The United States is preparing to hold terrorism suspects indefinitely without trial, replacing the Guantanamo Bay prison camp with permanent prisons in the Cuban enclave and elsewhere, it was reported yesterday.

The new prisons are intended for captives the Pentagon and the CIA suspect of terrorist links but do not wish to set free or put on trial for lack of hard evidence.

—Guardian Unlimited

Asked about the similarity of such prisons to the torture chambers once run by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, President Bush replied, “Well, we don’t plan to release anyone from our prisons.”

I lied: I will draw upon my astounding auguring abilities to make a baker’s dozen of prophecies for 2005. Or, in homie-speak, I’m gonna drop some crystal ball shit on yo’ ass, bitches, so listen up:

1. Sally Struthers will visit you–perhaps in a dream, perhaps in person–and suggest a new career in TV/VCR repair.

2. You will experience a severe hangover, after which you will maintain a vow of alcoholic absitinence for up to 48 hours.

3. Efforts to befriend the six billion people who are strangers to you will meet with only limited success.

4. You will add salt, according to taste.

5. You will be reminded on more than one occasion that, contrary to Woody Allen’s opinion, there are, in fact, bad orgasms.

6. You will see a hint of logic in Bush administration policies, which will thrill and/or terrify you.

7. Three people who have visited your neighborhood will die.

8. You will know hunger, pain, sadness, longing, and a curious mix of passion, hatred, and nausea.

9. You will cut your fingernails too short.

10. You will reach a point at which you believe things are finally under control, but the moment will pass.

11. Green will surpass orange, pink, and slate gray as the new black.

12. You will lather and rinse, but not repeat.

13. Nicole Richie who?

I hate New Year’s Eve. Most holidays encourage you to get out there and have some fun, dammit, but New Year’s demands it. If you’re not drunk off your nelly ass, covered in confetti, blowing noisemakers, and screaming for more by midnight in the middle of Times Square, then you’re a…well, there aren’t really words to describe the depths of your loserdom. You’re a complete waste of perfectly good DNA. You might as well just stay under the bedsheets reading about string theory for the next 365 days and try your luck again.

Me, I don’t respond well to such high-pressure pitches: not from telemarketers, not from used car salesmen, not from tweaked-out hustlers in toilet stalls of seedy downtown bars, and certainly not from the holiday gods. So for many years, I tried to avoid New Year’s Eve altogether. This proved not so easy, and, right on schedule, I wound up feeling like a total loser. Mission accomplished, Dick Clark! Are you happy now, you old bat?

Last year, Jonno and I decided a change was in order, and we hosted our very own party. I think it went off pretty damn well, so we’re having another one ce soir. Of course, you’re invited: if you’re around and don’t know where the hell we live, just gimme a call or drop a line for directions.

One small change this year: just for kicks, we opted for a dress code. In homage to the late, great Jackie 60, we have provided our guests with the following sartorial options:

Miss Jane Hathaway Ornithological Expedition Realness

Cleopatra Jones Kung Fu Glamour Princess

Crocodile Dundee Pith Helmet Fisting Top

Amber Waves Coke Whore Effect

Audra Lindley Macrame Muu-Muu Couture

Aubrey Beardsley Neurasthenic Pansy Boy

Big Dick Cheney Drama Queen Leather Daddy

Harajuku Schoolgirl Super Lolita Now

Stevie Nicks Magical Suspension of Disbelief

Lindsay Wagner Ninja Showgirl Fembot

but jeans and a t-shirt will do.

Going back to Frank O’Hara for a moment: decades ago, he wrote a lovely piece intended for fortune cookies, but most of it can easily be read as New Year’s predictions, which (a) makes it timely, and (b) means I don’t have to tap my own dark powers of clarivoyance to divine prophecies for 2005. So, in my best Jean Dixon voice…

Lines For The Fortune Cookies

by Frank O’Hara

I think you’re wonderful and so does everyone else.

Just as Jackie Kennedy has a baby boy, so will you–even bigger.

You will meet a tall beautiful blonde stranger, and you will not say hello.

You will take a long trip and you will be very happy, though alone.

You will marry the first person who tells you your eyes are like scrambled eggs.

In the beginning there was YOU–there will always be YOU, I guess.

