I hate Christmas.  All the sugary cheer and cherry merry tidings, tin-foil nostalgia and performative charity.  Everything about Christmas is really about regurgitating these dimly-lit, like lead-painted bulbs, primal memories of candle warmth and chestnut embers, memories which are filtered and condensed into a quarantined snowglobe of candy-coated sentimentality.  It's a small psychological island of artificial wonder, a tear of joy trapped in amber, that we preserve and display in the face of the ever-widening world that stretches our hearts apart year after year.  We all seem to fall into the comfort of this isolated microcosm of an imagined, idealized fantasy of childhood once a year, where we convince ourselves of the half-remembered joy of believing in unearned gifts from a cold fat man in the sky.

There's more or less silly holidays, I guess.  As I get older, I'm more attracted to the food.  The "season", as they say, is admittedly a great opportunity for hearty fixings, storing up the necessary gut to sustain the leaner months.  The problem is that none of this is actually free in any of the cordial 'tis the season sense.  The price is always the steep cost of suffering the shame of those same loved ones about whom I'm supposed to have these home-sweet-home sentimens.  This has been my regular conditioning over the past several years.  Bracing myself, pre-emptively identifying areas of discourse to avoid, inventing diversions for specific inquiries, it's a full-contact game strategy just to make it through the end of the year.  Stuff like airplane tickets and hotel accomadations?  Pfff.  That's just the gaterade and cortisone on the sidelines.  The real mental toll is the emotional navigation.

I probably should point my own personal failures here.  As a young man, I took a chance.  I had no passion for the options which were opening up from my collegiate training, and so I decided to try my hand at something that I felt had a potential of providing me an authentic and self-respecting/sustaining voice: stand-up comedy.  And that may have been my best joke.  But I did the duty.  I worked the open-mics.  I socialized with the latent talent.  I climbed a little.  I wasn't always the best judge of who and who couldn't take a joke.  At one time I had a solid 40 minutes that gave me two or three dozen really good nights.  The problem is that it never became my day job, which is the goal.

I begin to suspect that my humor may play better on paper, so I took a hand at writing.  Any and every thing.  Sketches, situations, concepts, clever little short film scripts.  Eventually I started prostituting as a catty critic.  Money is money, I was increasingly understanding.  And this all pretty much dissolved as a commercial prospect around the time when society at large discovered that they don't really like to pay for people to spill words.  The Internet 1.0 (1992-2004) was one thing.  Someone with my own, unfortunate, skills has no chance of being able to swim in The Internet 2.0 since then.  'Content' has calcified.  I was plaque in the meme-stream.  Creators are like accumulating proteins in the collective memory.

So, career-wise, here I am.  Not too much to show for all of that awe-inspiring promise of youthful Christmas creativity.  And as I pack to embark on this journey, another arbitrary and increasingly indistinguishable year of holiday obligations, yet another simulation of past festive spirit with its slowly thinning veneer with each replication, I have to anticipate the prospect of my family's polite pity and reserved disappointment.  

Who am I?  And what have I done with myself?  Well, I like myself.  I've matured and enhanced and fermented in ways that may be too subjective to appreciate outside of my unprofitable articulation.  Certainly not in any of the ways that my family appreciates., which is material growth and reproduction.  Something they can put on social media to superficially show off to other families.  Less tangible resources, like dreams, are not as valued as a new wireless cuisinart.  All of my books, films, records, stuff, they see these things as things to either wear or sell, but rarely to immerse.  Culture has become a collection of costumes, all replicated but never ingested, just slivers of various signifying shells and sleeves.  How can I present myself when I'm limited to showing rather than telling?  Our depth is being walled off without our even noticing it.

--

My parents were sarcastic-ecstatic when I let them know I was coming in.  "Oh, good, another room to clean and prepare."  That's another one of the the more recent comforts of holiday congregation - passive-aggressiveness.  You learn to love it.  There should be a new wing in the linguistic schools to adequately chart and model the fine, deniable but precise melodies of insincerity.  I'm still not exactly sure what year it was that my parents lost all of their respect for me, because, roughly, I have a hard time discerning one year from another over the past 15 or so years.  But somewhere in this century, my parent's somewhat amused but cautious support for my comedic aspirations soured into an irritated acceptance.  And, as if they feel that they are nourishing my process, they've taken to sprinkling subtle barbs, like seeds in a spiteful garden, around my prickly ears.

