Mitch's Blog

F. Scott Fitzgerald:

Those seven precious hours of sleep suddenly break in two. There is, if one is lucky, the “first sweet sleep of night” and the last deep sleep of morning, but between the two appears a sinister, ever widening interval."

That’s me. Or was, until I started taking Trazadone a few months ago. It’s an amazing miracle drug.

My insomnia almost always follows the same pattern: I don’t have any trouble getting to sleep at first. I fall asleep, deep and sweet, for a couple of hours, and then I get up to pee and can’t get back to sleep. I lay in bed a little while, trying various mind tricks and torturing myself with anxiety and self-loathing. Sometimes that lasts for hours, until morning. Sometimes I get up for a couple of hours, which reduces the anxiety and self-loathing but it’s not sleeping. Sometimes I can get back to sleep before the alarm goes off, but it’s not enough sleep and I stagger through the rest of the day. Sometimes I just sit there until it’s time to wash up and start the day.

I used to get insomnia attacks like that a few times a week. Now, it’s down to a couple of times a month, thanks to Trazadone.

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

Over a 50-year-career, Villanch worked on campy variety shows that live forever on YouTube, including the Brady Bunch Variety Hour and the Star Wars Holiday Special. They are the subject of his new book, “It Seemed Like A Bad Idea At The Time: The Worst TV Shows in History and Other Things I Wrote.”

Villanch is best known as a regular guest on Hollywood Squares, and he was head writer at the Academy Awards for 15 years. “It’s the kind of entertainment he writes for where he really excels: star-studded variety shows with big, brassy musical numbers.”

You’ll remember Villanch if you’ve seen him on TV: He’s a big, fat gay man with a blonde Prince Valiant haircut, who wears novelty T-shirts and chunky eyeglasses with frames in bright primary colors. He has a big deep voice and a sharp, fast wit.

Anytime Villanch is on an interview podcast, I’ll listen that podcast. He’s full of great old showbiz stories.

When I was a kid in the late 60s and very early 70s, there were a lot of toys that looked cool but they only did one thing and that one thing ceased to be entertaining in a few minutes.

After much nagging, my parents got us a remote-controlled toy flatbed semi-truck. The remote control operated with a wire about three feet long, and the truck was about two feet long.

You could drive the truck around the playroom a little bit. It crept along on its little wheels.

And that was it. Entertainment value for about five minutes.

Same for a toy plastic hovercraft, about a foot long, oval-shaped. You held a little motor in your hand, and the motor was attached to a long, thin hose, like the clear plastic hoses you found in a fishtank. The motor operated a fan that blew air through the hose and caused the lightweight plastic toy hovercraft to float.

You couldn’t steer the hovercraft. You could drag it around on the floor for a bit. Then what? Entertainment value: About five minutes.

It’s a cliche, but it’s true: The best toys are simple and open-ended. Blocks. Big cardboard boxes — the kind that a washing machine ships in. Snow that can make into a fort or castle.

I remember when I was about 11 years old, sitting on the floor in the playroom and building vast brutalist palaces out of Lego bricks. It was a meditative activity. You have a lot to think about when you’re 11 years old.

Charles Dickens was an inveterate walker, going for hours every day at a brisk pace, usually alone. “He did so because walking time was thinking time, or perhaps more accurately dreaming time.,” writes Luke McKernan.

Dickens walked in the day and in the night. He once got up at two in the morning and walked 30 miles to breakfast.

Today, McKernan lives in “the heart of Dickens territory,” Rochester and the Medway towns in England.

The high street businesses alone bear witness to the Dickensian connection: they include Tiny Tim’s Tearooms, Fezziwig’s, Mr Tope’s, Ebenezer’s, Pips of Rochester, Sweet Expectations, and the inspired A Taste of Two Cities. In days past we have had Hard Times the antique shop, and – believe it or not – the Havisham Wedding Centre, which perhaps not surprisingly went out of business.