Yes, it's that time of year again, when visions of sugar plums dance through the opiate-addled skulls of terminal heroin addicts and little children are traded for a month's worth of rice into the Albanian Mafia's international sex market.
It's a wonderful time, where global warming is drowning the Mekong Delta and politicians hone their lying skills to spend a Yuletide weekend or two in Sptizbule or Vale with someone other than there respective spouses.
For me, Christmas has become an especially significant season of ill-will, disappointment, loneliness and depression. And anxiety. Let's not forget the anxiety. Like Dickens' Ghost of Christmas Past, all my ill deeds of the past both distant and proximal come to haunt and then, to linger. Plus, there's the bonus of the suffering related to the malice of others I get to enjoy.
Had this been a surprise, suicide would have been the inevitable and just choice. But instead, Father Christmas has gifted me with a long and slow run-up to the season of Anti-Mirth. So, my treatment as a Dark Denizen has, on some level, become a holiday tradition, much like gingerbread cookies, except, without the frosting and instead of gingerbread, poo for dough.
Around Thanksgiving, I feel a glimmer of that Holiday Spirit, only to realize that I'm actually having a nicotine fit. Not that I'm complaining, mind you.
By the way, I'm sure there's at least one know-it-all out there with the strident belief that I made it this way. Well, you're right, but you don't bother calling, either, do you? No, you don't, and that's my point.
So, for Christmas this year, I'm taking it to the streets. I'm turning on my charm to glom all of the fruitcake I can and replace XMas morning stocking goodies with lumpy, greasy, toxic coal. Take that, Copehagen! I'm going to get little kids hooked on cigarettes and whisper to elderly grandmothers that their children never loved them. I'm going to be the one on line at Kohl's and Sears and Target on Christ Mass Eve that's paying for my twelve bucks worth of worthless crap with pennies and a personal check. I'm the one who'll be calling the cops to tow your brother-in-law's car for intruding three millimeters over my driveway-line, all after his six-hundred mile trip from Virginia Beach, two days after his wife's ovarian-cyst-removal surgery. Yes! I will represent the Ghost of Christmas Reality, by and with whom, no holiday delusion will be allowed.
Ho, ho, ho. Whatev. Hold on - I'm a-comin' . . .