You will write a great play and it will run for three performances.

Please phone The Village Voice immediately: they want to interview you.

Roger L. Stevens and Kermit Bloomgarden have their eyes on you.

Relax a little; one of your most celebrated nervous tics will be your undoing.

Your first volume of poetry will be published as soon as you finish it.

You may be a hit uptown, but downtown you’re legendary!

Your walk has a musical quality which will bring you fame and fortune.

You will eat cake.

Who do you think you are, anyway? Jo Van Fleet?

You think your life is like Pirandello, but it’s really like O’Neill.

A few dance lessons with James Waring and who knows? Maybe something will happen.

That’s not a run in your stocking, it’s a hand on your leg.

I realize you’ve lived in France, but that doesn’t mean you know EVERYTHING!

You should wear white more often–it becomes you.

The next person to speak to you will have a very intriquing proposal to make.

A lot of people in this room wish they were you.

Have you been to Mike Goldberg‘s show? Al Leslie‘s? Lee Krasner‘s?

At times, your disinterestedness may seem insincere, to strangers.

Now that the election’s over, what are you going to do with yourself?

You are a prisoner in a croissant factory and you love it.

You eat meat. Why do you eat meat?

Beyond the horizon there is a vale of gloom.

You too could be Premier of France, if only … if only…

If I were still in Mississippi, discussing world affairs and current events with my family across a kitchen island loaded with divinity and other Stuckey’s delights, I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that one of my ever-so-thoughtful, ever-so-Baptist brothers–probably the former missionary, but who knows–would credit God/Yaweh with this whole tsunami disaster thing. “Hallelujah!” he’d shout, a little too loudly. “This is a sign from the Almighty! God is tellin’ them people to stop worshippin’ monkeys and crocodiles and other such nonsense and get with the program. They have done brung it on themselves.“

Unfortunately, I doubt that’d be the first Pat Robertson-esque discussion of the matter. In fact, chances are that conversations just like that are taking place in countless breakfast nooks and Waffle Houses across the country as we speak. Er, type.

On a more compassionate note, Tyler has written a touching elegy to the late, great Susan Sontag. The author may be gone, but her work survives, giving thousands upon thousands of future graduate students great ideas to misinterpret.

Lessons Learned This Holiday Season

1. Paying a surprise Christmas visit to your boyfriend’s family, who live thousands of miles away, can be great fun, as long as you put aside concerns about calorie consumption, cold weather, and your checking account.

2. If you’re in the market for high-end threads on a low-end budget, a trip to Macy’s Herald Square on December 26 really is worth all the trouble.

3. American Airlines is clearly a force from the dark side of the negaverse, run by Satan, a bunch of evil elves, and eight tiny reignofterror deer.

Three Poems by Two Men and One Woman Who are Clearly Wiser than I

---

At Christmas little children sing and merry bells jingle,

The cold winter air makes our hands and faces tingle

And happy families go to church and cheerily they mingle

And the whole business is unbelievably dreadful, if you’re single.

— Wendy Cope

---

Lana Turner has collapsed!

I was trotting along and suddenly

it started raining and snowing

and you said it was hailing

but hailing hits you on the head

hard so it was really snowing and

raining and I was in such a hurry

to meet you but the traffic

was acting exactly like the sky

and suddenly I see a headline

LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!

there is no snow in Hollywood

there is no rain in California

I have been to lots of parties

and acted perfectly disgraceful

but I never actually collapsed

oh Lana Turner we love you get up

— Frank O’Hara

---

White Dwarf
One day when our sun runs out of fuel and collapses inward under its own weight, then picks up enough mass from its neighbor to explode outward, the blown debris approaching a good fraction of the speed of light, then, then you’ll be sorry. Oh, relax: we have five billion years, give or take a few million, to prepare. Meanwhile we go on believing the universe has our best interests at heart. The dock down at Groton Long Point throws a lovely wood skeleton fifty yards out into the Sound. There we rest, after a bike ride, and the winds rise by our witness and the waves build, and the paper-white sails and hulls of pleasure boats cut scimitars into the bay. We sit close-pressed and watch without speaking, wanting to live here, in this model galaxy of islands and peninsulas and rock borders where earth, water and air meet in the small fires of our blood. Oh, why not. We watch a long time. I whisper to you. It is the middle of the day but your hair has that scrubbed protein smell once locked in the center of a star. Why not here? This is what I whisper. Even as we speak, close galaxies are speeding away, faster than more distant galaxies, which are also receding. Groton Long Point, Milky Way, heat of your body next to mine: this is where we live, now. Lovely little islands of matter, surrounded by the blank of space. And the dark taking over more real estate even as we speak. Encroaching zero of the infinite, white dwarf, my breath on your neck: even as we speak.