The thinning veneer of replicated Christmas, another year, has led me to start considering "what if I just stopped showing up?"  It's not an unserious question.  Again, I'm not sure exactly when this feeling shifted from impulse to a more defined possibility.  One of these anonymous past years of endlessly less satisfying Christmases, the spark occurred to me.  Let the children enjoy it.  Why am I here?  Honestly, the problem is that I know my parents would characterize such a move as an act of self-pity on my part.  Even if it isn't.  But that's what they'll say.  And so now my primary motivation to attend the Christmas festivities is in self-defense against my parent's premature aspersions of my self-pity.  Can you see the drain we're circling here?  Families tend to have these elaborate Jenga perils.

As I arrive at my family home, I find it dispiritingly similar to my recollection.  Almost unreal in its sameness, like a cheap echo of what it was.  I do the standard male buck dance of half-assedly fighting my father over the bags, only to happily allow him to win the heaviest ones, which he recognizes and resents immediately as he hauls them up the porch.  "Well", I point out, "leave them all to me then."  But this only causes my father to resent me further for not being impressed with his old-man strength.  My mom calls me into the kitchen to taste some of "her" new Christmas cupcakes, which have clearly been made from the very heavily advertised confection product White Fructose, a trademark of the larger HIDO corporation which has been inescapably plastering ads for a wide variety of White Fructose products all over television and the internet.  So I have to try some so I can have say I've had a White Fructose experience, which is worth, I dunno, clicks or something on some website called Dic-Doc.  "It's a challenge!", she says, miming whatever morning show she saw it on.  "I'm sure it is."  Honestly it wasn't bad, but puffy.  The kind of food that evaporates rather than melts in your mouth.

"We were hoping maybe you might think this was the year to stop coming", my dad says optimistically.  "Oh, it's been in the back of my mind for awhile", I reply while looking around distractingly, hoping to give an air of disinterest.  But then something caught my eye.  I wasn't sure what it was at first, but thought maybe they had gotten a new pet since the old dog had died a couple of years prior.  But as I started down the hallway, I realized that this was somebody else here, in the shadow of the back room.  For some reason keeping out of sight....

I have to stress - this is not autobiographical.

Yes, I do have a good 40 minutes of imaginary stand-up material, but I haven't bothered to actually put it in front of anybody.  I like Christmas!  My parents are dead.  Trust me.  This is a work of fiction, but it has value.  Please do continue to follow along.  I'm sorry for any misunderstanding.
 

[Rampop giggles in anticipation]

I will need to know more about this "Instagram project" though.

Last edited by Rampop II (1/18/2023 8:52 pm)

"We'll be back before you know it." 

Yeah, I'm not holding my breath.  "Oh, one thing though, you guys got Wi-Fi, right?" 

"You mean my record player?"  My chest sinks in one final defeat.  "Yeah that Panasonic should still be up in the attic..." 

"No, dad, that's a Hi-Fi." 

"But it's got wires." 

"I know.  I know it does, dad".

So off they trek.  "Hold down the fort, son!"  They seem to be giggling a little too giddily as they veer the Oldsmobile down the road.

-------

God damn cable.  I can't believe that anyone still pays for this crap.  It's like a dare at this point, to torture people who don't know any better.  It's not even cable from 30 or even 20 years ago, when most channels still had some original programming at least.  Now it's just binge-blocks of all of the things you couldn't be bothered to watch the first time around.  Every show feels like a rejected Saturday Night Live sketch.  It's such a sad shadow of what was never really the premium entertainment medium but has still since turned to strict garbage.  "Reality" TV, the one thing we never wanted from our TV.  There's a lot of drunk bitches on TV at 10 o'clock in the morning.  It should say something about the intended audience that the vast bulk of TV commercials are lawyers, insurance and pharmaceuticals.  Is there even any news channels anymore?  Oh, here's CNN, with a piece about the fabulous taste sensation of the holiday season - white fructose.  And something running across the crawl about some crazy dude who thinks that he's being spied on by elves, hahaha, what an idi....oh, damn that's the president.  He's going to need some good lawyers, insurance and pharmaceuticals.  Wait....Congress is investigating these elves?  O'Kay.  They're going to end up scaring all of these drunk cable-watching bitches.  I guess they got nothing better to do.

