Twenty-nine hits yesterday! Over 2200 hits in the last six months! As I keep telling you people, I am a god damned internet phenomenon.

Still, that's a hell of a jump. Did someone out there link to me? If so, I want to know so I can thank you properly.

So here's my concept for the video for Elvis Costello's Alison. Does it already have a video? Never mind! This one will be better.

THE SETTING: Two bars - for the sake of example, RP Tracks and Alex's, right here in Memphis.

A GUY AND A GIRL: I'll pull a couple of thespians from the local theater crowd - Dr. Jason and Leah the Vivacious Redhead, let's say. They'll do. They're both handsome people.

The whole video would be these two, each one sitting at the bar of one of these places - Leah at RP Tracks, Jason at Alex's. Both of them have a drink in front of them, and they're staring blankly ahead.

This is going to require an agile and experienced Steadicam operator, as he's going to be crawling over the bar again and again, always keeping one of our two main characters in the frame, but also getting in shots of the bartender, the crowded bar behind them, all the other people having fun.

Throughout the course of the song, our two characters are going to BREAK DOWN, going from a slight sniffle to a tear or two to big, ugly bereft weeping. All the while, those in the bar around them ignore them completely, having a big Saturday night of fun and drinking. It ends with shots of them both, head down on the bar, heaving and sobbing every few seconds.

That's it.

It would be compulsively watchable, wouldn't it? These two, both of them archetypes for a certain kind of beauty, caught greiving over something that has obviously left them heartbroken.

What do you say, Elvis? You finance, I'll direct.

So this is funny - the Book A Minute website. I especially liked their summation of the Narnia books.

You know, I read all those books in fifth and sixth grade. I loved 'em. I never caught on to the whole religion thing, though. I mean, yeah, in the first one Aslan was some sort of Christ figure, and in the last one the kids were dead and going to heaven, sure. But the rest of the time they were just good - if slightly wide-eyed - fantasy.

At the time I was going to a Catholic school, however, where they never hesitate to bash you over the head with religion, I assure you. I guess C.S. Lewis was a bit too subtle for me right then.

Here's a zinger Sister Miriam would whip at us every once in a while:

"If the communists burst in this classroom right now and threatened to pull out your fingernails and kill you if you don't deny Christ, what would you do?"

I might add that Sister Miriam has gone on to great things in the Arkansas diocese.

The correct answer to that particular moral quiz was that you'd take the channellock manicure and death over denying the Lord, of course. It troubled me then, again in high school when one of my teachers brought it up (in a different context) and it still does now.

The high school teacher was Mr. Dixon, who taught English and French and came out of the closet (much to the surprise of his wife and kids, I'm told) a few years after I graduated. He was my favorite teacher in high school, hands down. We called him the Monsieur (pronounced "mon-sewer").

"If they're trying to eradicate Christianity," Mr. Dixon argued, "don't you have a greater duty to say what they want you to say, play along with them for a while and then work from the inside to overthrow them?"

An elegant answer - and one, thankfully, that would keep wonderful, irreplaceable me alive and intact.

And like the communists (the Russian communists, anyway) could have ever gotten their shit together enough to go after the American army, much less a bunch of schoolkids in West Memphis.

I got more unsubtle religion in high school - I went to a Church of Christ school. That meant no dancing, no drinking, no sex and no piano in the church itself. Sex was a particularly big deal with the Church of Christ, which leads me to believe that the entire denomination is a powderkeg of repressed lust that could go off at any minute. I don't want to be anywhere nearby when that happens. One Sunday morning they'll all pour out of the doors of their churches, mounting and fornicating with anything that they can catch. It will be a dark - though entertaining - day.

I've said it before and I'll say it now: West Memphis Christian, in my class and those that graduated around us, produced an amazing number of sex fiends, drug addicts, athiests and criminals. After having something crammed down your throat for so long you either embrace it, rebel against it or reject it utterly. Guess which one my generation did?

I can't blame my mom for sending me to private schools, though. She felt that I would get a better education, and how can you argue with a parent wanting a good thing for you?

I mean, it didn't work out like that. True, I think my Catholic education was superior to what I would have gotten in public schools, but my time at the Christian was pretty light-weight. The Christian, really, would accept anybody whose parents had the cash to cover tuition. That meant they had an interesting group of criminals, functional illiterates, and those who were socially un-savvy to such an extent that they shit copiously in their old nest and had to leave their old schools. Teachers had a choice: try to educate or keep the heathens from rising up and burning down the classroom. They chose the latter.

If you were an idiot, now, the Christian would help you out, urge you along, tutor you if necessary, anything to keep the wheels moving and process you through the system. See the WMCS class of 1989 for extensive examples of this. If you were anything over moderately bright, though, you were gonna have to mark a lot of time.

My senior year I had speech class right before lunch. During this class I would either turn around and talk to my friend Stephen or I would sleep. The teacher allowed this because she was so busy trying to hammer a few slivers of knowledge into the marble-like heads of the other cretins in the class - a batch from the class of '89 mentioned above. Occasionally I would get up and speak to the class. I got all A's in speech and I still have a paralyzing fear of speaking in front of people.

The speech teacher was cute, though. Her name was...Linda, I think. She was about three feet tall and it was her first job out of college. If I'd been her I would have found another line of work. She was sweet, though, and she had a soft spot for me and Stephen, simple because we didn't make trouble.

Every year, though, we had to take a devilishly hard Bible class from Mr. Redd, a preacher and part-time teacher who I also liked tremendously. To this day I can answer any Bible-related trivia questions and I can always think of a name when the topic "A Name From The Bible" comes up in Scattergories.

So I just got through watching the Buffy/Angel crossover event. That Spike is totally cool. I hope he continues to be a recurring villain on Angel - Angel needs someone like that to run up against every once in a while.

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