthermore, it seems inappropriate for a writer.
But this Thanksgiving will be good. We're driving out to Malibu where it will be like the ancient Romans met the Pilgrims, took their food, and slaughtered them. My daughter has redistributed my iPod to one of her secret places, so I will be relying on antique CD technology to get us out there.
Speaking of antique things, here is a story from my second Thanksgiving in California. What an odd week that was.
 I haven't watched television in about a year, but I am very interested about this auction of a bobblehead of a woman on Trading Spouses. Wait for the page to load to hear the "Da da da"-inspired theme song.
 The last time I altered my own chemistry was September 22, 2002 at Big Bear Lake (oddly enough, three years later my daughter would take her first steps. Coincidence? I think so). Anyway, amidst the fog machines and the lasers, I watched a VHS of Pink Floyd's Pulse concerts.
As the curtain began to drop, I remember thinking, "How did Pink Floyd know I would be watching this tape? How did they know to write Comfortably Numb for me?"
Pulse will be released soon on DVD. I heard on the radio that it will be available as early as December 5 but Amazon is saying January, 2006. One thing is certain: I will need to play it very loud to approximate the original effect.
 Since we're all fabulously rich and buy whatever we want, it is often difficult getting presents for special occasions. One such occasion was the recent baby shower of my friends James and Antoinette.
They are about to sprout a son, tentatively titled Noah Boston Levine.
I made the fetus a website to avoid awkward identity isssues later on. Other than bartending services, this is perhaps the only individualized gift I'm capable of giving (personalized CDs, once the catch-all of any gift-giving season, have become, due to their ease of manufacture, cheap. This is not my sentiment, but that of Congress, which unanimously resolved that opinion last term).
We're looking forward to young Noah's arrival in early December. We're hoping to drive some pre-natal traffic to the site to start an affiliate program, etc.
 I went to a birthday party this weekend in which the metal sign was thrown inappropriately (to wit: Angela here was exhorting Jessica to take a shot of tequila, not that Jessica needs to be exhorted). Jessica wasn't biting the head off a bat or invoking Satan or anything, to my knowledge, so maybe the metal sign was unleashed too early.
I came home and, lo! here was this Onion article.
Another show tonight
 The final Improv Supergroup Musical will be tonight at Creative Grounds in Glendale. Last week we did a musical about Abu-Ghraib and a parallel universe. In fact, both times a parallel universe has come up. Anyway, it was filthy, and a very good time.
The cast this week is me, Seth Shapiro, Debi Derryberry, Katie Wise, Steve Benaquist, Chris Bonno, Anna Homler, Rena Malin, Matt Kaye, Mike Berson, and Kirk Zipfel. There are more woimen in this show than have been in previous incarnations, so I'm assuming there will be an utter structural breakdown. Of course I kid.
Creative Grounds is located at 3042 Glendale Blvd.
Hungerford wins this round
 There are five people I know who are fans of Jaws to the extent that I am a fan of Jaws.
They are Brian Descheneaux, Ian Wilcox, Sherman T. Headbutt, Jack Neary, and Paul Hungerford.
Today Paul was filming something for NBC and needed to get a cast of his upper body made. It turns out the company making the casts also made the shark for this summer's JawsFest on Martha's Vineyard.
Paul Hungerford is a bastard.
As you know, Amity means "friendship".
Knowing my neighbors
 I don't really want to be here.
When I moved to California I lived about a mile from the ocean. The living situation wasn't great but I could take my bike to the beach every day, and I did. As I moved around the city I found things to like everywhere I went, but I still regretted not being near the water. The beach is the #1 reason to live here, I think, and if you have to drive to get there ...
The fact that I am still renting at my advanced age vexes me, but for the first time in many years I live in a neighborhood where I know my neighbors.
My downstairs neighbor, Ian, has become a friend of the family. My neighbor across the hall is a brain-damaged Vietnamese tattoo artist. His wife is a sullen caucasian. When I met him, he said, "My wife is white, too, so it's OK."
People in this part of Los Angeles don't know how to park. Since we use our garage for a meth lab, we park on the street. People out here tend to see parking as an unlimited resource/Manifest Destiny-type commodity, so if there are five parking spots in front of a house, they will take up all of them with as few cars as possible. Once every space was occupied by just two cars.