----------

I must have something better to do.  I can't get it up in this musky dust.  Cock-blocking the scotch.  I wonder what kinds of pharmaceuticals we have lying around here?  Check their bedroom bathroom.  Pepsid and Lipitor?  Not even any Claritin?  Ah!  Here we go - Robotussin Cough and Congestion: Maximum Strength and Family Size.  I didn't think they made this anymore.  Ooof, "Best by 02/06/06".  Well, it's still sealed.  Fresh as beaujolais.

Oh, now the fucking construction!  You gotta be kidding me?  These hammering bastards.  Where the fuck are they?  It must be one house over, but, damn, that's loud.  It's Christmas, you sons-a-bitches!  They better be hanging lights or something.  Is that sawing now?  Urgh!

I try to check my phone for some real news, but I've never been comfortable staring at this screen for more than a half-hour, maybe.  Maybe I will drag out that Panasonic.  Can't be worse than this industrial racket outside.  Look at all of these AARP back issues.  All of these books that I'm sure they never read.  I think I read a couple, back in the day, or at least flipped through them once or twice.  Here we go - General Anatomy.  I definitely enjoyed those cell illustrations.  World Book Encyclopedia, yep yep yep.  Guinness World Records.  I'm telling you, cable programmers should be ashamed of themselves for not being able to compete with this stuff.  The only Reality TV I need is on PBS.

I may be starting to sound like an old man, but who wants to be young at a time like this?  They fucked up your culture, now it's just reboots of our culture.  They fucked up your music industry.  They fucked up your climate.  They fucked up your journalism.  They fucked up how you relate to society.  And they stuck you with the bills they used to educate you on how absolutely fucked you are.  But hey?  Enjoy the white fructose and shut the fuck up!  It's not my fault that 'streaming content' sounds like a euphemism for piss and diarrhea.  We're living in the Simulation all right, but not the cool Matrix kind.  Our simulation is a real-time debased reduction of a culture and a society, with degenerative memes a poor substitute for communication.  Our cultural cavities are crumbling off our gaslit gums, all the better to suck and fuck with.

That god damn noise!  Better be a manger.  That's all I'm saying.  I will drop-kick some fucking donkeys.

----------

Here's an old tome I remember - Lost Tribes of History.  I loved looking at these pictures, maps and illustrations.  All kinds of good stuff.  Toltecs, Hitties, Cathars.  And this really strange one, I'm not even sure how to pronounce these letters.  Supposedly existed for hundreds of years, circa 1200-400 B.C., isolated within subterranean pockets, caves with fresh oxygen and water, in the South China Sea under something called the Dragon Hole.  Says they used methane for illumination and heat, only discovered in the 1880s, and now (published in 1982) is forbidden to outsiders, fiercely guarded by the CCP navy.  Some rusty old artifacts, but they could be from any shipwreck in the area.  It would be quite a hoax, but it's all very fishy.

--------

At least the construction stopped a few minutes ago, but in the pocket of that silence, I definitely heard something like the soft feet of a cat on the hardwood hallway floor.  Or maybe a big rat.  I sneak into yonder hallway, still very quiet.  Walk slowly, peering into each room as I pass down, waiting for something to scuttle.  But nothing.  Finally the bathroom at the end of the hallway, I check inside, and almost immediately feel the sharp sting of pain on the sole of my foot.  There's broken jagged pieces of glass strewn about the entire bathroom floor.  The fuck did this happen?  Did my parents just happen to leave this here, maybe hoping I'd clean it up for them?  Is that why they were giggling?  The absolute hell?  Switching on the light, I slide my punctured foot into the bathtub and wash off the sprinkles of shards.  The cuts aren't super-deep but my pride is pained.  I use the toilet brush to sweep as much of the glass as possible over to one corner, and pull out the bandages from under the sink.  I have a mind to put the shards right under their sheets, but I just tossed them in the recepticle instead.

