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Mick Farren

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Posted Monday, Dec. 6, 1999, at 9:00 PM ET

The holiday sense of eeriness settles on Los Angeles, and the halls are decked with blinking electricity. For anyone raised in Northern Europe, or even the states of the union that actually have seasons, it simply can't be Christmas with the relentless sun and the subtropical vegetation as tired and garish in its abundance as any hooker on Sunset Boulevard. Christmas trees are offered for sale on vacant lots, with or without spray-on acrylic snow, but the prospect of lugging a dead conifer home past the flourishing palms and jacaranda is just plain creepy, and I wish I had one of those folding aluminum trees that were so big in the tract homes of the '50s. This Christmas promises to be weirder than most. After the meteorological anomalies of El Niño and La Niña, anything can happen. Next week it might be in the '80s. Who knows? Certainly not the TV weatherpeople. My cat, a Himalayan who sheds his fur seasonally, is totally and genetically confused, and his coat is matting into dreadlocks that only clipping to skin will eradicate, except he seems perfectly happy with the situation, and all Jah-feline claims to need is a Bob Marley knitted hat and an icon of Haile Selassie.

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Fortunately, this year I will not have to deal with an L.A. X-mas. I have been invited by my only multimillionaire friend to his Caribbean paradise, and I go without guilt. We were penniless and obnoxious hippies together, but while I wrote a multitude of books and ran around the world with a rock band, he focused on making more money than is strictly natural, so I have no qualms about sharing his largesse, and although his island may be hotter than Hollywood, the feeling of all not being right will be offset by total immersion in disgusting luxury, and I will not be bothered by any confusion between ho-ho-ho and yo-ho-ho. But before you not-so-gentle readers reach for you laptops to start with the hate mail, the two weeks before I depart will be spent in the writer's equivalent of trench warfare. I will pay in literary tribulation for my first vacation in over a decade.

I have a novel being officially published on Dec. 17, which means I'm in the full process of e-mail and phone exchanges with my publishers who tell me all the things that can't possibly be done to make me rich and famous. One of the great problems in modern publishing is workloads that seem to be such that no one has any time to read. The book is called Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife, and my first problem was to convince everyone concerned that this was the psychedelic novel of the millennium, and not another redundant rock-star biography, or that I hadn't been psychically channeling the dead Lizard King. I think the message has finally got across, but one can never be sure. I await non-developments.

Before I leave town, I will also have to work out my personal solution to Y2K. After months of procrastination, I finally fear for my hard drive. I have reduced all my Y2K worries to the strictly personal. I cannot worry about the macro world. I'll try not to be in the air at midnight of Dec. 31, but if the Federal Government or the banking system go out, I have nothing to lose but my debts. After a recent book tour in the Midwest, where every radio station I was booked on seemed to be running commercials for guns, electrical generators, freeze-dried food, and gold, I decided that 100 million middle-Americans could be wrong and that Y2K wasn't going to be a cybernetic approximation of the fundamentalist Rapture with all essential services supernaturally disappearing on the stroke of midnight. My gut feeling is that the worst-case scenario will be a great deal of minor irritation. "I'm sorry, sir, we seem to have a computer problem." As the event horizon looms closer, however, I think I'll back everything up to disk. Better time-consuming than sorry. But that nettle will have to be grasped tomorrow. It's time to watch The Simpsons, my vital cartoon benchmark of sanity.

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Posted Monday, Dec. 6, 1999, at 9:00 PM ET

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Mick Farren is a writer, musician, and author of the novel Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife, to be published next month (click here to buy the book and here to buy his band's CD).

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