Down With Love--and with A Certain Show

--as a topic of fulmination, at any rate. I woke up this morning, looked over my last two posts, rolled my eyes, and muttered, "Give me a f***ing break." (And yes, I actually spoke in asterisks. It's not easy--very glottal.) Love and its absence is fundamentally boring, isn't it? Someone who's happy in love is tedious and irritating, someone who's unhappy in love is...tedious and irritating. Basically, it's an emotion--and thus, while it's engaging to experience it, it's dull to talk about it, especially at length. I mean, sex is fun, but would you want to read a long, explicit description of--OK, bad example. Food--better--one of my favorite things to do at restaurants is to take the bottle of wine and, reading the description of the 'flavors' and 'overtones' and the 'finish' of said vintage, ask my compatriots what it is they think they're tasting. Nobody ever gets it right--"vanilla!" "blackberry!" "chocolate!" "cherry!" "parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme!"--and we all laugh at the purple prose of the most bizarre description-- "a smooth finish of chutney and baked potato"--describing food is just...pointless. Taste doesn't translate well into prose. Much less something like love. So, f*** it. Moving on--

Have I mentioned that I could not give less of a rat's ass about the premiere tonight of The Sopranos? I couldn't. Not if you paid me. I no longer care--and, like most HBO subscribers, I once cared a lot. But now? Meh. I feel about the show the way I felt about The Godfather III--even before it came out and was revealed to be a scar on the face of an otherwise masterful cinematic narrative--can we ever forget the soul-dead look on Michael's broodinf face at the end of that second film--goddammit, that's how the story ends!--my first thought upon hearing that it was being made was, "Do we really need any more of this?" No, no we don't. I don't care about these people anymore. I simply don't. The first few seasons were brilliant, and then David Chase because an 800-pound gorilla--someone whom no one would say "no" to--as in "No, David, that idea doesn't work"--or "No, David, I think we need the story to focus on this character"--instead, we got meandering crap, material so dull that even actors as brilliant as David Strathairn and Steve Buscemi couldn't save it. We're now at the stage where, Tony and Co. having killed off all the interesting characters, we have to introduce new characters just so that they can eventually be killed in that last episode. To hell with it. Yes, Adriana's murder was chilling beyond words--no doubt about it. But one brilliant moment or two does not a season justify. Much less a season that comes around about as often as a presidential election. I'm done. I'm out. Y'all can watch--I'm going to read Gibbon, play XBox, and go to bed feeling free and easy...