I’ve decided to cancel my cable TV service next month.

My AT&T U-verse bill is up to $278 a month — and nobody in my house watches TV. I might watch one show, and my wife just watches reruns of “Big Bang Theory” that are probably available (free?) everywhere else in the universe.

Here’s an imponderable: I asked my 15-year-old son if he wanted to watch a show with me. He said, “Is it on Netflix?” “No,” I said. “Oh. Then no,” he said.” My question:  What difference does it make if it’s on Netflix or “live” TV? I can’t wrap my mind around this. What if I asked before reading a magazine (yes, I’m old-school in some ways!) if it was printed on matte or glossy paper? “OH! It’s on matte? I couldn’t possibly read that!”

In any event, the TV portion of my bill, which pays for that TV stuff that nobody is watching, is $151/month. (Ouch!) I could easily buy more than 10 cigars a month for that, or something else, if pressed. So I’m going to cancel that. But what if I — or you — wanted to retain the ability to view some of those fine, fine TV programs, while still saving most of that $151 a month? The program offerings are so diverse, and so widely dispersed, that it’s almost impossible to know where to choose, let alone what to choose.

Until, as they say in marketing, until now!

Here, for your reference — and for mine, so I can find it later! — is a helpful online guide to which streaming services offer which channels.

Merry Christmas. Now I need to go to back to whatever I was doing on the Internet, where all the action is.

#4. Real climate change correction is becoming feasible.

No, I’m not Pollyanna, and yes, we should remain alarmed about global warming. But there is cause for careful optimism. This is based on a number of factors:

1. Carbon-cleaning technology already exists. The best future outcome for preventing the environmental apocalypse forecast in the “Blade Runner” movies is probably a combination of reducing carbon output, and offsetting (via trees, etc.) or cleaning the carbon we do generate. We already know how to do this, and many countries have written carbon-cleaning technology into their infrastructure plans.
2. Almost every nation on Earth recognizes the problem and has pledged to do at least something about it. (No need to guess which is the only country that has not made — okay, revoked — that pledge. It’s us. As in U.S.)
3. There’s money to be made in dealing with this problem. As recent history will tell you, once there’s money to be made, action happens. If carbon emissions fuel global warming (which they do), and global warming increases costs for nations and their constituent industries (insurance; agriculture; healthcare — and plus pretty much everyone else, in increased sickness and decrease productivity), then clearly there’s a market for fixing the problem. If you invest in the stock market, you might want to take a look at stocks related to carbon-cleaning technology.
4. China is the world’s largest polluter, putting out about twice the level of carbon dioxide emissions as the U.S.  China is now facing the very real impacts of pollution and climate change — and is now emerging as a leader in the fight against global warming. They’re committed to this, because they know it’s real. We shouldn’t waste any time drawing comparisons with the actions of our own federal “government,” now populated by the sort of anti-science religious fundamentalists we used to more commonly associate with radicals in the Middle East; instead, we should vote them out, and be glad that least polluter #1 (China) and polluter #3 (the European Union) are on the case.

Environmental collapse is our greatest threat, and undoubtedly we’re in for a rough time of it. But given awareness of the situation, market incentives, and growing technology, we may be able to work our way out of it or reduce the impacts. That’s good news for next year, and for beyond.

#3.

There is a school of thought that everything really turned to shit only after David Bowie died. While I can’t lay all of the blame on Mr. Bowie, and would never do so, I do have to say it seems like a large contributing factor. Without Bowie in our universe, things got undeniably worse, and that suggests a cause-and-effect relationship.

So here’s the good news:  There will be new music from David Bowie.

We may not get Mr. Bowie himself back — although with the Thin White Duke, one can never be sure what form he might manifest — we will get more of his music.

Oh, it may not come out in 2018 — it might be 2019, or 2020, or, in an homage to his song “Five Years,” it might come out in 2021, five years after his death — but it will come out.

Here’s how I know this:  The Beach Boys recorded most of their truly great music 50 years ago, and it’s still coming out. (Witness the recent boxed collections — that’s a plural, collections — of Beach Boys music recorded in 1967 that came out this year.)

Also, how many new Michael Jackson albums have come out since MJ himself moonwalked off this plane of existence? How many posthumous Johnny Cash albums (some of them pretty good)?

Three-quarters of The Monkees are still with us, and they released a pretty terrific new album last year. I listen to it constantly. It’s so great that it has convinced me that their old music was better than I ever thought. Now, after all these years, yes, I’m a believer! Well, the other day I was listening to it yet again, and had a question about a particular song, and went to Mr. Google, and here’s what I found out:  There were other great songs recorded in those sessions that didn’t make it onto the album. Of course! And they are available for your listening pleasure if you buy various packagings of that album — if you buy it on vinyl, or from the Japanese, or in a deluxe version, and so forth. This reminds me that it’s almost certain that additional songs were recorded for Blackstar that just didn’t make it on the album.

