love's official sanction
Music: The Birthday Massacre: Violet
[hangs up phone]: "Oh, she just had the baby yesterday and there's drama already."
The holiday is definitely underway with unhappiness, thankfully most directly among the extendeds, although it does impact the unholy trinity via the maternal news vehicle at its center.
Really, the holiday is pleasantly relaxing but for babies and tongues.
Fragment of the morning walk with maternal news vehicle: beautiful, glorious day with the smell of burning backyard leaves and the sight of deflated Blow-Up Santas and Snowpeople in every other yard. Some gleeful preteen got his Christmas pocket-knife early.
That gleeful pubescent hellbent on merry mischief represents the inevitable threat of Disneyfication: if you enforce happiness and corral it to one place and one day, you're tempting an eruption of bummedness, you're risking bursting that boil of red and green excess. I think Paul Virilio is pretty darn right when he argues "if you build it, not only will people come, but they will help you to create the accidental catastrophe of It too." The invention of the blow up Snowpeople staked to the obnoxiously green Southern front lawn was simultaneously the birth of pocket knife vandalism against inflatable Christmas lawn ornaments.
I mean really, Snowpeople in 70 degree weather?
What should we expect with all these tidings of comfort and joy? Your Uncle Earle is something like the opening sequence of Lynch's Blue Velvet: lurking just beneath the surface is a gas cloud just waiting to erupt at the dinner table, and precisely at the moment grandmother is thanking God for the bounty and asking him to bless the boys overseas.
After I post this, I am going to go watch My Girl, starring Macaulay Culkin and Anna Chlumsky, with my parents. We're going to have blackberry cobbler, and probably suffer a few cheerful hums of "White Christmas" by my father. This is possible for me because I really do love my parents and can sometimes endure what Kundera called "the second tear" for them. Oh, and also because Anna Chulmsky starred in Blood Car this year: "In the near future, gas prices are at an astronomical high. One man is determined to find an alternate fuel source. That alternate fuel source turns out to be blood...HUMAN BLOOD."
Blood: love's official sanction . . . and fuel.
Oh, and Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate it. That's what we celebrate here, the real reason for the season . . . and if you don't agree I'll go out back and get a stick and beat your goddamn ass. To wax Shaunessy: You can take Josh out of a Christmas, but you cain't . . . .