Then I hear a very loud *bang* on what seems to be a wall, but when I check into the downstairs guest room, I notice that the window has been boarded up with wood planks.  That's good to know.  I have no idea if this window is the source of the glass or how the glass made it seemingly 30 feet to the bathroom.  And in fact, I'm pretty sure I don't remember fucking sharp ass glass on the floor of the downstairs bathroom that I'm sure I used the day before.  With a pissed sprint, I hop outside and peer around the corner, and find some dude standing outside the busted window looking as confused as me as to why there's wooden planks there.

"The fuck you doing?"

"Huh?"

"J'you doing outside my house?"

"Oh, well, I think I'm supposed to fix this?"

"Are you or aren't you?"

"Is there another broken window?"

"Who are you?"

"I think I'm supposed to fix this window?"

"Buddy, I'm about to call the police.  Now who told you to fix that window?  Or to be here at all?"

"I'm with the realtor, and we're doing maintanence on homes in the neighborhood."

"We?"

"Yeah, we've been out here all morning."

"You got a work order with a signature?"

"A what?"

"Paperwork!  Do you have any paper work whatsoever that says you have a right to be here?!?"

"Let me see."  Lumbers over to his truck.  "I dunno.  Is this your signature?"

It wasn't my signature, but it was clearly my dad's.  The date on the bill was Dec. 21.  It seems like a certainty that my parents were well aware that these workers would be showing up today.  "OK, look.  My parents aren't here today, so I think there's been a misunderstanding, and I'd be a lot more comfortable if you were to do this work, that my father apparently authorized, when he's actually present on the property."

"But today's the last day we can do it before the New Year.  You don't want that window to stay busted all the way through the holidays, do you?"

Honestly couldn't care less, I thought.  "Sorry for the misunderstanding.  I don't know what to tell you.  Have your boss take the matter up with my father after Christmas."

That's when I heard the chainsaw.  One of this dude's cohorts had decided to go ahead and cut through the wooden planks because he failed to understand by damn sight that I was discussing this business a few yards away.

"Well, we should probably go ahead and take care of it now while we're here," this lumpy cunt says.

"Pfft.  OK.  You have an hour.  And make sure no little critters get in while you're working."

"Like the elves?" 

I stick my finger in his face, "I swear to fucking god, guy!"

"Jeez, man.  What ever you say."

Apparently not.

Yessss, just how I like it, cutting straight to the chainsaws! 
Am I right to imagine that first exchange of dialogue in a Firesignian tone?
 

Those damn pancakes.  I should have gone out to the store or something.  Grease-fried fast food would have been preferable.  No, I had to resign to sloth, and resort to slapping some of these god-awful white fructose pancakes together for supper.  After all of the commotion and irritation of the day, I just wanted to fill my belly and go to bed.  But now I'm vaguely nauseous, bloated, shifting around trying to find a position that will be just not-sore enough to drift to sleep.  And sleep only comes in spurts, fits and sheets.  A dull agony suspends over my body, suffocating and stagnating.  I hate this wretched room, a dead memory of childhood.  There's nothing in this physical space that conjures any sentimental significance.  Everything this room was for me as a child, as a boy, as a young man, has dissipated like fumes deep in the wood.  This is not the room I grew up in.  It's a pitiful echo of past projections, a replica of presence.  I'm becoming a myth.


This night is tempestuous.  It seems like more than a matter of processed batter.  No, the whole of the air feels rancid and tussled.  As I shift about the sheets, the entire supine space of the house shifts with me.  It's not just pungent gurgles from my belly, but soft scuttles, creaks and moans in the foundation.  Since I'm captive in these twilight tremors, I try to hone in on those I deem true sensations.  After several minutes (possibly an hour), I cannot dissuade myself that it sounds like someone is walking upstairs in the attic.

