I’m in mourning this week, feeling a sense of loss, because the first season of the remarkable AMC series Mad Men has come to an end. Yes, the show has been renewed, but we’ll have to wait until next summer to see it. That’s far too long.

Over the past few years, I have all but given up on standard episodic television. I like Heroes well enough, but strangely, I don’t really mind when it hits a stretch of reruns or goes on hiatus. I was hooked on Lost for part of the first season but gradually drifted away. I think The Sopranos had pretty much run its course. I enjoy that other HBO dysfunctional family saga, Big Love, and do kind of miss it when it’s not around. And I still grieve for Deadwood, which was probably my favorite TV series of all time … at least until Mad Men came along.

Other than that, my TV viewing has been characterized by hit and miss frustration. I pretty much stick to a few shows on the Discovery Channel and a few on the Food Network, filling in the gaps with a limited selection of reality shows and reruns and a rapid-fire, devil may care trigger finger on the remote.

Then Mad Men arrived.

The first few episodes interested me in a somewhat haphazard way. I liked what I was seeing a lot, but I hadn’t yet succumbed. By episode three or four I was feeling the magic. And by mid-season the series had restored my belief that perfection is possible in television. Perfection in writing. Perfection in casting. Perfection in acting. Perfection in directing. Perfection in character development. Perfection in set design and costumes, lighting, props, music. Perfection in every choice made by the people on screen and behind it. Over the last half of the season, Thursday nights couldn’t get here fast enough for me, even during the final few weeks when I knew I was running out of time and would soon be bereft, suffering through eight months without any new stories to anticipate.

If you missed Mad Men or deliberately gave it a pass, I encourage you to correct that situation as soon as possible. There seem to be a lot of options for those who want to catch up: encore airings, On Demand for those whose cable or satellite systems provide it, iTunes downloads, and I imagine a DVD release in the offing.

Let this show, this amazing fictional world, slowly sink its hooks into you, draw you in, envelop you. It’s a show that demands much of its viewers but repays with generous interest. Give it a chance. Like me, you may even find something you’d been missing far too long, that heady sense of joy that comes from settling down in your favorite chair, turning on the TV, and being transported to a different universe, some place familiar but new, disturbing but heartwarming, bright but melancholy, unbelievable but always utterly real and altogether absolutely wonderful.

A while back, I wrote this post about an eye-popping modification that turned an ordinary computer keyboard into a phantasmagorical typing machine.

A few months after that, I came across this monitor modification from the same amazing craftsman. I should have posted it at the time, but for one reason or other never got around to it. Take a look, and even if you don’t want to read through all the nitty-gritty, be sure to scroll to the bottom of the page for some snapshots of the flatscreen monitor paired with the earlier magic keyboard. Wow.

When I was a senior in high school, I took a psychology class where the teacher taught us to meditate. I doubt it was part of the official state of Michigan curriculum, but it was fun, and hey, it was the ’70s.

I still remember all the steps of his meditation process, which drew on various colors to relax your physical body, mind, emotions, and so forth, even if I don’t recall specifically what each particular color was supposed to do.

In a darkened classroom with soft music playing, we would all close our eyes and put our heads down on our desks, while he talked us through a journey from a bright green meadow, through a deep green forest to a warm sand beach, then into a boat and across a crystal blue lake to an island. On the island was a building, and in the building was a room. That was where the detailed descriptions ended and we were left on our own. Each person was supposed to “design” or “decorate” his or her own room. We were, in effect, creating our own private mental space where we could retreat in a relaxed state to think about things, get creative, solve problems, or just take a refreshing break.

Talking about it afterward, I learned that some of the kids came up with bare, undecorated, unfurnished rooms. I’m not sure what that said about them, if it was good, bad, or a little frightening. Others had rooms that looked like their bedrooms at home or a favorite relative’s house or a place stuffed full of toys and knickknacks and other private, personal things.

My room wasn’t quite like anyone else’s. It was, as I recall, like some kind of wizard’s chambers in a high castle tower — small and cramped with rough stone walls, overflowing with leatherbound books and maps on parchment, gigantic globes and big brass telescopes, crystal balls and hissing gas lamps and weird bubbling potions in beakers. There were also a lot of devices like the marvelous keyboard and monitor. Not exactly like them, of course, since we were still a few years away from the PC revolution at that point and I wasn’t visionary enough to imagine a personal desktop computer. But similar. I specifically remember a large brass typing sort of device with an oversized keyboard and ornate knobs and a long scroll of paper spilling out the back.

We did the meditation thing probably five or six times before moving on to the next item in the syllabus, but those sessions were the highlight of the year for most of us. We talked about them endlessly, and some of us tried to recreate the magic in small groups. It worked, sort of, but was never quite as effective without a skilled leader.

I returned to my island room off and on over the years, but again, it was never the same. Still, I remember the bewitching wonder of those first visits and the childlike awe I felt seeing all those strange devices, those impossible machines that I had created in the recesses of my very own mind, machines that could occasionally be used for some kind of practical work but whose true purpose was hidden from human sight and could never be fully divined.

I guess I was steampunk before steampunk was cool. Or before it was even invented, for that matter.

Okay, I’m fairly comfortable in officially announcing this as “the new look” for the site. I like it, the comments you’ve sent me have been favorable, and all in all it seems to be working well.

I owe a huge hug to my sister for finding an odd problem on the comment form, one I never would have found myself since … well, I generally don’t make a habit of commenting on my own posts. It seems the button to submit comments was trying to send them somewhere else, somewhere way out on the dark side of cyberspace. But that’s all fixed now. Needless to say, if anyone comes across any other glitches, be sure to let me know.

I’m sure I’ll be doing some more tinkering behind the scenes in the coming days, but the big, noticeable changes should be done. So we can now return you to your regular programming.

And just for the record: this is what my “Plan B” design would have looked like. Did I make the right choice?

Why, yes, the blog does look different. Thank you for noticing.

For several reasons, technical, practical and aesthetic, I’ve been working on a redesign for this site. At this point, everything appears to be in order and seems to be working.

As a warning, though, the layout you’re looking at now may not actually be the final version. I’m hemming and hawing, torn between two quite-different themes which both accomplish the things I’ve been trying to do. In fact, if you dropped in at just the right moment yesterday, you might have seen the other design, which I put up several times for comparison purposes. You might see it again over the next week or so. In other words, don’t be surprised if the appearance of these pages changes back and forth a bit. It’s not a technical disaster, and it’s not a permanent state of flux. It’s just me being indecisive. I promise to finish this off as quickly as possible.

In the meantime, please drop me a note and let me know what you think. Look all right? Feel good? Also, click around a bit, check the archives, search, dig. If you find something that doesn’t look or work right, shout. I’d appreciate it.

A video of the Gregory Maguire event that my daughters attended last month has now been posted at the spiffy Borders Media site. You get to see a pre-interview, the reading, the audience Q-and-A, and a few seconds of the book-signing. Oh yeah, you might catch a glimpse or two of the girls, as well.

To watch it, just click here: Gregory Maguire

While you’re at the site, you might want to check out a few of their other productions. The Ann Arbor Borders (Store 01) has hosted an awfully eclectic selection of authors and musicians. It’s nice to see their brief visits preserved as first-rate video productions.

As a fan of Christopher Moore, I’m kind of partial to this one.