Okay, don’t read this if you haven’t seen the Mad Men finale (this means you, Carole).

From the reaction of the TV blogs I’ve seen today (and who the hell are these people?) the season closer either makes no sense because we don’t know Megan (the secretary Don up and proposed to, after a trip with his kids to California) is or it’s lyrical and romantic (seriously, someone wrote that) because that’s a new, open Don who pops the question. Leave it  to Roger Sterling to speak for the viewer: “Who the hell is Megan?” (He is often called upon to sound the much needed note of bitter reality in the show, as when he asks Don fresh from his meeting with the American Cancer Society, “Did you get cancer?”)

Faye, the good, loyal, mature Joyce Brothers type doctor who looked like she was cleared for take-off sealed her fate in the first scene when she suggest that Don deal with his dual identity problem and overcome his anxiety by grappling with the past. Uh-huh. Not only might that crimp DD’s style as TV’s ultimate (and literal) swinging dick (or Don), it would stop the show cold. Who the hell wants to see an individuated Don Draper?

Personally I think it’s all about impulsiveness. Betty fires her kids’ nanny without consulting anyone, or thinking of the consequences of her actions. (Consequences that include Don taking Megan on the trip to LA when he doesn’t have a babysitter.) Don proposes to Megan in the wee small hours of the morning because… well, she’s good with spills (as my friend Paulette said)! She wipes up Sally’s spilt milkshake in no time and doesn’t lose her cool — and that might just have been the moment when he decided he couldn’t live without her. So unlike his last wife, and his crazy abusive parents. Having been raised the unwanted orphan of his father’s whore mistress seems to make Don want some stability, strangely.

Or does he? I find all the California stuff fascinating. At the end of season two I thought Don might just go native; there he was hanging out with local hot-rodders, sort of a Tom Wolfe without the white suit. Any minute I thought he might drop acid. Instead he went back to NY but the Golden State still seems to represent the promise of change for him (as it did for the rest of the country), to be anyone he wants. Whoever that might be.

I believe series creator (and director of last night’s episode) Matthew Weiner has mentioned Seconds before, the 1966 John Frankenheimer flick that starred Rock Hudson as man in a gray flannel suit who trades in his old life (and face) to be reborn in Malibu as a barefoot swinger. Things don’t work out so well. It seems that second chances are as chancy as hell.

“It’s been a little while since I hit you with free-style,” as Poter Wagoner once sang. Okay, it wasn’t PW, it was Ice T but who’s counting? I’ve been busy since my last post but wanted to say something about the late C&W singer, just ’cause his legacy is so damn strange, and has so little to do with the mush that comes out of Nashville today.

I was driving back and forth between Connecticut and Brooklyn last month and picked up some new CD’s for the radio-less portions of the trip: the new Superchunk, the new Robert Plant, the Dum-Dum Girls, all of which I liked and which have stayed in rotation (especially the latter). But the most compelling of the bunch might be a CD from Wagoner’s 1970s’s oeuvre entitled What Ain’t To Be, Just Might Happen.

You’re to be forgiven if you don’t remember Porter Wagoner. You would have to be pretty hardcore country to care; if you set your wayback machines to the 1960’s you’ll hear he had a couple big hits, most notably “Green, Green Grass of Home” and “A Satisfied Mind.” If his work had a theme it might have been man’s unregenerate nature, as seen in the reflection of his Nudie suit from the bottom of a shot glass.

By the time of the recordings on What Ain’t to Be, Porter was a king in Nashville. He was known as Mr. Grand Ole Opry and introduced the world, and his TV audience, to Dolly Parton. But he was recording songs like “The Rubber Room” and “If I Lose My Mind,” all in a private studio and seemingly pulled from more than just his imagination. It’s commonplace now to see stars go crazy in public, but it still takes cojones, and maybe a big blond pompadour, to write songs about it.

For despite its anti-drug stance at the time, a lot of country music of the seventies was beginning to acknowledge that too much booze and pills will make you act batshit. Don Carpenter, who wrote the screenplay for the great unsung country music meltdown movie of the seventies, Payday, said that he was inspired by stories he heard about Wagoner from Shel Silverstein. (Whether they were true or not is another story.) In a performance that makes Jeff Bridges’s foray into the same territory in Crazy Heart look rather safe and studied, Rip Torn played a country music legend careening toward the grave, one hand on his prescription pills and the other on some girl he just met.

Torn seemed to be reprising that role last year when he tried to rob a bank in Salisbury, CT — the town he calls home. As the title of one of Porter’s songs would have it, “I Haven’t Learned a Thing.”

Maybe it’s just coincidental that the California Correctional Peace Officers Association has endorsed Jerry Brown for governor. Brown, you may have heard, one of the Golden State’s more independent minded governors in the past, is running against billionaire Meg Whitman, and while the former Ebay CEO has outspent her opponent 100-1, as in $100 million to Brown’s $1M, he still has a good chance of carrying the race.

