I'm back, bitches.

I wish I could say I return from my vaca­tion refreshed and with a renewed sense of blog­ging pur­pose, but you know, with­in mere hours of recon­nect­ing with my medi­um of choice I was look­ing around think­ing, “Damn, what are yo-yos X, Y and Z yam­mer­ing about now? Who signed me up for this? Is there any escape from noise?”

To tell you the truth, near the end of our sojourn in the mid­w­est, a fair por­tion of which was spent vis­it­ing the in-laws, My Lovely Wife and I hit upon what we con­sidered a very attract­ive plan: to entirely renounce adult­hood and live out the rest of our lives under the roof of our hosts, not doing much of any­thing but enjoy­ing the fab­ulous blonde brownies con­cocted by the house­hold­’s pat­ri­arch, the fried chick­en at Stroud’s, the pork sand­wiches at Arthur Bryant’s, and the Playboy Strip steak/battered lob­ster tail do-it-yourself surf-and-turf at Jess and Jim’s. Given such a diet, our abdic­a­tion of adult­hood would prob­ably only bur­den our folks for a couple of years, tops. But what a way to go. 

We pro­posed this plan, and it was received with sur­pris­ing enthu­si­asm by our kin, although soon enough pro­vis­os involving us “doing stuff” in order to “earn our keep” were men­tioned. We pro­tested that this kind of missed the whole point of our pro­pos­al. Things did not become heated, but nev­er­th­less an insur­mount­able impasse presen­ted itself. 

Sigh.

My thanks to Mr. Aaron Aradillas for his con­tri­bu­tions to the blog in my absence. We are work­ing out a hope­fully mutu­ally sat­is­fact­ory approach to part two of his Jonathan Demme sur­vey. In the meantime…I am NOT going to the Toronto Film Festival this year. Poor plan­ning on my part is the cul­prit, so all I can mourn is my own feck­less­ness. The bright side is that every­body and his or her moth­er in the cine-blogosphere is going; hence, this site can serve as, um, counter-programming.

And sorry about the “bitches.” It is an attention-grabber, though, no?