True, James Gandolfini’s character has had a closer call this season than Fosdick ever did, hovering with dangerous ambivalence during his coma’s closing moments at the threshold of an enticingly lit "reunion party" where his dead mother and everyone he ever murdered were no doubt waiting to yell "Surprise!" if he stepped through the door—accompanied I’m sure by Nate Fisher, his dad, and five seasons’ worth of the precipitously killed extras from Six Feet Under.

But Tony has baggage (in the form of a metaphorical briefcase) from his life on planet Earth that he isn’t yet ready to turn loose of, and so he steps back from the unseen revelers and instead returns to the hospital where Carmela, the kids, and the extended Soprano "family" are holding vigil over his betubed corporteal self. So I gather that we will all be graced with his company for a few episodes more.

Since Gandolini is the uncontested star of the series, his character’s survival comes as no big surprise, but that didn’t keep me from vicariously experiencing my most harrowing hospital stay since my double-hernia surgery several years ago. I mean, poke around in my groin if you have to, but please don’t ever let me look down and see a hole in my belly as gory as the one Tony Soprano was sporting for a while!

Mob dramas awash in bloodletting have always been a hard sell for me — weak-kneed, violence-hating wimp that I am — so I avoided The Sopranos when the first wave of hooplah hit and continued to abstain until the third season, when I made the mistake of watching one episode and was quickly hooked by the intriguing characters illuminated by uncommonly incisive writing. Everyone else in America was already ahead of me, of course. That’s the story of my life; I was late in appreciating rock & roll, too.

Anyway, now that I’ve joined the Sopranos-loving masses and rented all of the DVDs to catch up on the shows I originally missed while suffering through the long drought leading up to this HBO season’s new, reportedly final bunch of episodes, I’m so pleased that my longtime friend George DeStefano has written An Offer We Can’t Refuse: The Mafia in the Mind of America.

While a lot of the mob movies George writes about with clarity and obvious insight I never saw and probably never will (yes, I saw the Godfather flicks and GoodFellas many years ago, but otherwise I’m largely a stranger to the films whose themes my pal explores), George’s chapters about The Sopranos pulled me right in.

It’s like batting reactions back and forth with a really smart college friend in the dorm, when you both should be studying but when both your heads are too full of ideas about a cool show you’ve just seen to crack the books. George offers a mix of intellectual analysis, occasional critical caveats, but more often straight-out grooving on the moments and characters he and I both dig. Good stuff to shoot the bull about after the spilled blood has clotted.

The article about me accompanies a Spanish translation of "Billy Goes Out," the seven-pager that I drew for the first issue of Gay Comix 26 years ago. Claro Que Si, as you may suspect from its cover, features gay stories of an erotic bent, and my tale of one young man’s quest for uncomplicated sensual contact in the wake of romantic loss certainly fills that bill.

"Tell him to use Firefox!" Jason advised with an emoticonned grin.

Bruce Garrett, meanwhile, had come to the same conclusion. "If Eddie is using IE," Bruce wrote, "then he’ll still have a problem.  This is from Microsoft itself:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/community/columns/rss.mspx

"Although some sites provide information about what RSS is and how to access it when they offer RSS on their sites, many do not. If we do the logical thing and click on the button when using Internet Explorer 6 or earlier, and we do not have an RSS reader or [an appropriate] plug-in installed, all we will see is code. IE 6 needs a plug in to work.  IE 7, when it comes out, won’t."

Got it, Mr. Gates!

"So Eddie can either find a plugin for IE 6 that he likes (there’s one called Pluck out there that people seem to like), or wait for IE7, or download and use the current version of Firefox."

Firefox again! I sensed a trend in personal preferences gathering.

Jason did offer an additioned insight: "If there’s anyone complaining about compatibility with RSS readers, there is a second feed being generated by your blog at this URL:

http://www.howardcruse.com/cruseblog/atom.xml

"It’s generated automatically. That’s a specifically Atom-based feed. By default your blog is showing the index.xml file, which is a straight RSS 2.0 feed. Atom is an alternative format that is prefered by some people, although generally it tends to be less compatible, as it’s a newer format. If you want, you can either switch the default to that, or link to it as a secondary feed. I don’t bother myself, as any reader that can read Atom is 99.9% certain to be able to read the other one. But you never know."

Somehow I don’t think I’m going to fool around with any default settings, though, since in that last paragraph Jason forged way beyond the boundaries of my Level of Incompetence. Babe in the HTML woods that I am, I’m far too dependent on the kindness of my geek friends to venture too far out on my own.

ME TO BRUCE: …I was interrupted just now by Eddie, who is having trouble subscribing to my blog’s RSS feed. Eddie’s a PC guy working with Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6. My web-enabler says that RSS feeds are a cross-platform program. But when Eddie clicks on my blog’s "Subscribe to this blog" link, he just gets the blog’s source code.

I know that your own blog is now RSS enabled. On my Mac (using Safari on MacOSX 4.0) when I click on your RSS link I get the trimmed down version of your blog, but Eddie gets source code. Do you have any insights of what may be going on?

Two responses from Bruce arrived on successive days.

BRUCE TO ME: You asked about why Eddie is getting only source code while you’re getting the posts off the RSS link on my blog and I’ve been trying to understand how that might be happening, and to do that I’ve had to dive into the mechanics of the whole RSS thing because I really don’t understand it.  I just asked my new web host to enable RSS when we moved my blog to WordPress and he did it.  That’s how I got mine set up.

