My Willie Nelson Christmas
How the gravel-voiced country outlaw became my Santa Claus
The story of a discount CD that keeps on giving
The Easter Bunny is bogus, by the way
I didn’t grow up in the country, but my family liked to pretend as much around Christmas. We'd build a fire together, drink eggnog together, and decorate our tree together — just the four of us, my parents, my brother, and I. From our home’s vantage in south Los Angeles, upon a hillside once known for grazing and specialty row crops, our living room overlooked an endless basin of suburban pavement and twinkling city lights. Our tree always went in this awkward catty-corner beside the living room windows — where it'd be secured into its stand and given a perimeter skirt of linen snow — and the singular soundtrack to our adorning of its limbs was Christmas with Willie Nelson.
It was a pleasant scene, too pleasant for my liking. I envied my father’s childhood in the outskirts of Milwaukee, where it actually snowed. He found my longing for extreme weather ridiculous. So to deter me, he told stories …
Malibu Versus Nobu
Why SoCal’s surfing paradise stinks
There is Poo in the ’Bu
Surf Nazis, selfish billionaires, and the young punk Sean Penn in his Chevy Caprice reflect the spirit of Malibu’s inhospitable Mother
Surfing Malibu, when the conditions are right, can feel like a waking dream. Can be, because usually, surfing Malibu means fighting surly crowds, with ten people hassling for position on every wave. But once in a while, I’ve caught that wave that all surfers rehearse in their heads: on a classic longboard, you turn towards shore and paddle to catch the wave just as it rises to break; dropping down the face, you pop to your feet, push on your back foot to turn the board and accelerate down the line, take two steps towards the nose and pause, trying to be as graceful as a ballet dancer poised just ahead of the curling lip. That moment of stillness balanced on swirling water might last a second at most. Then it collapses, and you shuffle back, adjust your feet, and read the next section of the wave, or maybe you wipe out in bliss.
When the wind cooperates, the water’s surface becomes what surfers call …
Oh, Canada. Oh, Crap.
Euthanasia laws, a government that targets normal people’s bank accounts and gives medals to Nazis, have turned our neighbor to the north into a threat to free people everywhere.
Justin Trudeau’s father was a cuckold.
Neil Young, go home!
When I think of Canada, I think of snow, maple syrup, “O Canada,” and ice skating (specifically that of Elvis Stojko). I think of Wayne Gretzky. I think of my parents’ love of Vancouver as “the most beautiful city in the world,” of the supposedly global metropolis that is Toronto, the culinary delights of Montreal, of the vast emptiness of its northern reaches, and sure, of its sort of goofy little brother status vis-à-vis my home nation, the United States of America. And, from that point of view, that of the superior, alpha citizenry, something else I think about, and that really bugs me, is how Canada could have produced three of the greatest musical geniuses and poets in the history of mankind: Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young. They all ended up down here, they don’t live in the Great White North anymore, do they? So, why do I have to acknowledge that it made them?
Blasphemous as it …
