My brother is about as scary an individual as I have ever met. He is not a large man; probably two-thirds of my size and isn’t a particularly loud person. But, oh man, he is the absolute last guy you’d want to be locked in a room with. And those of you who know him know what I am talking about.

But he’s also a crazy dog person. Like, his dog is a person, just with a collar. Let me tell you what: his pooch Timmy lives better than you and I put together. Timmy’s a wonderful character, too, but I suspect that, even if my brother had a troublemaking pooch, he would be treating it just as well.

In terms of benevolence toward our four-legged friends, my brother is not alone; I know plenty of folks who spend crazy amounts of money on their pets. And treat their pets like children or, horror of horrors, de facto spouses.

I’m okay with it, I guess. People make their own money; they can spend it as they please. As long as you aren’t harming someone, go nuts. A real person had to make that dog’s beret. You are actually participating in the redistribution of wealth, keeping the engine of the economy…doing something less than humming.

Not to mention, I have always loved dogs. Why? Because all they want to do is give and receive love. Cats are dicks. They always seem to have an agenda, lurking here and there, while staring at you contemptuously. Always staring. I have always thought if a cat had a middle finger, he or she’d be giving it perpetually. Lastly, they crap in a box. That’s a non-starter in my household.

There are four other kinds of animals I would rather have living with me than a cat. They are: rabbit, peccary (look it up), fish and snapping turtle. But I digress…

So there’s a dachshund in my neighborhood. He has long red hair and quite a varied wardrobe. The other day he was sporting a black cashmere hoodie (I asked) and a grey down vest. I call him Thom Yorke, for obvious reasons.

I think Thom shops at this tiny storefront in the first floor of our building. It’s a dog fashion and accessories shop called Wagwear and this leggy former model runs it. The store is open odd hours and there never seems to be any customers, which can only mean one thing: she is clearly running the business as a hobby. Either that or she is up to something nefarious. Just kidding; she’s got money, though.

My brother doesn’t put clothing on his dog yet. But at Christmas, he did ask my sister for a blanket for Timmy to sleep on, even though the room he was sleeping in had a thick carpet.

I would laugh, but he would so kill me.

Oh, great. Just last month, when I practically stripper-grammed to get onto a Delta flight to Minneapolis, I was thinking, “Man, this is too easy. I wish it was more difficult to fly.”

Now, with the recent development involving that Nigerian jackass who somehow thought that using his testes as a temporary home for liquid explosives was gonna get him all virgin-ed up, you will need to show up four hours early to fly anywhere. And I do mean, anywhere.

But if any good has come from this recent event it’s this: those guys realize that they need to come up with a better idea. Because airline passengers have no intention of letting anything go down anymore. If you see something, you’re swinging. Even the Dutch, who are known for being laidback.

Getting through security is going to be 50% shittier, but it wasn’t exactly a bed of roses to begin with.

The whole concept of blowing up a passenger jet is such an eye-poke of an event, especially in a nation of 300-plus million people. Will it anger us? Most certainly. Scare us? Not so much anymore.

In three weeks, I am flying Delta, operated by Northwest and going through Detroit (sound familiar?) and I am more concerned with getting snowed in.

I am not a bad flier, except that I put an inordinate amount of stress on a coach seat’s frame, not to mention my own frame. I am more annoyed than anything. Which is pretty much all these crotch-bombers are going to get out of me. Or you, right?

That news right there is probably chilling some folks and, for once, it isn’t us.

Vic Chestnutt died the other day, and the world got a little less cranky and a lot less talented.

Some of you have heard of him, but I reckon that more of you haven’t. And it isn’t like his death will cause a sudden rush to iTunes to download his catalog of brilliant albums. Matter of fact, only two of his songs are even available there—both on compilation CDs.

But Vic was a great songwriter. A heavyweight, expert at mining the bitterness of his situation—being left a paraplegic in a car accident when he was 18—but often turning it on its ear, with sardonic humor. While his songs ached like few others, as he kept his subject matter firmly rooted in the every day, the man could also take a joke.