I'm not sure exactly what hour it is, but I pull myself out of bed and decide to check it out.  If it is an animal, how dangerous could it be?  I ascend the short staircase at the end of the upstairs hallway and open the attic door.  It must be the relative darkness, but the attic seems vastly larger than I remembered.  Just filled with stuff.  Rows and rows, it seemed.  A lot of things I vaguely remember, old furniture, appliances, magazines, carpets.  I don't remember this window being up here.  It's actually quite nice, a moonlight view over the neighborhood.  I never realized the elevation of our house to the others before.  Seems like a strange waste.  I come across yet another set of stairs, which I definitely don't remember being here, this time descending.  It looks like another wing of the house, but that can't be right.  I step through into what looks like another enormous attic space.  Have I even been in here before?  Wait.  I'm almost sure I have.  When was that?  This attic space seems to have a lot of my stuff in it.  Are these my old videotapes?  That's right, I stayed in here, didn't I?  For a couple of years in school?  I moved in here, what year was that?  There's a bed in the corner.  But that's not right.  It's unkempt and tussled.  This bed is being used.

Then a shock of scratch.  I turn toward the sound and there's someone in the room, deformed and insane, sizzling giggles and hot icepick eyes, shuffling in my direction, and I choke on a scream until I wake up. 

Back in my pitiful echo of a bed and a burning belly.  I turn on all of the lights.

Ah, that car door slam.  Here we go.  I had dozed off a bit on this "new" sofa after scurrying out a bit in the afternoon to find any real drink that might be available from an open store in this little town.  I managed to find a place with some scarce stock, no sympathy for the last minute holiday reveller, and grabbed a dusty drambuie, which I was now trying to find a cozy hiding place before realizing what little difference it could possibly make.  Oh, listen to their dim enthusiasm, coming up the porch.  I sincerely begin to pray that they will be horrified by the turn of events.

"Hello!  Still here?!?", they laugh bursting through the front door.  Yes, it all seems like such a fine joke, doesn't it?   Rather than respond I just grin and chuckle, rising to my feet as they race to the kitchen and bathroom respectively.  Finally to neither in particular, I say, "Oh, it's been wild."

But then Dad shrieks from the bathroom, and I'm almost satisfied with his agony.  "What the hell did you do in here?!?!?"  Which opens up the opportunity to ask him the same thing, as Dad still hasn't laid eyes on my bandaged foot.  "Goddamit, son!!!!"  He steps out of the bathroom with a similarly bloody foot, and for a competely inexplicable, straight-up impossible reason, the bathroom floor is covered in the same kind of broken glass shards that I had just stepped in and swept up yesterday.  "I have no idea" was the best I could summon.  "You have no idea what you did?!?"  "I have no idea how this happened again", pointing to my foot.  "There was all this glass here yesterday morning that I stepped in, but I cleaned it all up.  I have no idea where the glass came from in either case."  "You mean you don't remember?"  "I think I would remember."

Dad barrelled past me to nurse his own injury, and all I could do was scan the area for any possible source of this breakage, and finding nothing.  No possible bottle labels, certainly not the window.  It's quite an uncanny occurance.  But, automatically, I start to sweep up all of the debris again and, as insane as it sounds, decide to check yesterday's trash to see if that glass was still there (as if it just migrated back overnight).  Mom has decided that the fuss is worth her attention, and, seeing Dad's red sock, suddenly declares a crisis.  "Do we have sutures?!?!"  "I don't think that's necessary."  "What happened?!?!?"  Good question.  I'm honestly baffled.

After a few minutes, the drama receded, the wound dressed, the mess swept, I offer "I thought you had left that broken glass there before you left.  I stepped in it too" (showing them my sole cuts) "and I swear I got it all up.  I don't know what's going on."

Dad is now more circumspect, "I guess maybe we'll never know...."

I figure it's a good enough time to broach, "There were some guys who showed up to fix the front room window though.  You must have known about that.  You signed for it."

Dad: "Did they come?  Finally."

"But the glass today couldn't have anything to do with that."

Dad: "I wouldn't think so."

"Still....would have been nice to have gotten a heads-up about that.  And the, you know, new furniture?"

Dad: "Right!  Did that come?  I didn't even notice."

I take a moment to calibrate his sincerity before turning to Mom, "You could have let me know that you had a big furniture shipment arriving while you were gone, you know."

Mom: "Well, it's been very hectic with all of the plan...s."

"Like what was so important to attend to yesterday, driving up to Franklin and all of that?"

Mom: "Oh, it was so boring, you don't have to worry about that."

Like a kid, I already start to scheme for how to swipe their keys to get a look into their trunk.  "Ok, hectically boring.  Sure.  But.  What the hell?"  They stare like they have no idea what language I speak.  "Try to see it from my point of view.  It seems..."