Our Major Tom may have sung “Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust,” but I must point out that dust is everywhere — and David Bowie will live on. Knowing that there will be new music should make us eager for at least those elements of our immediate future.

2. More good news:

The GOP may be 100% committed to the 1%, but the average citizen isn’t. Actually, it seems that most of us actually care about each other. In its recent year-end survey of consumer behaviors in 2017, Google reported a great deal of search volume for terms ending in “how can I help”?

This year had more than its fair share of disasters. But people were not content to simply follow the news coverage. They were itching to take action, turning to Google Search in the moment to quickly find ways to help.

In October, wildfires ravaged Northern California and a mass shooting in Las Vegas sent the country reeling. Plus, the 2017 hurricane season ranked as one of the most active and destructive on record, with 17 named storms.

In these moments, we saw people around the country eager for information about how they could make a difference for victims of disasters stretching from Puerto Rico to Napa Valley.

One way they might help:  Ditch the GOP in 2018. If, again, we actually have elections.

1. The mid-term elections look promising for Democrats.

If, like me — and most of the electorate — you’re horrified by the GOP tax law that just got passed, not to say things like eliminating environmental regulations; attacking the FBI every day; working to ban people of some religions from entering the country; subverting the Constitution to steal a Supreme Court seat; selling off public lands; and much much more, then you might be cheered to know that, at the moment at least, Democrats are poised for a big blue wave election next year. With any luck, that’ll happen — and slow down (or reverse) some of this nonsense. Democrats recently won in areas as far-flung as Alabama, New Jersey and Virginia, and should be able to expand on that in 2018.

Assuming, that is, that there actually are elections.

Here’s some Pepto Bismol for that pit in your stomach.

Yes, if you follow the news every day — as one unavoidably must now — things look bleak. But there are some bright spots on the horizon. So throughout the rest of this month, I’m going to post a few of them just to help get us through this holiday season.

“Literary fiction in crisis as sales drop dramatically,” the headline reads. And that’s in England, which is theoretically filled with readers.

The story in The Guardian, which you can read here, posits that part of the decline is due to free, easy, readily available entertainment in the form of Candy Crush. I know this to be true. Someone I’m close to has, throughout her life, been an inveterate reader; now, though, she’s always “feeding her chickens” on some digital farming game on her iPad. I understand the temptation. A couple of weeks ago on a day during a particularly draining spell of flying around the country on brief trips; being over-scheduled here, there, and everywhere; and getting pulled in multiple directions simultaneously by the necessities of career, family, writing and more, and feeling that I couldn’t read another paragraph of anything or write another word of anything else, let alone think straight, I hopped on Amazon.com and bought myself a PlayStation 4 and a copy of “The Last of Us” and spent two blissful worry-free weeks shepherding a digital young girl through the post-apocalyptic zombie wasteland. Since then, I’m navigating another post-apocalyptic scenario courtesy of “Fallout 4.”

At the same time, somewhere in there, I did read two novels, what the The Guardian would call “literary” but which I call “novels,” or “fiction,” both of them debuts by former graduate writing students of mine at USC. I knew they both could write, and given that both books were from major publishers, I assumed they were good. What (pleasantly) surprised me was how good they both were.

I found JJ Strong’s “Us Kids Know,” about three teenagers in post-9/11 New Jersey getting deeply into bad trouble, unputdownable. While always advancing the plot, JJ alternates each chapter from a differing point of view from one of the three protagonists — a device I first encounter in Philip K. Dick’s “The Confessions of a Crap Artist,” the only one of his mainstream novels worth reading, and a book I recommend wholeheartedly and frequently; the net effect is to constantly keep you reading a bit further because you want to see what’s next, and because you want to get back into a previous character’s voice. It’s a sly form of plotting, and incredibly suspenseful. When I was an undergrad studying writing, a long long time ago, my writing professor said to me, “Suspense is cheap” — but having read many writers who have no clue how to create suspense, I’d say that suspense is valuable; you may not always know you need it, but when you don’t find it in something you’re reading, you sure know it’s not there. (Besides, I can’t help throwing in that that professor was a poet — so what would he know about this?) My recommendation to JJ, and this is a serious recommendation, is this:  I encourage him to write a literary horror novel. Stephen King can write suspense, but not literature (the proof I offer of his awful, clunking, lurching writing, can be found here); while any number of major literary writers can write well, but without suspense. (T.C. Boyle being an exception.) Imagine a well-written, beautifully evocative horror novel that keeps you on the edge of your seat and features characters whose entire personality isn’t summed by a King-like quirk like, say, the big killer Indian chief collecting shoes. (That would be King’s “Firestarter,” which was even more ludicrous than most of the rest of them.) JJ Strong is the man to write that novel (and rake in the sales, The Guardian be damned).

