This is my first attempt at blogging from my phone. Is it working? Can you read me loud and clear? Is this thing on?
Anyway, greetings from planet earth. I say that because I catch a small notion that most of you, and sometimes I, aren’t actually on this planet. Additionally, I feel as though I’m so far away from everyone I know, that I may as well be on another planet. Which isn’t the worst thing. Although I had no aspirations to be an astronaut, I did always wonder what food served in toothpaste tubes was like. I always imagined wheat bread was in paste form; because somehow I imagined that wheat bread could get worse. Wheat bread is for cheats and liars, if you’re going to eat carbs, at least make it taste good. Wheat bread is what they serve in hell along with a Coke Zero.
Anyway, as anyone with a calendar or phone knows, the holidays are upon us, which makes me the most spritely person alive. I went to Target on Black Friday, which was actually Thursday, not even to buy anything, I just wanted to be there to witness when/if someone was trampled. It didn’t happen which is good for the prospective trampled, but bad for me, hoping to break up my boredom. The good news is, I did see some lady’s foot get ran over by a cart and the captain of the cart didn’t stop, or apologize, they carried on as if nothing had happened. Witnessing this really put me in the holiday spirit. Nothing like a good bruised foot sacrificed to save $10 on a lego set to really ring in the holidays.
This year I’m actually excited for Christmas. Not because of the usual bullshit about presents, but because I’ll be able to see my wife. She and I were talking the other day about Christmas music and our disdain for it. While she is not even close to the grinch that I am, she doesn’t like Christmas music at all. She doesn’t know her reasoning for disliking it, but I can think of a few. How many damn variations of the same freaking song can you hear before you’ve had enough? I mean, sure the Dixie Chicks version of Dashing Through The Snow was a little different than Bing Crosby’s, but it’s the same damn words being sung. How many times can someone say the same phrase over and over, but differently before you feed them antifreeze? (Not very many at my house)
The one thing I do like about Christmas music is how sometimes they’ll put footage of people fighting doing Christmas shopping or whatever to the calm Christmas music. That’s the kind of low brow shit I like.
Anyway, the point of all this was that I had a epiphany today that made me feel very stupid. For whatever reason I was thinking about the Santa Clause fable. And I was thinking about the first time I figured out that Santa Clause (I guess technically the Easter Bunny) wasn’t a real thing.
I don’t remember how old I was, I would guess 6 or 7, and I was playing hide and seek with my brother outside. It was around Easter time and we had a fairly big yard. I was looking for that moron for what seemed like forever. I finally had the idea that that dope may be hiding in our motor home in the back yard. So I ran out there and threw open the door and stumbled on all our Easter gifts. I knew they were Easter gifts because there was church clothes in there and we always got church clothes for Easter. The other thing I remember seeing was Super Soaker squirt guns. I don’t know why I remember the squirt guns, but that vision is burned into my memory. I hurried and shut the door and ran inside. I remember telling my older sister that I found our presents and the Easter bunny wasn’t real and she replied “duh.” So that was stifling to the pride that I had unearthed the truth about the world for the first time in my life. I remember putting all the pieces together and thinking; “well if the Easter bunny isn’t real then Santa mustn’t be real. And is santa isn’t real then the tooth fairy mustn’t be real..” and so on, and so forth. But I never, And still am not able to understand how my parents swiped my fallen teeth from underneath the pillow which I was sleeping on and replaced it with $2 without waking me up. Or my brother up because that dweeb and I shared a room almost my whole life.
So as I was recollecting this story I made a realization about why santa wants you to be good, aside from the obvious. I mean, if your parents are santa then they get the ultimate say in what you get and what you don’t. They also get the say because it’s their money, your stupid ass didn’t work forty hours a week to deserve the new Weird Al cd, so it’s not up to you. But also because the parents can look at your track record that year and think “well... he was a real piece of shit this year. Let’s get him a basketball and spend the rest of the money on us.” Or whatever the narrative might be. I guess this also gets transferred over to husbands and wives. I’m sure my wife is well aware of how good I’ve been this year. Hopefully she just hasn’t written it all down.
Besides, Christmas is a great opportunity to teach kids a great life lesson called “there’s always next year.”
If they didn’t get what they wanted you can say “there’s always next year.” Which is a common used phrase in adulthood.
“Did you lose any weight this year?”
“No.”
“Eh. There’s always next year.”
“Did you pay off your credit card this year?”
“No.”
“Eh. There’s always next year?”
“Did you get that raise you deserved at work?”
“No.”
“Eh. There’s always next year.”
“Did your wife let you watch the X Games?”
“No.”
“Eh. There’s always next year.”
“Did you finally get that thing removed?”
“No.”
“Eh. There’s always next year.”
I hope everyone is spending this holiday season bullying their loved ones into buying you shit you don’t need, and spreading joy everywhere they go. Just don’t try and spread it around my neighborhood. We’re all set on Christmas cheer.
P.S. writing this got ‘Santa Clause Is Coming To Town’ stuck in my head. I’m getting in the shower to try and rinse it out.