Forty-five when he died, Vic had fought the temptation to end his life for many years, but just last week temptation won and he overdosed on pills in his Athens, Georgia home. He lay in a coma for nearly a week before mercifully passing.

He had been hounded for money owed to a local hospital, and friends said Vic felt hopeless in recent weeks. While his death tees up a discussion about the need in the country for universal health care, I won’t make that case here. This should be about magic and loss—his songs and his life.

My favorite of Vic’s songs is called “Guilty By Association” and oddly enough, it isn’t even his version that has gotten into my bloodstream. The song was recorded by American singer/guitarist Joe Henry, in his home studio/garage, in 1994. It was for an album called “Sweet Relief II” which was released to try and raise money for Vic’s crippling hospital bills.

A duet between Joe and his sister-in-law Madonna, it’s a slow haunting take with a backward looping distorted intro and, builds toward nowhere, really, before ending as it had begun. The absence of Vic’s nasally crackle manages to deepen the song’s sense of sexual longing.

Of all of the singing Madonna has done in her career, this is my favorite performance, perhaps because it was recorded on a four-track while her sister was inside the house preparing dinner. And she makes no attempt to alpha wolf the song. Her voice, which is normally so reedy, is subtle and sexy. And it kind of adds a layer of glaze atop Henry’s tenor. Like Mazzy Star re-imagined as a country act. It’s really quite something and I have been embedding it in my mix CDs for years now.

*****************

“Sit down. Sit the fuck down.”

About ten years ago, I saw Vic at the old Irving Plaza and he made the entire audience plop our asses down on a grimy floor to watch his performance. He was sitting, he reasoned aloud, so everyone should. I almost barfed on my friend; it was such a skeevy maneuver. But I couldn’t really say no.

The wheelchair bound Vic performed solo, with an acoustic guitar and a single spotlight. And for about an hour, I felt like a kid at camp, sitting around a campfire, watching a counselor ruminating on fate and love, regret and loss and even flashes of hope mixed in occasionally.

When it was over he thanked us for sitting down, sincerely, and the Southerner seemed genuinely pleased that he was able to hold sway over a New York crowd.

Hopefully, today, he is at peace and, if you believe in such things as the afterlife, probably getting a real hoot about his name being mentioned in the news section on Yahoo.com like he was a big music star.

He was, though. Perhaps you just didn’t know it.

When you’re a Christian, most all Holidays end up a sword fight between Jesus and the commercial enterprises like candy conglomerates and greeting card companies.

Christmas is the pinnacle of this mixed messaging, as it is considered Jesus’ birthday and yet, for most people, the focus is a Christmas tree and Santa Claus, neither symbol possessing any religious undertones—at least in this country.

In the Netherlands, they have Sinterklaas, who is about as messed up a character as I have ever read about, or seen first hand, while roaming the streets of Amsterdam with a buddy about nine sheets to the wind. More on that later.

Sinterklaas is the Dutch version of Saint Nicholas, the precursor to Santa. His back-story is this: He lives in Spain and spends all year writing in his big red book the names of the good and bad Dutch kids. Every year, on December 6^th, the saint himself—dressed in pope-like garb— rides his tugboat up from Spain, accompany by zwarte piet (“Black Peter”), his sidekick/slave. Sinterklaas has enslaved old Pete for various misdeeds, so he serves as a cautionary tale to brats to step their games up. But what is so messed up is a white guy in black face always represents zwarte piet in public. (The accompanying photo is real. Honestly.)

And anyway, Sinterklaas and about six zwarte piet all ride into Amsterdam harbor, and the Amsterdammers go berserkers, singing and dancing in the streets. The local shopkeepers all dress their windows commemorating the Holiday and crazy sales abound.

A few years ago, I decided to see this for myself—for research purposes. (You understand.) It was as berserkers as advertised, especially when the fake black dudes disembarked the tugboat and began to march through town playing horns and such. It was super-racist—although I have to say that Black Peter isn’t supposed to be black, but white, and covered in coal dust (don’t ask)— but kind of badass in a completely surreal way.

