Sick Tree

While replacing wiper blades on the work truck, I suddenly became inexplicably cold and lightheaded, and have remained so. No joke! I'm under blankets now, shivering.

This didn't stop me from going to the orthopedist's office. The doctor was confident and matter of fact, and had strange cuts all over this fingers.

I do not have a tear in my ligaments. Nor do I have any obvious source of my discomfort other than, well, jiu-jitsu.

I asked him about training in the future. He told me I would have to decide what it is worth to me. We outlined three possible operations, none appealing.

The short-term plan is this: heal up, take some antibiotics, and try it again.

*

I told Billy about the Dogfish Head Brewery 90 minute I.P.A.s. He travelled around Amesbury until he found a liquor store that sold them, and called me later, in a drunken state.

"I drank four!" he told me, while changing his grandbaby's diapers. "I can see his dingdong!"

These are strong ales. Three is enough for me.

When he came into work today, he told me, "Goo Goo, your dog whatever beer got me in trouble."

Turns out, he didn't buy four, but eight, and worked his way through them all, capping them with a trio of bud lites before his girlfriend came home.

"Did she yell at you?" I asked.

"Oh, she yelled at me," he said. "I can't buy that anymore."

"But why don't you just drink three or four?" I asked him.

"Goo Goo, please. Those are strong beers! Gooooo Goooooooooo!!!"

I suggested, once again, that he try for just a four-pack, but he had already turned around and was once again focused on his warehouse duties.

*

The novel is off the rails, but I'm doing my best to be a dutiful engineer. Can't will away an avalanche, folks.

*

I woke up Saturday after a now forgotten dream and could only think, with utterly curmudgeonliness, that people have lost the true spirit of Christmas.

William James notes, without any irony, that there is a tremendous pragmatic value in the vague. And so there is! But let's not leave it at that.

This seems to have little to do with people saying holiday rather than Christmas, since I've never met a single person who has a problem with saying Christmas but many who suspect the word is under fire. The ghost of Joe McCarthy is pale but perceptible.

In my admittedly secularized view it has to do with self-sacrifice, family, and serenity. I may be a materialist, but I also believe in the spirit of things: one that is volatile and everchanging: sometimes stronger (the Stephen Colbert Christmas special, Truman Capote's story, the Pogues) and sometimes just pure hangover shit: red and cloudy (Tickle Me Elmo, dry turkey, Bill O'Reilly).

Just because something is changing, doesn't mean we should at least try to return to the source and see it gives us strength, always with the foreknowledge that anyone who thinks they have got it figured out in this regard is likely an ideologue and not of my camp.

I associate a true Christmas with quiet and cold. That's my Viking heart: the pagan tremblings at the base of the holiday must have resonated with fur and bone and fire -- the rolling blue snows of a mythological past or an anticipated ideal.

We all know moments where it seems to come upon us. And you stop to think, "Hey there, that's one of those moments! I just felt it! For a fleeting moment, things were as they ought to be. Fuck ya!!!" And you try to stick to this sensation and let it linger, and often it does, before fading with the light.

I also figure that my deep and provocative understanding of the holiday spirit was formed, stamped, and set to dry by the Peanuts special on the same topic, since I watched it reverently as a child, and my sense of the meaning of the spirit of the holiday of Christmas and/or its allegorical interpretations strays not a hair from that pitiful, solitary, poor tree and whatever sense Mr. C. Brown makes of it.

C. Brown, please!