— Jeffrey Skinner

A former housemaster of Uppingham School is quoted as saying that a 16-year-old gave him an Omega Watch and a bottle of vintage Dom Perignon. The headteacher of Annemount prep in Hampstead Garden Suburb noted that this year’s haul had included Selfridges vouchers, caviar and vodka.

There were no reports about what teachers at the very top schools, such as Eton, received this year — presumably because they were busy whizzing downhill in Klosters in a scree of powdery snow, screaming: “I can’t believe this is all free! Thank you, Fig-Stotton Minor!” at the time.

— The Times Online

Hmmm. My teachers always seemed content with the Holly Hobby coffee mugs my mom sent in (which, frankly, I found a tad lavish). You think maybe they were just humoring me?

Nearly two decades ago, in a tiny town in middle-of-nowhere Mississippi, I packed all of my worldly possessions into a then-new Mustang, backed down a driveway buckling in the August heat, and left.

Lots of people who’ve done such things–who’ve left behind lives and families in Middle America to pursue careers or education or dreams in cities across the nation–will try to convince you that they’d give up everything to return to their roots. They’ll be tossing back an $18-a-glass Beaujolais, waiting for their edamame to cool, and then bust out with statements like, “Hell yeah, I’m just a country boy at heart!”

Ladies and gentlemen, those words will never cross my lips.

I mean, sure: I spent a good chunk of my childhood fishing and running through woods and planting vegetable gardens, and I look back fondly on all that, but I’m pretty good and distinguishing between nostalgia and straight-up yearning. I wax nostalgic when I remember riding four-wheelers for hours in the cold, then shuffling into my grandmother’s house and smelling her incomparable blueberry cobbler, fresh from the oven; I yearn for a personal assistant who can draft a decent thank-you letter and for a computer that doesn’t groan every time I try to run InDesign and Photoshop at the same time. Which basically means I understand that my hometown is a great place to visit, but until they 86 the fagbashing and build a good Thai restaurant, I wouldn’t want to live there. Again.

All of this was thrown into sharp relief two days ago when I walked into my daddy’s house and the first thing he said to me was, “We’re gonna have to wait dinner on your brothers. They went up to the farm for some deer hunting and probably won’t be back for another hour or so. I got some ambrosia in the fridge if you’re hungry, though.” It all sounded so completely foreign to me–but not in an attractive, exotic way. Just foreign. Like, “Oh, yeah, that’s what it’s like here.” Later, I tried to have extended conversations with my family without bringing up politics, religion, or social issues, which basically left us with cars, golf, and my estranged mother (who merits a post of her own). I’ve never been so happy to see my grumpy boyfriend or my incontinent dogs as I was when I returned last night.

So, yeah, I freely admit that I’ve lost touch with Middle America. But then, they’ve lost touch with me, too, so I’m not taking all the blame.

As a footnote to the boyfriend’s recent post about Tokyo-based entrepreneurs who rent high-end [ba-dum-bum!] sex dolls to company men looking to blow off some steam after the 16-hour workday, here’s a bit from the ever-popular Wai-Wai section of Mainichi Daily News:

Several companies are involved in the bustling trade supplying customers looking to slip it into some silicon, with lifelike figurines that set back buyers something in the vicinity of 600,000 yen as opposed to the simple, blow-up types with the permanently open mouths that can be bought from vending machines for a few thousand yen [emphasis, like, totally mine].

Excuse me? I mean, I knew about the various automats for eggs, beer, rice, toilet paper, and porn, but love dolls, too? Is nothing sacred?

Suddenly Mississippi–where I’m heading today for a pre-holiday dinner with the family–doesn’t seem so odd.