Where's Robby Benson When You Need Him?

The sun has been taken away, in favor of winds and rain, and for whatever reason this isn't helping how anti-social I am at the moment. My mood makes me feel like I'm due to be featured in an ABC Afterschool Special.

After all, if they taught me anything, it's that my desire to sleep a lot, to not talk to many people, and to avoid my job means I'm either depressed or on drugs. And since I can say for sure that I'm not on drugs, we'd better find Robbie Benson to play a young me. Maybe he'll come from the past to tell me about a key choice I made that led to my desire to stay in bed all day. That'd be just like young-me, after all: time traveling and then interrupting me in the midst of a good nap only to kick me when I'm down. Young-me was often a jackass like that, though he was great fun at parties and really good about scoring free drinks for the table.

Whatever this mood is, I'm trying not to wallow in it, not to send snarky e-mails - or worse, ones that are so true they scald. I'm trying to give into the urge to reply to the Ex Who Crushed Paris or to the Grad School Friend Turned Nutter. Instead, I'm listening to music and trying to find things worth thinking about that don't piss me off. Here are a couple of nice musical touchstones. On the loud side, there's Be Your Own Pet's homage to "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" with "The Kelly Affair" (the name of the band in the movie before G-Man changed it to "The Carrie Nations"). On the softer side, check out Bat For Lashes' "Trophy". Once the term's up, my buddy "Eric Stratton" has been working diligently for R.E.M. and Pearl Jam tickets. That also likely means camping. And there are other things, like the return of "Geek Date," the lingering hopes of my March Madness bracket, and the impending return of 'Battlestar Galactica" (check out the semi-"Last Supper" homage on the opening page).

So don't worry too much. You can have young Mr. Benson put the script down, and you can keep the melodramatic music. But if you see young-me, feel free to smack him upside the head. He had it coming, almost certainly, and he should know better than to try and wake me up.