The other novel I just completed, on the flight back from Portland on Sunday, “The Most Dangerous Place on Earth” by Lindsey Lee Johnson, follows a group of students and an idealistic new teacher through high school. Filled with penetrating insights into what in untalented hands would be archetypes — the hippie chick; the striving Asian kid; the handsome jock; the beautiful but aloof girl; and more — the novel builds into an emotionally devastating conclusion, leaving all of us glad to no longer be in high school. While I don’t think I learned anything additional about why I so completely hated high school — the forced regimen; the bad teachers; the sense that I was in the wrong place for me and at the wrong time, when I could be learning a lot more in some other way at some other place — I did learn a great deal about student behavior these days, and about what it might be like to be the beautiful girl who doesn’t want attention and doesn’t seek it but who is misunderstood as being an aloof bitch, or the poor dullard whom teachers view as a menace to teaching and everyone knows to be a troublemaker but who finds out far too late that others will actually have a future, and are planning around it, and that those others will soon be leaving him behind, and that, already, his life will be going nowhere rewarding. Somewhat like JJ’s book, chapters are told from alternating perspectives, but here each plausibly could stand alone as a short story; (tenuously) like “The Canterbury Tales,” these are standalones that add up to a whole, with an arc.

“The Last of Us” and “Fallout 4” are incredibly diverting and entertaining. But I haven’t learned anything from them — except, perhaps, the bad lesson that ultimately global nuclear war isn’t so bad, because our species survives, just in degraded situations and without cable TV. (I prefer to think that global annihilation means global annihilation, and we’re better off just avoiding it.) These novels, on the other hand, are incredibly diverting and entertaining — and illuminating as well. They’ve made me feel in a different way. While I think all day long and generally in the middle of the night, too — it’s impossible to turn off — feeling is different; so much of everyone’s day is spent in so much rote behavior that it can be hard to feel something. That’s a gift that literary novels provide. Some of us will always understand that. Others never will. (And maybe they turn to music for the same sensation, or movies, or art, or food, or drugs. I like all of those too (if the “drug” is cigars or bourbon). )

There will always be some sort of market for literary fiction. I say this with authority, because the art I express is mostly in the theatre, and that’s a form that’s been written off as dead or dying for millennia now. But I saw a new play just recently, I’m writing one myself, and I’m directing one now. It’s scheduled to open in January. And I’m ready to start reading another novel.

A very pretty young girl on Facebook wants to Friend me. I can see why! She has NO Facebook friends. I should accept her invitation, and help her out. I’m surprised she’s from Lagos, though, because her photo looks like a white girl from SoCal. Well, such are the mysteries of life.

I’m glad to see this on the menu. It’s been a hit in Alabama, Virginia, and New Jersey. Look for more locations in November of next year.

I love books. Many, many books. But I don’t love all books. (For examples, see: The Martian; Dhalgren; Rich Dad, Poor Dad; and any cat-focused books found at cash registers.) Still, I’ve always assumed there was someone for every book; right now, I would imagine there’s a booming business in Mein Kampf among many of the president’s supporters who show up at rallies (if I also assumed they read books).

But in all the glories I found today in the four-story book mecca known as Powell’s Books in Portland, I came across many, many books of arcana that I can’t imagine anyone, anywhere, will ever need.

No, not just the outdated and therefore uselessly old books, such as science books or medical books now proved wrong; they might be a curiosity. But what need does the world have, exactly, for “Game of Draughts” (below), which recounts 24 tournaments of checkers that took place across the British Isle in 1905? By “recounts,” I mean that literally — it is a book almost entirely composed of columns of numbers. While I have no need of this book, someone at the time evidently did; the pages are filled with pencil notations. But I can’t imagine that Powell’s will ever ever ever sell this book. I almost bought it out of pity, the way one would adopt the one-legged dog who’s had both eyes poked out — but even then I didn’t buy it. If you’re interested, I’m told that every book of Powell’s is on their website for sale. Now’s your change. It’s $9.95.

This book, astoundingly, was not the only such book from that golden era of hard-fought checkers games. It turns out that the War of 1812 was not the last time that Britain fought the United States; no, there was also the 1905 war of checkers between the two great nations. This book too contains pages upon pages of columns of numbers.

Although as a people we’ve lost our excitement for checkers, here is one consolation: The spine serves to remind us that whose who came before us were not wiser than we.

Finally, here is a more recent book that I can’t imagine wanting, although it did spur thoughts toward many sequels and, indeed, a full potential series, with titles like: “How to Drink Water from a Glass,” “How to Look Out Your Left Eye,” and “How to Not Buy Useless Books No Matter How Sorry You Feel for them.”