The neighborhood is mostly Armenian. The guy in the house next to me, Armo (pictured), has been here for at least two decades. He does not speak English. He patrols the quarter acre lot on which his house stands and, because there are no Armenians in my house, he patrols that one, too. He walks up and down the street all day. I don't know what he does for work.
This morning he knocked on my door. My car was parked on the wrong side of the street and was in danger of getting a ticket because of street cleaning. "Your car. Ticket. Go," he said.
He and his wife (we call her Armette) pinch our daughter harshly and leave her redolent of their colognes. Marisol likes it. It is a challenge for us as parents. When Armo has a barbecue, he will give me vodka and spiced beast. Last week he asked for our Halloween pumpkin. Ian says he will return with some sweet and horrible-tasting pumpkinseed paste that Armette makes.
He and his son appear to be running a recycling scam. They have appropriated the city-owned recycling containers for some of the houses on our block. The first day I went downstairs with a bag of recycling, Armo intercepted me.
"I do," he said.
"Where do these go?" I asked.
"I take," he said.
It's impossible arguing with someone when he can't understand you and you are unwilling to talk in pronoun/verb constructions.
I think Armo and his friends prevent crime in our neighborhood by walking the beat. They do not prevent pinching or parking crimes, but it's nice to know our neighbors care.
I can see the San Bernardino mountains from my office window, but I would rather see the ocean.
Crawl, Walk
 ACI walked across the floor for me on September 22. No camera or other living individual witnessed this. TAARG was appropriately impressed and weepy, but when the walking did not repeat itself for several weeks, Rebecca began to use language like, "Well, Marty says he saw her walking in September, but..."
On Halloween weekend Marisol began walking in earnest, possibly due to spectral influences emanating from the carpeting. She still finds it more convenient to crawl or, if in need, levitate.
***
 Speaking of crawling, Rebecca finished her acclaimed run of Crawl, Fade to White this weekend. It's great to have her back. Now I will have time to campaign for a Supreme Court appointment.
 I'm re-reading James Joyce's Dubliners in preparation for my ground assault on Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. Nothing says "Stay away from Ireland" better than Dubliners.
Here is a link to one zany and upbeat story, "A Little Cloud". Read it with the lights on, far away from sharp objects, rosaries, or infants.
Slight site update
 More out of a sense of boredom than a need to clear away debris, I updated the site a bit and will continue pruning over the next couple of weeks, consolidating items here, moving things there, pretending other things never existed, etc.
 The Stag has a new face.
Like Mordred in Excalibur, Jagermeister bottles are now sheathed in a form-fitting and re-useable bottle-cozy.
This is one of the most exciting alcohol-related things that has ever happened to me. (Getting one of these for my birthday in exactly three weeks would be even better.)
Show tonight
 I had such a good time performing the Improv Supergroup musical show at Creative Grounds in Glendabulous that I'll be doing it again tonight and next Wednesday. The cast list for this week is as follows: me, Seth Shapiro, Denny Siegel, Steve Benaquist, Sam Crouppen, Mark D'Albis, Adam Felber, Mike Berson, and Lance Barber.
Selected audience response:
"Jesus."
"Oh my God."
"I love you."
Creative Grounds is located at 3042 Glendale Blvd. The shows start at 8.
 Halloween passed without a recurrence of the murder that happened in our building this time last year. The new tenant of the haunted apartment, Ian, made sure to be uncharacteristically social for the weekend, getting the hell out of his accursed apartment four nights in a row.
Silverlake friends suggested having a kooky seance. Ian reminded them, "but I'm the one who has to sleep there." They had the seance elsewhere, calling to ask things like, "The Ouija Board is apelling out 'I will asphyxiate the upstairs tenant.' Does that mean anything to you?"
Marisol was visited by the Reaper, who said he'd see her again some time around her 105th birthday.
We gave out candy to about 30 kids. It was my first time giving out candy in at least ten years. One girl came as a Ghetto Princess.
****
 The Reaper also visited our neighbor, Armo, saying, "Learn to fucking park."
(I just fixed the following link):
I determined to spend my life developing technology that would scare people cheaply.
****
 Our friend Alicia bequeathed us some catnip bubbles to torment Jonah.
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