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Okay, a lot of details have been creeping into my daily routine that have me afraid that I might be living someone else’s lifestyle. The red Vespa. The tiny Maltipoo. The Season Pass to the Jane Austen series on PBS.

But perhaps the greatest departure from my God-fearing Catholic upbringing comes in the form of my Monday morning appointments with Dr. Jin, the acupuncturist.

When the Writers Guild leadership decided to strike, my wife knew that my stress level, already somewhere in the ionisphere, would go into orbit. Soothing words don’t work on me and I don’t like to be touched, so she opted to send me to a traditional Chinese herbalist. To get accupuncture. For stress.

After going for two months, the first thing I have to say about it is it works. Stiff neck? Jab! and in a few minutes it’s gone. Stuffy nose? Jab! and in 30 seconds the sinuses drain. But for stress? That’s a whole different needle altogether.

Jab! Right between the eyes.

And it’s always the first one in. I swear, it makes the sound of tearing sandpaper as it forces its way through the epidermal layers. And just as she’s doing it, she says, “Deep breath!” meaning, I should take one.

I need a deep breath so I can scream, “Oh shit, lady, you just jabbed a needle in my face!” but I never do. I just stare at that thing waving around in front of my eyes like a giant stray unibrow hair, waiting to be plucked at the end of the hour.

What’s really amazing is that, a minute or two later, I am completely relaxed. Then I fall asleep with thirty needles sticking out of me, feeling vaguely like a runaway spending the night on Venice Beach. Must be the needles.

Forget about which newspaper is endorsing what candidate. Turn your attention to prestigious news journal Parade, where you’ll find a significant endorsement of a very different kind. There it is, right on page 2, in the questions to venerated newsman Walter Scott:

“I read that Jay Leno doesn’t want
to retire and may switch networks
if NBC replaces him on The Tonight
Show with Conan O’Brien. Who do you
think would win a head-to-head competition: Jay or Conan?

I will skip through the complex media analysis that follows, and boil it down for the layman: “We’d bet on Jay.”

But don’t just take Mr. Scott’s word for it. The article goes on to invite readers to vote for their favorite late-night host online. I pointed my browser to Parade.com, and, after a few hours of reading scoop after scoop of hard news, I came upon the results of the poll:

(Wow, Carson, buddy, that’s gotta hurt. Even ONE vote would have given you a percentage point. Ah well.)

Now my only hope is that, at whatever bartending or busboy job I have a that point, my new boss is kind enough to switch over to Jay and his new show.

Hey, it wouldn’t be me without a fun fact. The term “Thinking Outside the Box” refers to an old logic puzzle, whereby one is presented with an array of nine dots. The puzzle is to connect all of the dots without lifting one’s pencil from the paper, using only four lines. Most people consider the limits of the array to be the boundaries of the puzzle. Only the true smartypants out there have the intuitive cojones to draw beyond the dots, thereby thinking outside the box.Thus:

…Peter Rader! Screenwriter for “Waterworld” and participant in today’s Entertainment article in the Business section of the LA Times.

That’s right, the article is about writers doing their own web startups as a way of flouting the big companies and getting that mighty internet dollar themselves. And Rader is among the Hollywood A-Listers who have invested in online ventures designed to eliminate the filtering effects of a studio or network, and bring those fresh, writerly ideas direct to you, the viewers at home.

The contest in these kinds of articles is to see who finally breaks down and uses the expression, “thinking outside the box.” And there it is, after the jump in paragraph 11: “The people who are going to crack the internet are the ones who have to be thinking outside the box.”

I guess you have to fill up those column inches, Mr. Menn (author of the piece), but for the love of God would you please protect some of these guys from themselves? Not only does Rader, who is putting himself forward as the arbiter of future pitched material for his new-found company, use the one expression you will hear come from the mouths of every executive and producer in a pitch meeting, but he sets it up with a statement implying that the internet has not yet been cracked. Yeowch!

As I have said before, I can’t criticize the strike in any way. It’s clear the blowback from that shot would be much more damaging than any devastation caused by the shell. But at least I can channel my powerlessness, I mean, creativity into serving at least a few of the goals of the strike. Time and again (well, twice, which is the number of times we have had a general membership meeting), the leadership has stated that this strike is for the middle class writer. And being a middle class writer, I can’t afford the buy-in to participate in these new companies. And I have a feeling the Strike Fund ain’t going to lend it to me. In that light, how do these new companies, starting up at this point in time, serve that goal, or really any of the Strike goals? I guess all entrepreneurism is opportunism, but it seems out of place, at least to tout it, at this point.