At about 2am, my friend and I were walking through the Red Light District, and heard a car tearing up the canal behind us. We jumped out of the way to see a swerving sedan driven by a makeup smeared Black Peter. Riding shotgun, Sinterklaas leaned out the passenger window, shook his fist at us and shouted, “RESPECT!”

And that was the last moment that I ever saw Santa Claus as anything but a second-rate fat guy in a red suit.

Unfortunately, a large part of the president’s job is to shoulder the burden of our own unmet expectations, and to bear the brunt of the accompanying anger. That’s why when you see President Obama now, he looks like the uncle of the guy who took the job a year ago, despite the fact that about none of this is his fault and had McCain and Boom-Boom Palin been elected, the country may have dropped dead by now.

That’s also why it’s said that his is the loneliest job in the world. Because your desk is where the buck stops, unless you’re ‘Bush the brush clearer’—remember him?—in which case half the bucks don’t even reach you, and the other half you manage to handle as poorly as humanly possible. Probably even inhumanly. Now that I think about it, my childhood pet Linguine, the snapping turtle, would have made less-damaging decisions, and most of his day was spent sleeping. But I digress.

In following the news, it seems as if half the country is actually rooting against Obama to succeed. You see it, too, I know you do. There were cheers when Chicago didn’t get the Olympics, jeers when he won the Nobel Peace prize, and actual anger that he was attempting to do something that should have been done a half-century ago: to make sure that no one in the richest nation (not manmade out of sand) on Earth has to choose between food and medicine again.

The thing is, the voices against him have no plan. The opposition never does. They just want to make sure that their friends in whatever industry needs to be overhauled are still their friends afterward. They are always about winning, not governing. And so they obstruct. And twist Obama’s words and intent until it looks like he is some crazy liberal spending maniac. They point to the fact that the country is staggered while somehow tying potential future spending into the current malaise. That’s like me blaming today’s headache on all of that champagne I plan on drinking on New Year’s Eve.

Then, otherwise intelligent people begin to repeat the same things, in the same ways, that they just heard that human Pez dispenser on Fox News say. Nearly daily I wonder just what the hell people have been smoking outside the friendly confines of Manhattan Island and part of California. (And my friend Gregg’s house in the Midwest.)

But I will say this: Every time I see President Obama, it makes me happy, nearly deliriously so, although I haven’t exactly been napping in a bed of roses for the past 16 months. Despite everything, we’re still cool. Because even when he sits with Oprah and discusses Christmas decorations, he shouts “progress”—like the most-awesome Shep Fairey print that his guys sent me when Obama was still a long-shot—and that is the exact tonic we need right now.

For if anyone is going to lead us out of this deep, dark forest, it sure as hell isn’t going to be someone more concerned with who’s marrying who and rebranding science as merely one version of history than he or she is in improving our lives like, you know, President Clinton did for 8 years. The thought of re-entering that Twilight Zone of religious zealotry is enough to get me to think about pulling up stakes and moving on, someplace smaller and more intelligent.

So, if there is any good that can come out of 2009, it’s that the smartest, most compassionate guy possible is still making the decisions and heading into 2010, there is no way to go but up.

From my lips to God’s ears. No, not literally.

So I’m a fan of Intervention and have discovered the secret to surviving it: watch the first ten minutes and the last ten minutes. The middle 40 is just a life unraveling. A, “Hey poor unfortunate, smile pretty for America” bit of entertainment, however dubious.

Tonight the guy is just an alcoholic/meth head. Easy enough. He’ll go rehab, they’ll play that sappy music over the credits, and we’ll find out that he was lapsed since treatment, but that he has been clean for about ten minutes. And chances are, his life will be a series of stumbles and treading water until hopefully the thing inside him or her clicks. Or doesn’t.

I read somewhere that 22 million Americans are addicted to something. Not just drugs. There was a lady on this show a month ago because she couldn’t stop punching herself, and unless I was hallucinating, there was an episode where a woman was addicted to feeding herself through a tube. Hell, even the woman from two weeks ago, who was dusting her lungs with five cans of Computer Dust-r a day would pity the she-tube.

