The human brain is a strange thing. I was trying to take a shower, but I couldn't stop thinking about the handful of people in my life I know I treated very badly, by which I mean specifically the people I treated badly who didn't deserve it.

I know I'm a selfish asshole, always have been, and, frankly, I'm generally okay with that. Other people, even people I know quite well, often make me uncomfortable, and I self-defensively want to keep them at arms length. As any good dog will tell you, the best way to do that is to growl and bark at anyone on the other side of the fence. But in the past half century, there have been a few people, about five I can name easily, who did not earn the behavior I showed them.

I'm bothered by the lingering concern that that my actions likely caused them discomfort and lasting emotional damage. That sounds narcissistic, doesn't it? That I could have the power to so strongly influence their lives for the worse? I hope not. Obviously they should never have given me such power, but more importantly, if they did, I shouldn't have taken advantage of it. Shame on me. I wish I had the skill and emotional stability to have communicated better.

In the movie Billy Madison, an older, wiser Billy (played by Adam Sandler) calls his former bullying victim (played by Steve Buscemi) and apologizes for past actions. I'm not going to do that. While I regret my past behavior and those I have wronged probably deserve an apology, I don't think any good can come from my investigating old wounds. I'm not in any twelve-step program. (I know how those apologies typically go.) And, more importantly, I still don't have the skill and emotional stability to communicate better. If Steve Buscemi is going to shoot anyone, it might as well be me.

There. I feel better for having typed that. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a shower to finish.

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In an apt metaphor for America in 2025,¹ I'm ending the year trying to find a bandage that will stick and cover the self-inflicted wound to my scrotum.²

¹ You know what I mean. I have actively tried to avoid posting about current events this year because I've been trying to keep my attention on things that don't make me miserable. The results have been mixed. I've been through four 1.75 liter bottles of Kaluha.

² It's not what you think, unless you think I intentionally stabbed myself with a pointy object. I nicked a tiny skin tag with scissors. Maybe I *should* shave; band-aids would adhere better.

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I think between all the cinnamon rolls, donuts, candy, hot chocolate, ham, mashed potatoes, and pie, I gave myself the gift of an extra 10 pounds for Christmas.

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This may come as a surprise to you, but I'm frequently irritated by the things I say and do. A little voice inside my head judges and tells me that it was pretentious or dull or cruel or any number of other words it looked up in a thesaurus under "wrong." I've been told that I shouldn't pay too much attention to that little voice, that I should be kinder to myself, but some days it's harder than others, and right now that voice is making it very hard to post anything that doesn't make me want to slap myself.

So instead, here's a picture I took this afternoon while the poodles were playing in Dad's backyard.

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My dreams lately have been full of shootings, stabbings, and death, but I wouldn't say I was having nightmares. Any outright horror in them has been subdued, like in a classic Hollywood crime story. I generally feel tense, not afraid. Using the language of movie genres, maybe I should call them suspense-mares.

One thing they seem to have in common is that many are set or begin in Victorian houses chock-full of bedrooms with dark-stained wood wall paneling, well-worn hardwood floors, cast-iron beds, chamber pots, and ornately carved fireplaces with roaring fires. And when I say houses full of bedrooms, I mean exactly that: the only rooms in these houses are bedrooms. Even the hallways, stairwells, and closets seem to have been adapted to bedrooms.

To be clear: these houses are not scary to me. I'm not trapped; I can leave the building any time I want. And I almost always approve of the tasteful layout, furnishings, decor. I'd willingly live in any of them. (Though, as my family will attest, I have unusual taste in residential architecture. Mom has long called eclectic houses with outdated designs "Walter Houses." Finances aside, I've never been able to understand why anyone would want to live in a house that looked like anyone else's.)

According to a quick Googling of the dream symbology of bedrooms, "a bedroom in a dream symbolizes your private inner self." Okay, if you say so. But what if it's all bedrooms all the way down? Am I just an especially deep person? Or so narcissistic that I'm just a Droste effect of navel gazing to infinity?

If my brain is trying to tell me something, I wish it'd just come out and say it.

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Since I usually post about Georgia home football games, I suppose I should mention that the final tickets in my annual season package were for today's home finale against the 1-9 Charlotte 49ers. I did not go. I gave the tickets to the daughter of a high-school friend who went to Georgia Tech (ha-ha!), which means I watched from the comfort of my couch as freshman running back Bo Walker's two-touchdown debut paved the way to a 35-3 route. Good for Bo. I hope he makes a lot of other people's money playing ball.