What that says about either candidate is anyone’s guess, but I remember Brown fondly for his more idiosyncratic policies and associates. He brought Whole Earth Catalog editor Stewart Brand into his administration as a “special advisor” in the seventies and had his mysterious French Zen buddy Jacques Barzaghi (he of the black beret and chrome dome) tour a troubled state prison. Asked his impression afterwards he replied, “We are all prisoners.”

My brother Ethan has been teaching meditation to the inmates of the SF jail lately, part of an prison outreach program that the SF Zen Center participates in. It’s a captive audience no doubt, and he says the classes are always well attended. I recently sent him a link to a story I did on Dharma Punx’ Noah Levine, who has been teaching those kinds of classes for years now. Not that I think Ethan needs any pointers.

He was explaining his practice to some gang girl a few weeks ago when she paid him what he said was probably the ultimate compliment. “Is that why you so chill like that?” she said.

“Well, it’s why I’m so chill like that now,” he said. “But a few hours ago, when I was fighting with my wife and screaming at my daughter, I wasn’t feeling so cool.”

And she got it, he said. He didn’t have to explain any more.

I’ve been taking the Q train a lot lately, courtesy my new job, and as expert as I am at blocking out the ambient sounds of the New York subway system — the strictly-from-hunger doowop singers; the 22-year-old teenagers selling candy bars for their “team” — it’s hard to ignore the automated voices on the new subway cars.

As much as I like hearing any kind of announcement about service and even which stops are next, the friendly, inhuman male and female recordings that fill the airspace on the Q are starting to get on my nerves. I keep expecting them to start bickering with each other, like the man and woman you hear disagreeing with each other in the airport in Airplane!

The stop just before mine is DeKalb Avenue, which everyone in Brooklyn pronounces Dee-Kalb, with the stress on the first syllable and “al” pronounced to rhyme with pal. Not robo Bob and Betty. They keep saying “The next stop is De-Kalb Avenue,” with emphasis on the second syllable and a short a as in awl. Kind of fussy, and not at all Brooklyn sounding.

The city may have done a study and discovered that the original Dutch family after whom the street (and hence the stop) is named may have pronounced it that way. But we’re not in Amsterdam and Brooklyn has a legacy of pronouncing things their way. My neighbor Joe Bellati, who was born here about eighty years ago and seems to remember everyone who has lived in Ft. Greene since then, was telling me about a long-gone doctor once. “His name was Gorse,” he said and then spelled it: “G-O-S-S.”

Tell the subway robots that.

When it comes to television, I live on the sort of time-lag familiar to anyone with Tivo or a DVR. About the only live TV I’ve seen in the last month has been the World Cup games, as painful as the US and UK defeats have been to witness in real time. All my favorite shows linger in limbo until I’m ready.

So I was caught a little off-guard by the conclusion of HBO’s Treme. Like most of the show’s fans, I had been won over by the lacksadaisical pace and ensemble acting. Where David Simon’s previous series, The Wire, had been all land mines and barbed wire in terms of the dangers that befell its huge cast of characters, Treme has been mostly soft landings.

“I keep waiting for a plot to kick in,” a friend of mine grumbled just a few weeks ago. Though the racial tensions of New Orleans have been evident, the real webbing of this series is music and, to a lesser extent, food. Two of my favorite pastimes, and neither particularly fraught with danger.

So [spoiler alert for those waiting to watch the first season! turn back now!] the suicide of John Goodman’s increasingly depressed English professor, Creighton Burnett, sort of knocked me for a loop. It’s a tough topic for me, in general: my father (an English teacher by trade btw) killed himself in his eighties, and I think the subject is often used in a cheap and unconvincing fashion in TV dramas. When in doubt, have someone kill themselves.

But the death of Goodman’s professor seemed earned, as they say in the acting business, and a longtime coming. It wasn’t just the angry tirades against Bush and FEMA that he put on YouTube (anger being the flipside of depression) or the empty screen he confronted when trying to finish his novel (writer’s block being another metaphor for the futility of existence); it was his whole sagging, deflated demeanor as the forced happiness of life in the Big Easy got harder to maintain.

And yeah, I lost it watching his wife and kid (the amazing Melissa Leo and child actress India Ennenga) deal with his death. Before they knew where he’d gone (for one last swim in the Mississippi) the daughter asks mom, “What’s a dependent clause?”

“O don’t ask me!” says Leo’s Toni Bernette (whose character owes more than a little to real NOLA attorney and advocate Mary Howell). “That’s your father’s department.”

Interdependence might turn out to be the true theme of this surprisingly emotionally rewarding drama.