I know people who have survived alcohol and drug addiction and I always think that it’s a miracle when they maintain their sobriety. I have tremendous respect for them and let them know that. And especially now, with the world sort of bottoming, it would be much easier to seclude oneself with a bottle of Chivas and tackle box filled with pharmaceuticals. Even for a month.

I’m sensitive toward that particular weakness, mostly because the same fate could’ve easily befallen me had I not had my sights set on being an Olympic high jumper. Or maybe it was because I was too poor. That could’ve been it too. Either way, it’s with a sense of relief that I find myself at my age and with my wit about me. (Yes, singular.)

So I am more than willing to lend an ear or a couch. But the guy who was addicted to Nigerian bank scams? He doesn’t need an intervention, he just needs a dunce cap and my address for the money order. Dumbass.

Next week on Intervention: my compassion.

I have made any number of New Year’s resolutions over the years that I have broken. Some have lasted a month, a few have clocked a week and one (about being less caustic) lasted as long as it took a certain party host to try and put a party hat on my enormous head. Why anybody would look at my head and think, “Boy, what that head needs is more bulk” is beyond me. But I digress.

This year, I have decided not to choose my own resolution. The pressure on me to live up to some unhealthy ideal of how life could be—“Go to the gym more than twice a week!” “No more candy!”—has affected me in untold ways. I have night terrors.

The whole business of resolutions is a vicious cycle of me promising myself and immediately creating loopholes to slither through, like, “Well, it is a Thursday and I have never had General Tso’s chicken, with a brown-eyed person in a grey coat, and I am downtown, so…”

Just this morning I was discussing my dilemma with a friend and had a brainstorm. (Occasionally, that happens.) I decided to let her choose my 2010 New Year’s Resolution. It was a risky maneuver, as you can imagine. And verbatim, this was her first suggestion:

“Less sugar? But that’s definitely impossible.”

Obviously, my people know me well. Without my prompting she went back to the drawing board with my full confidence that a more “do-able” resolution, a more “Tony-friendly” solution would be borne. Like, “nap more” or even “more cigars, more scotch, less talking.”

My confidence was rewarded as, after a couple more moments of thinking, she fired back:

“I have one for you. Stop considering other people’s feelings when they so obviously don’t consider yours.”

Sold. And you can hold me to it.

Bed bugs. The term itself is horrifying, especially since it combines both a happy word—bed— with a terrible one—bugs. By now, anyone who lives in NYC has a friend, or knows someone who has had bed bugs, nearly invisible little critters that bite the crap out of you.

Basically, they move in with you and ruin your life, in much the same way a grandparent would. (Stop it—I’m joking.) You need to throw out, dry clean and scrub your life down. Normally, a germaphobe would welcome such behavior. Except I like my stuff.

I’d heard two accounts just today, one from a friend and another from the Russian kid who cuts my hair, about people they know who contracted by bedbugs at the Regal Cinemas in Union Square.

I was floored, having just this morning gotten GG to agree to see something other than a movie about a queen, or with Viggo Mortenson. Avatar is being shown there. That was the plan for tonight. Now? Somewhere downtown, Emily Blunt is playing a young Queen Victoria. That’s all I’m saying.

I went online and found a few stories about the theater’s recent dubious history, including The Gothamist and The BedBug Registry (literally), complete with photographs of the bitten New Yorkers. Horrifying, truly, especially in a relatively new building.

Reviews like this one from Yelp! are all over the place:

BED BUGS!!!!!!!!!! I saw a movie in theatre 13 on Wednesday 9/2/09. The next morning I woke up covered in red welts over my back, arms  and elbows. Not knowing what was wrong I went to see a doctor , then spoke to the friend I was with and she had the same bites.!…..a couple days later we ran into another friend of ours who had been to the same movie and had the same pattern of bites. We reported to the management and they offered us two movie tickets!!!!! Really , I am so traumatized I don’t know if I will ever go to a movie again. It has been a week and although they are healing I still have red welts. Everywhere!!!!!!! If you get these things in your home It could cost thousands of $$$$$ to get rid of them …. not to mention the mental anguish of being bitten while your sleeping  every night . I feel like the management is not taking this situation seriously, as they admitted to having this problem last month and the action they took was to remove a few of the  seats. 
PLEASE BEWARE!!!!!!!!!