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I just read that famous performance artist Yoko Ono, who everyone knows only because of her famous performance art and for no other reason, once published a "book of instructions" (Grapefruit) containing a conceptual think piece ("Number Piece 1") in which she instructed readers to "Count all the words in the book instead of reading them." My knee-jerk response to that knowledge was, "damn, that's stupid." That's the same as telling someone to go a museum and focus on measuring the size of all the frames. And then, as I was feeling very superior in my judgment, it dawned on me that counting the number of words in a book is exactly the sort of thing I might do without being prompted. (122 so far. Now 126. Is this art?)

I do not understood what this says about me, but I do have the sudden urge to go find a band to break up.

154.

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I'm pretty sure that tonight's game matching #10 Texas against #5 Georgia was the last game I'm going to see in Sanford Stadium as a season ticket holder.

To ensure we made it this time (after the traffic fiasco that prevented us from seeing Mississippi last month), Mom and I left the house four-and-a-half hours early. For many years, we parked at Clarke Central High School, where parking fees helped fund extracurricular activities, but as the University has driven tailgating farther and farther from expensive campus lots, the high school now fills up extra early. So we parked at the dentist office across the street instead. Mom wanted to walk the old route through the student center into the stadium, which ultimately only served as a reminder that the University has built new barriers to block it. Oh well. We had plenty of time, and were still in our seats 90 minutes before kickoff, even after I was misled by some context clues (temporary stadium seats that looked like the old seat backs replaced earlier this year) and mistakenly accused someone else of being in our seats. Poor Mom. She's usually in bed by 9, but we didn't get home again until after 2AM. (Don't worry about Audrey: the dogsitter got her fed and to bed on time.)

As it happens, the guy I wrongly asked to move has been attending UGA games for decades, even after moving from Covington, GA, to Florida, but he said after a few decades, he canceled his season tickets and now instead spends that money and more buying tickets on the secondary market just for the games he wants to attend (in Athens and in other locations for other teams). It's a sound plan, one I've been contemplating a lot recently in this modern era of pay-for-play college football. Once upon a time, the university told me my donations bought books and meals. Now, my money finances base salaries, freeing big-donor money to outbid other colleges for the best kickers in the transfer portal. Somehow, I don't find that as satisfying.

Which is not to say that I don't think the players should be paid. Since they are the product, they should get the lion's share of whatever the football program takes in. But it's also fair for me to judge whether I think I'm getting my value's worth from my season tickets. Given that I only made it to two games this year (UGA closes its home schedule next week against 1-9 Charlotte at 12:45 PM, and I am definitely not going), I think the math is pretty clear.

As it happens, when I wasn't stuck in my own head thinking about the future, I did notice there was also a football game played in Athens. It was okay, but it certainly did not live up to the hype. (Though I'm probably spoiled by the two spectacular wins UGA put on Texas last season.) Georgia was pretty obviously the better team for most of this game, even if their offensive coordinator was calling predictable plays that made Texas's defensive line look amazing for about half the game. But the imprecision of the Longhorn's youthful quarterback (some kid named Arch Manning) ultimately doomed them. You'll read in the tabloids about fourth down conversions and an onside kick that blew the game open late, but Georgia had 14 points by halftime, more than enough to win what would become a 35-10 blowout. Good Dogs.

I hope that some other team will be nice and give Georgia a chance to play in the SEC title game. If that happens, I'll happily watch that game with my dogs beside me on the couch.

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Considered topics for today's blog post:

• Tried Vietnamese pho. Didn't like it.
• Is life really worth living if you can't drink all the Coca-Cola you want?
• The tyranny of the Rule of Three when making lists
• Whether the death penalty should be reserved for people who decorate for Christmas during the first week of November (or, God forbid, earlier)

I try to present the facade of someone who is reasonably emotionally stable (in part because I inherently conflate stoicism with strength), but I'm having trouble typing something that doesn't strike me on a re-read as maudlin, self-pitying, or grossly insulting to the intelligence of anyone within eyeshot.

So I think maybe this is all I'll post today. Instead, I'm going to go give a poodle a cuddle. I encourage you to do the same (but get your own poodles; mine are busy).

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I'm so happy with how our Halloween dog portraits turned out, let's keep looking at pictures! You probably won't be as impressed with this next set, but they represent some of the graphic design work I've done in the past year for a local vintage toy store that I think turned out well.

To be clear, I do not mean to take create any of the art: those all belong to their original copyright holders for those toys. I just laid everything out to create some attractive 4- and 8-foot in-store store displays. For what it's worth, this is the kind of work that is increasingly being turned over to generative AI. My days are numbered.

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