How was your Christmas? Mine was very much up-and-down, which is part of why I took so long to update this thing.
Christmas Eve started off on quite the high note, though how I managed to quaff significant portions of two fifths of Sinfire and make it back to my loading dock I ken not. The first was split with a newly befriended coleen whose reception of the unholstering of the bottle was one of the most exuberant displays I've seen in recent years. I wouldn't call her a NORMAL friend, but she's certainly much more so and much more agreeable company than the jabbering speed freaks, slobbering drunks, and skittish wingnuts I share my neighborhood with — I hope she turns out to be a keeper! (I'm not a relativist by any means, but I've observed a subjective orientation in qualitative judgments whenever lifestyles lie fallen off one side of the saddle of mainstream cultural norms.) Even better than that agreeable occasion was when later in the evening I paid a couple of my old neighbors a visit and split another fifth of Sinfire with them, whom I haven't seen in all the eleven months I've been gone from their building. Even though I despise that place enough to prefer exposure to turmoil and the elements over it, it's nice to be domestic and spend time with old friends ... well, acquaintances, actually; I don't do the friend thing whimsically.
Alas, Christmas day was rather awful: everything was closed, I only had enough money for three beers that I hadn't even the desire to drink, and the weather deteriorated to blustery almost-freezing rain. Even a bowl smoked with 5D at Wallace Park didn't help any, especially after I slid on some wet grass and sullied my typically well-kempt appearance with that poo-colored stuff god's green earth roots itself in. Even stoned I felt glum, bored, cold, and so disgusted with the day I trudged back to retire on my loading dock before the sun had the decency to sink below the horizon. To add insult to injury, my new dockmate absconded with ten dollars and never reappeared (and hasn't since), and I simply didn't have it in me to can up the money to souse myself into an appropriate indurate stupor. It brought to mind again my conjecture that Norman Rockwell depictions of goodwill, festive joy, and fellowship on Christmas are more the exception than the rule — underscored by a customer service incident a friend related to me about a woman so full of consumerist self-righteous indignation that she had the audacity to demand that my friend fix the corporate web site, all against the backdrop of cheery holiday music.
And, well, today's New Year's Eve, which means tomorrow's closures will result in another day of creative time-killing. I suppose if I'm to eat I'll need to can, since all but the worst of the downtown bumfeeds will be operating — which I'm not about to subject myself to. As for tonight, I'm not even sure I care. After I post to this blog I'll nibble on a can of chicken breast meat while gaming until the Friendly closes at seven, unless the colleen and/or 5D make good on their threats of chemically reinforced cheer. Holidays in general mean little to me, especially now that the cool pagan ones have been long christianized and both religious and civil ones are assembled in sweatshops, sold at malls and liquor stores and gas stations, and aren't taken seriously without schmaltzy world-devouring pageantry.