The theater was closed yesterday, while cleaning crews were attempting to localize the problem. But today, they are open for business, which is heartwarming. After all, who doesn’t want to bring bed bugs home to their families this Christmas? Besides for me, and you, presumably.

Sadly, I know that I will never again set foot in that theater, unless there’s an Olga Kurylenko Film Festival being held there. For such an occasion, I would wear a Hazmat suit. Seriously.

My wife had her company Christmas party last night and this quiet-as-a-mouse art chick got drunk and went buck wild, throwing drinks in people’s faces, cursing out her bosses and generally acting like a lunatic. It’s a recurring story: the company Christmas party debacle.

There was a story a few years ago about some production assistant at a major media that got so wasted she…voided (I sound like my mother) while lying on a white velvet couch in some party space. In front of 1,000 people. She had to be carried out, hosed off (presumably) and moved out of town shortly thereafter.

My own experience is slightly less dramatic, although those present that night still laugh about it. About ten years ago, at a otherwise lovely company Christmas party a woman got so drunk she became profane, and graphic, when introduced to the owner’s wife, and then eventually, staggered out of the ladies room with her pants around her ankles, before collapsing and calling for “mama.”

I was telling a work friend today that I thought new employees should be shown a warning video about their first company Christmas party. When you’re young the thought of free food and booze is enough to get you to cut loose.

When I first met GG, as a young cub/co-worker, I warned her to avoid getting drunk at our company’s party, her first, as the mailroom guys would try and dirty dance with her and her assistant friends. I had seen it happen three years in a row.

Although she barely knew me, she took my advice and we watched her friends get all humpty-humped by the guys responsible for stealing anything from us that looked even remotely edible.

But with the economy tanking, Christmas parties are disappearing faster than Roman Polanski’s supporters, and so the chances of you witnessing something memorable and is rare, unless of course, you have too much to drink.

So don’t, okay?

Like a lot of you, I am watching “Jersey Shore” as if it is heroin and I am a Sticky Fingers- era Keith Richards.

Some of the landscape is very familiar to me—I intermittently spent college summers down the shore, and the places still look the same. No one had boob jobs, though, back then, which is another way of saying that the entire boardwalk didn’t look like the Stripper Stroll is has become.

So I know Belmar from Seaside Heights, but, on a whole other level, I feel as if I have been dropped into the Amazon rainforest and am observing the mating rituals of some kind of tanned reptile.

I am not sure which kid I like best—Snooki is the sentimental favorite. Or she is the mental favorite, perhaps. And “the Situation” is a true classic. But I guess my favorite is DJ Pauly D, a guy who is so stupid looking, he resembles a giant rhesus monkey with Botox. And Parkinsons. Acute Parkinsons.

It’s funny because the guys are far more girly than the girls. The guys wax their chests and their eyebrows and fake tan, while the girls are fighting, farting and Frenching anybody who’ll let them–men or women.

But it’s now ten minutes until eleven and I am nearly done with my third consecutive hour of it and have decided that I need to make room in my rotation for “Jersey Shore.”

As far as reality TV goes, the kids are genial doofuses. Sure, they are representative of New Jersey in the worst possible way. But their collective stupidity is endearing, like blind moles, if the lady moles had inflated boobs under not-so-strategically ripped t-shirts.

In one scene in this evening’s episode, Ronnie and Sammi Sweetheart, star-crossed and tramp-stamped lovers, were drinkin’ and fightin’ and cryin’ and at the end of their collective road. Ronnie wailed plaintively to Sammi. “I was ready to put you in the equation.”

I’ve already put “Jersey Shore” in the equation. So should you.