Cup XXIX: The Leaves are Turning Charlie Brown

Tea: Lapsang Caramel

Music: Vince Guaraldi Trio, "The Great Pumpkin Waltz"

Time: Late evening

I didn't grow up with Charlie Brown, but I grew up on him. I had all the paperback collections as a kid, wore the Joe Cool T-shirt in high school, wrote Linus and Charlie Brown into a very short story that's out there on the Web under one of my other names.

(And yes, that was me in the yellow shirt with the zigzag on the front a couple of Halloweens ago. So maybe I'm not all the way grown up yet.)

So, obviously, I'll read David Michaelis' biography of Charles Schulz once I get the chance (translation: once I get to borrow a copy, find it used or snag the eventual paperback).

It's already causing a bit of a stir, as evidenced by this review and this article, both from the New York Times. Short version: Michaelis apparently characterizes Schulz as melancholy.

Um ... gee, ya think?

Good art is rarely produced by the entirely well-balanced, in the first place (I will grant that maladjusts produce a lot of crap, by the way. Flaws are no guarantee of creative quality -- but they don't hurt.) I mean, look at David. Had his babymama's husband whacked, wrote the 23rd Psalm and most of the lyrics to U2's "40." Same guy.

Also, so much of professional humor is birthed by tension of some sort. Like a Louisville Slugger, it can be both defense mechanism and weapon. Hang around stand-up comics for more than a few minutes, and you'll see (and hear) what I mean. At its best, Peanuts managed the enviable trifecta of being sweet, funny and sad -- often in the same strip.

So if Schulz really was a moody, oft-inattentive grudge carrier ... he found a transcendent way of dealing with it, didn't he? Let that be his real legacy, whatever led him to produce it.

Speaking of maladjusts and misanthropes, here's tonight's tale of sweet, spooky sadness:

Ambrose Bierce, "The Moonlit Road"