Mad Men

This was supposed to be a post about the Eye-Gazing Party, but I got horribly ill and couldn't go. (Luckily for you, MSNBC was there and filed this report.)

How ill, you ask? This was a bad one. I felt like I'd swallowed razor blades. My body ached everywhere, right up to my eyeballs. I had the chills and then the sweats. My voice, when I actually tried to speak, sounded like that lady bailiff from Night Court channeling Tom Waits after her fourth pack of cigarettes. I spit up big hunks of green phlegm, which looked a bit like alien jello. And then I started hallucinating. This wasn't as bad as the time back in 2000, when I was so dehydrated that I thought great winged creatures were beating on the windows, trying to carry me away and I had to crawl down the hall of my apartment to my girlfriend because I couldn't raise my voice above a whisper. But I did hear things. Scary things. Voices, like on that Lost show.

Most bizarre was the loss of appetite. It was just gone. This never ever happens to me -- I get the two-hour feeding need, no matter what. So it's really liberating to look at food and think, "Nah, I don't need it." It's probably also not so healthy to eat once a day, and then only a little.

So, what did I do besides drink gallons of water, take cough medicine, and sleep 12 hours at a time? I watched TV shows. First I finished the initial season of Mad Men, which I highly recommend. It's written by a bunch of the old Sopranos writers and has a similar mix of dark humor, pathos, and masculine cool. It takes place in 1960 and revolves around a New York ad agency whose main client is Philip Morris, so everyone smokes all the time. I mean, all the time. Pregnant mothers smoke, children smoke, dead people smoke. Apparently, they use herbal cigarettes so no one croaks on set.

It's definitely a more innocent time -- at one point, the main ad man calls television evil -- but it's also pre-women's lib, pre-gay rights, pre-everything, practically. So it's fascinating to see these straight-laced people discover pot, vibrators, divorce, homosexuality, and other "unseemly" things for the first time. Plus, there's this one woman, Joan, who, well, I don't want to offend the women readers of this blog but she's built like some kind of teenage boy's wet dream. We're talking Jayne Mansfield curvy. And they put her in these amazing, body-hugging dresses, and then have her strut around that office as if she were demonstrating every theory of gravity and physics at once. She's over on the right here.


Season two starts this summer.