So I’m still digging, which is why I haven’t answered yet.  This is why I’m making a pretty good living doing computer work.  I had an employer once who complemented me on my "stick to it-ness" and I didn’t have the heart to tell him it wasn’t work ethic, but more like Obsessive Compulsive Disorder when it comes to computers.  My thoughts just get sucked into the algorithms and I have to understand what the f*** is going on here…  A shrink could probably help me with it, but it’s paying my bills.

Then, the next day:

BRUCE TO ME AGAIN: What’s happening is the stylesheet isn’t being picked up by the Windows browsers for some reason.  I get the same result with FireFox on Windows.  What Eddie is seeing is the xml, without the style sheet applied.  Not sure why that’s happening at this point.

I suppose I could just give in and ask my web host to fix it.  He’s a Mac guy too and so he probably didn’t notice.  The reason I didn’t notice at first was that I don’t use the RSS feed.  But I just got into trying to figure this thing out. 

I’ve been doing this to myself for years with Cricket.  We have students here at Johns Hopkins who play it during the warmer months.  I’ve been watching them for years, trying to determine what the rules are, from how they’re playing.  Not much luck so far, except I think it has something do to with knocking that twig off those three upright wooden posts behind the batter.  I still haven’t got a clue how they score the damn thing.  I could just ask, but I’m determined to figure it out for myself.  Some days I’m watching them, and I catch myself thinking that Cricket is one of those dry jokes the British like playing on people.

Some of you who are reading this may have thoughts of your own to offer — whether on RSS feeds or Cricket.

I happened today upon the following chastizing letter a friend apparently wrote to me more than forty years ago. It is unsigned and undated, but the other letters it was tucked in with place it in 1963. I’m pretty sure I know who must have written it.

It’s harsh but on target, prompted probably by one of my many depressed letters I wrote in my adolescence, despair-drenched missives in which I flirted compulsively with the romance of suicide. I quote his response to me in its entirety, unedited.

oh howard, will you stop this shit? the last time I wrote a thing like yours i was ready to die. je(a)sus god, before you go lose your soul, your poor ofay soul, in prussian square come talk to me. look man, I laid a few on your head, but i didn’t know what was comin off. you know the word, man, but you jest so hung up. dont be so dumb. please play it cool for me, God, and the Fat Lady. for me. for mine and everybody’s goddman [sic] petty banal life. for the lovers you never had. for yourself you hate so bad.

i don’t give a shit about the dribble b——- is going to write you or the good word from b–, i don’t care about being bound in your hang ups. man, i am bitter about you. when are you going to give up this abstract image of yourself - your body mind dichotomy - and live with your body? don’t go and blow your cool. HEAR ?

The writer of the foregoing himself died by his own hand a few years later. That doesn’t invalidate his rebuke to me; it’s a wonder he lasted as long as he did, that his hands didn’t fall off his arms before he graduated from high school from all the razor slices he had applied to his wrists. His own daily pain was ten times as bad as mine has ever been. (Bipolar disorder is what they would call it today, I believe.) For a time he and I were like two people sinking side-by-side in quicksand, each trying to prevent the other from sinking. Ah, those wonderful high school years!

I was thinking about this friend when I wrote the following song lyric in 1976:

They’d say:
Good-bye, Jimmy Joe.
It’s a bummer you’ve gone to stay.
We’d like you back
For the songs you’d sing
And the melodies you’d play.
You made us cry
But the tears were sweet
And they made us feel alive.
Now your bad trip is over,
Your bones are dry,
And I guess we’ll all survive.

He wrote out a beautiful note
from his heart.
He wrote how the misery
and pain of life,
they could tear a boy apart.
How the only friend he had
Was a razor blade of steel.
And he laughed a bit,
’cause he knew damn well
how the folks back home would feel.

They’d say:
Good-bye, Jimmy Joe.
It’s a bummer you’ve gone to stay.
We’d like you back
For the songs you’d sing
And the melodies you’d play.
You made us cry
But the tears were sweet
And they made us feel alive.
Now your bad trip is over,
Your bones are dry,
And I guess we’ll all survive.

I’m told that Alison Bechdel and I will be being "spotlighted" in some special way. I’m flattered, of course. It doesn’t look like I’ll be able to be there to be blinded in person, unfortunately, but I’ll do my best to cultivate an appropriate deer-in-the-headlights response from here in North Adams. (Note to Alison’s fans on the West Coast: Ms. Bechdel is expected to make an appearance at CAM as part of her Fun Home promotional book tour, so bee sure and stay alert for details about that treat.)

On the home front, meanwhile…

Contributing Editor John Townes threaded together interviews with the three of us most effectively, and I really like the photographs that Brad Johnson took. Thanks for making us look so sage and creative, Brad. You were a whiz at getting me to relax while a camera is pointing at me, and that ain’t easy.

‘Til tomorrow…

Unfortunately, Ashcroft’s successor is no better, just slicker, and the Bush Administration is scarier than ever.

Shown at left: Yours truly as Vashti (left) and Ed Sedarbaum as Esther (right).

Below left: The full ensemble assembles. Below right: There not being a lot for Vashti to do once she is beheaded, I busied myself by helping with audience cue cards.