Strike TV is the Writer’s Guild’s own venture. It wasn’t mentioned in the article, it doesn’t have its own website, no funds, and whatever money it makes goes to the Strike Fund. But it does serve at least one strike goal: to give writers a platform to express themselves. I hope it succeeds and isn’t crushed by these well-funded startups.

I guess we all have different motivations for leaving the cozy confines of The Box.

On top of this flu (which I really can’t recommend to anybody, unless you’re among the 2% who get hallucinations from Tamiflu), I had a dentist appointment yesterday at 8am.

Turns out, getting your teeth scraped at 8am while your head is full of diseased mucous sounds a lot like a giant playing street hockey with a manhole cover. So by the time the dental technician had gotten rid of the tartar (unpleasant) and polished the teeth (unpleasant, but minty), I was in no mood for the lady with the probe (don’t get the wrong idea: she’s my dentist) to come in with her version of Strike Talk.

“I think it’s going to be over next week,” she started. “Tom Cruise and the Weinstein Brothers are going to end this thing. Six months from now they’re going to be the only ones with movies!”

My head swam. The room was spinning. I guess Strike Nausea is an opportunistic disease.

“So what do you think?”

“I wish it was NBC. Then I would have a job. I guess, without a job, I’ll have extra time to see the four movies that UA and the Weinstein Company will have out this year.”

She gave me a look I recognized from when I was on the wrong end of the toothpick/floss/flossing sword debate. Eyebrows down, corner of the mouth up, slow micro-headshake. “The big companies HAVE to go back. They can’t afford this strike much longer. You’re just being pessimistic.”

Am I? Seems like all General Electric has to do is sell a couple of cruise missle engines and they could hold out for another couple of hundred years. If only we were at war. I started to formulate a premise for a discussion on pessimism vs. realism, when she hooked a spit sucker over my jaw.

It sucked the fight out of me, too. Whatever fight there was. In the blue sky outside I could see little flu thingies dancing in my eye gelatin. I was bathed in the unnatural calm of a drowning victim, when the spit ran out and the sucker made a sound in my head like I was flying a 747 with the windows rolled down. I looked back at my dentist, who was now counting off the measurements of my gum depths: numbers I couldn’t hear that were meaningless to me. Felt oddly familiar.

Then it hit me. It wasn’t the flu, or the scraping, or even what she had to say. It was the fact that she brought it up. Because, at this point in the strike, I go to the dentist to get away.

Mary McNamara’s snide and unfunny “Television Review” in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times shows that the editorial staff there must be in a bit of a fix: how can you be anti-Jay Leno, and anti-Writers Guild, when the Guild appears to be anti-Jay?

The answer, as always, is pick, pick, pick. Miss Mary Mack goes after Jay for doing an old reference in Monday’s monologue. It was that timeless classic about the recent rains causing the Chia pet he threw out at Christmas to grow so much it blocked his driveway. Forget the fact that Jon Stewart buttoned his first act by calling the Writer’s Strike nine times worse than 9/11. Forget that Jay is intentionally recycling jokes, in an effort to do as little writing as possible (although he IS writing, allowed during the last strike, but under fire now). Jay has the same problem he’s had in the press all along: He’s still number one.

The Guild’s own stance on whether or not Jay is breaking the strike rules (as detailed by John Bowman in Robert Siegel’s interview on January 8th) doesn’t seem to have teeth. The controversy here isn’t whether Jay went back on air (again, the Guild gave him their blessing based on all of his support and public appearances since day 1), rather it is over the difference between the MBA (the previous contract, and the guidelines that the companies continue to follow) that allows late-night hosts to do their own material, and the strike rules, that say the show can go on, but not with any writing. Is it fair for the Guild to have changed the rules after the strike authorization vote? Or is this milquetoast sturm and drang an admonishment to the rest of the writers to Do As We Say, Not As Jay Does?

I know for a fact that none of Jay’s writers are writing anything for him. And that doing his show must be hard without that support. Isn’t that enough? Does he have to be caught in the middle of the Who’s Cooler/Who’s Funnier debate now?

This is supposed to be a Tonight Show writer blog, and so far, no mention of the strike.

There are a number of good reasons for that. Since the beginning of this high-falutin’ labor action, the late-night shows, and our show in particular, has been under the microscope. And while Letterman owns his own production company on the show, and was able to take advantage of that to return to air with his writers, a lot of striking writers seem to think that’s unfair. On the other end, Jay held out as long as he could, paying the non-writing staff out of his own pocket (that’s after tax money, mind you) until he went back on the second. Still, there are writers protesting in front of NBC with signs calling Jay a scab and worse, even after the Guild announced their support of his going back before Christmas.

So I have to craft an approach to this blog that supports Jay first, then the guild, and that doesn’t get me quoted in Nikki Finke.

So, dear reader, forge on. And as you read, be sure to check very carefully between the lines.