Mom: "Confusing?"  Dad: "Frustrating?"

"Quite bizzare, in fact."

At this point, a loud crash comes careening out from the master bedroom.  We all jolt to our feet but, surprisingly, my parents then block the path to the staircase, while Dad tries to deter, "This goddamn old house, why don't we grab some of that elf cake from the kitchen?"

"What the hell was that?"

Dad: "Probably my stomach grumbling, I haven't had a bite since breakfast."  Meanwhile Mom is sequestering me towards the pantry, "You know how he gets".

"You two haven't even been upstairs yet?  You're not worried about that?"

"Bah", says Dad as he starts to stab at the cake.  "What's the worst it could be?  More glass?"  Laughs like a ghoulish fool.

"I think I'll be right back."

"Wait!", I hear as I lunge up the staircase in a momentum of confusion.  Just at the top step I catch out of the corner of my eye someone ducking behind the master bedroom door.  Now I'm more emboldened in my territoriality.  I rush into the room to find two goons, in the same work suits as those from yesterday, seemingly having a go at the wall with a sledgehammer.  "The absolute fuck?!?!?"

"Hey, watch out, now.", which I intuitively take as a threat.  After all, they're the ones with the sledgehammer.

"Who told you to be here?"

They just look at each other, evidently as confused as I am.

Mom and Dad aren't too far behind.  "It's OK", they assure the workers, not me. 

"What's going on here?"  Now I'm hearing slams and bursts from the attic as well.

"Come back down stairs, we'll explain, I promise."  For some reason my parents look slightly defeated.

As we're heading back down stairs, two additional guys are shuttling the tub out of the upstairs bathroom, and I have no idea where these people are coming from.  Just trying to keep my wits under some desperate assumption that there could possibly be an explanation worthy of this carnage, I try everything in my nervous capacity to avoid a complete conniption.  Back down stairs, as the commotion stirs and erupts to a chorus of chaos above, I wait patiently to entertain this explanation, so eagerly awaiting the punchline with which I will proverbially laugh for years to come.  Sitting now, on this new sofa and love seat in this distant memory of a living room, ok, so...?

Dad: "Argh, well.  First of all, son.  We weren't really even sure if you'd be coming this year", was the not very promising start.  "I mean, you know, we're always happy to see you..."  I start to drop my face a bit in the anticipation that, somehow, this was going to be my fault?  Nice negging, Dad.  "And, obviously, whenever you do come, we like to make you feel welcome."

"Hm-mm."

Mom: "Honestly, dear, we thought you'd stop this Christmas thing years ago."

"Ah."

Dad: "I mean, we've given hints over the years."

Nodding, I reconcile myself to spending Christmas Eve driving back to my house tonight.  That's something special.  "Right, but, that still doesn't explain....all of this", gesturing to the commotion.

They look at each other with resignation.  Dad: "To be perfectly honest, now, there's no need to beat around the bush...we didn't want to have to tell you any of this."

"Oh", feeling a little patronized.

"You see, your mom and I, we've been looking into this...program.  It's like a retirement community.  Only thing is, they give us different names, and, um, that's it."

"That's it?"

Dad nods hopefully.

"Where is this community?"

Dad: "Well, that's....not public information."  Mom: "That's why we have different names."  Dad: "Right."

"So, wait.  You weren't going to tell me any of this?"

Dad: "Of course not.  Different names."

"What about the house?"

Mom: "Well, that's why we're remodeling."

"But with duplicates of the exact same stuff?"

Dad: "Sure.  That way if you ever did get curious and came up some time, then, you know, it'd be...kinda funny, huh?"

"Funny?"

Dad: "Yeah", chuckling, "Like, 'where'd we go?'  That's pretty funny.  Other than we couldn't have seen the look on your face, which I'm sure would have been funnier."

I take a big black moment to let all of this sink in.  "I don't think I find any of this funny at all."

"Well maybe that's why you were never a very good comedian, son."

I can only stutter at this point, "I had some good sets"

"C'mon.  You were always more of a jackass."

I vaguely register the chainsaw then ripping through my bedroom.

*end part one*

See if I can get to the very bottom of this.