The holidays are winding down to a close, and mostly the Christmas cards have arrived, with their pictures and their annual letters detailing trips to the coast, braces for Sally, debate team championships for Billy and its off to college for little Susie and Matt. Faces are smiling, life is good. I usually write a Christmas letter of my own, I love to do that. Its a nice bit of fiction, isn't it? We're happy, we're good, never mind the dust elephants or the piles of dog crap in the yard or the coating of dirt on the windowsill.
Its sort of like this blog -- it could all be a load of hooey for all you know. Maybe I'm not really me at all, maybe I'm an overweight 57 year old man named Walter who lives in his mother's basement and has bad skin and a deep and abiding love for frozen pizza, Star Trek collectibles and a real light saber. OK, well, maybe I'm really me. But how do you really know that?
I think the cold medicine is getting to me. I've been sick since Christmas, actually since Christmas Eve, and I'm beginning to suspect that somehow this is tied in to the fact that I was just not as good as I could have been all year. Hard to imagine me getting any better, I realize, but there you have it. I was naughty and Santa caught me out. Hence, the nasty little virus that's currently creeping its way through my upper respiratory system. I managed to haul my sick ass into work today, which in retrospect may have not been a good idea as in my current state I'm crabbier than a pregnant sow in August and I've probably managed to spread the plague to every poor soul inside a 50-yard radius.
So my imagination, fueled by two big fizzy tabs of "plop, plop, fizz, fizz, kiss your sinuses goodbye," reads the Christmas letters and wonders what the world would be like if the fiction of 90% of the world's Christmas letters (mine included) were erased, and people wrote about their actual lives. The parts with the fingerprints on the windowpanes, cat piss under the bed and the crack pipe hidden inside the toilet paper roll. The lives where spouses cheat, we doubt our sanity, we fail at our jobs and we drink ourselves into oblivion nighly before 5:30 PM. Where our kids are likely shaping up to transform into carnival sideshow freaks or third world dictators. Where that cute puppy in the picture is actually a vicious animal who took out half the neighborhood cats this fall and currently sits in a dark, steaming corner, salivating hungrily as he plots ways to take down the guy who reads the water meter every month.
Hi friends! Well, I made a mess of everything this year. My fiance broke up with me in March after he met a cute little redhead in the supermarket checkout line. He's known her for a long time but once she got that boob job he lit out for greener pastures. I'm trying to keep my head above water, although I can't seem to pay a bill on time to save my life and my ass grew three sizes. Most days I pick my kids up from school still wearing my pajamas. I haven't had a real haircut in something like 8 months and the batteries in my electric toothbrush have been dead for even longer than that. The dog ran off a month ago but I'm not complaining because at least I don't have to buy dog food, although now I do have to clean the cat litter box a lot more now that he's not eating the poop out of it. The kids seem to be surviving just fine, I haven't gotten any calls from the juvenile authorities in at least three weeks. I managed to hang on to my job by a fingernail at least through the end of the year and if I'm lucky I'll get a severance package next year when they finally figure out I'm the one whose been stealing the toilet paper out of the bathrooms. But for God's sake, have you seen the price of paper products lately? Here's hoping our annual Christmas letter finds you in better shape than we are. Love always, us.
Just blame it on the cold medicine. I do.
