I’m pretty sure the tight throat, sniffly feeling is an allergic reaction to having a tree in the house. But, goddamn it’s perty.

While for years I’ve gradually become less and less Christmas-y, this whole living together thang has seemed to fuck with that system. Together, we are a fun-loving, joyous holiday couple. We have even been to two fairs.

Merry, merry, merry.

And, a Happy Holidays to Bill O’Reilly.

Is the Internet broken?

I can’t seem to get on a bunch of different sites, my Sidekick ain’t kicking any email and everything feels slow. This page works, and I’m using different networks, so, yeah, no more Internet. My sky has fallen.

Other than that, we are pondering a big tree purchase. M. was leaning hard on the artificial limbs, as it were. However, I may have won that battle with a simple fact. A fake Christmas tree (or as I like now that I’ve seen San Jose’s and to fuck with Bill O’Reilly’s broken brain, a fake “Community Giving Tree”) needs to be taken down, put away, stored and ultimately moved when we vacate the house of Nick’s.

Actually, the City of San Jose’s Community Giving Tree seems to pre-date by a couple of decades the current “war on Christmas” by us secular fuckheads who worry about the actual war. (You know the one with bullets and rocket launchers and suicide-bombers and shit.)

So far, my favorite display in the defense of Christmas Fox videos was from some poor family who had the misfortune of moving into a development with home association rules and an inadequate grasp of the fine print. They threw up a lovely, almost lifesize tableau of a light-up holy family, an equally glowing snowman and a jolly-lighted Santa.

It sucks and all to not be able to decorate your house the way you want. But, that’s why a shitload of us don’t move into those kinds of gated communities and whatnot. I couldn’t even cope with a bunch of the shit condos were telling me if I lived in certain buildings. I think the town of Hingham won’t let you decorate with non-white lights. (Actually, I think that’s peer pressure. Nonetheless, it keeps me the fuck out of Hingham.)

However, I gotta question the sacred, faith shit when the display includes a snowman and a santa and everything lights the fuck up. Seriously, my bullshit detector rings. Boohoohoo, they ain’t letting you live freely and religiously in the old, U.S. of A. Glad you found Fox News to listen.

I think “Christmas” in almost all quarters is an allowable adjective, no matter what Fox claims. But, everything doesn’t require it.

And, for the record, that thing with Santa and reindeer and gifts and eggnog is not sacred. The minute they dig up some verifiable scrolls, which the wackjob fundies can follow alongside their misunderstanding of the New Testament as a literal blueprint for good living, that features a chimney and red stockings, it’ll be sacred. Until then, um, ah, it’s capitalism not Christianity, and if stores zig with the zag of a changing demographic, that’s fucking life not war or faith under siege.

I forgot to write about last weekend. We cruised by The Great Dickens Christmas Fair, Christmas hype’s answer to a Ren Fair.

Personally, I was disappointed by the lack of disease, crippled, starving beggar children and chamber pots emptied to the street. But, history’s a funny thing.

I’m too lazy to write right now, and I’m too lazy to post the sound file of tonight, as I had planned.

But, among the power elite that is Stanford, I did the laugh making thang fairly adequately. I had fun. I chatted with some nice people. All and all I can’t complain.

The surreal of the evening was in its entirety and scope. Dig the concept from a small taste of higlighting — Undergrads aged from somewhere youthful in the birth to 20 zone, me talking trash about my 41-year-old cooch and a 72 year old doing a striptease. Fun for all ages.

Everyone who has ever watched an ABC After School Special needs to bow their heads in silence. Wendie Jo Sperber starred in the best and retained her good cheer through many a role as the wacky, chubby friend. RIP.

I’ve been too lazy to write things down. I still gots the ideas jumping inside the skull cavity, but I ain’t writing shit down like I should.

Here’s some bouncing non sequiturs (I think the “bouncing” there is a non sequitur itself).

I always feel a tad nostalgic around the holidays. Right now, I’m foundly recalling Santa Claus. I think it says something (not sure what) that I learned Santa was a sham by looking it up in the dictionary. Around the same time, using the same dictionary, I discovered that a whorehouse was a large storage facility. At some later point in life, I figured out the difference between wares and whores.

I guess I’m lucky that when my domestic partner gets an edge, it’s over a bad haircut or a lack of BBQ pork in his diet. As he told me (and, of course, I’m leaving out all context in order to make myself clearly the long, suffering and tortured one), “At least I don’t hit you.” Nonetheless, lately I’ve been telling people, “you know in Lifetime movies how the guy moves the chick away from her folks, and then she turns up missing…”

Since I now live in a land where sarcasm and hyperbole are often misunderstood, I probably shouldn’t have written the last paragraph. How much would it suck if M. had a huge shakedown, because something random happens to me, and I’m a fucking asshole wiseguy on the Internet making him number one suspect.

Speaking of domestic abuse, Nancy Grace, my heroine of CNN, may have spoken the best line ever, matching both Shakespeare for drama and Spanish-language soap operas for melodrama. It was something like, and I fucking wish I had it exactly, “Can someone tell me why all these pregnant women are dropping like flies.” (Per Nance, most US pregnant chicks who die, die by murder. If true it sucks, but with the grace of her ability to make all things sound completely fucked and sinister, she made it seem epidemic and epic in proportion. Thankfully, there aren’t streets full of mortally wounded mothers to be.)

Continuing on the death front, the worst thing about the Internet is that shit can’t die, or at least can’t die enough. This once vital cog in the wheel of Boston Comedy is beyond brain dead. Terry Schiavo time. If you could hold a pillow over it’s virtual face, I would do it.

Danger’s Sidekick is pretty fucking fun. I work among serious Blackberry, aka CrackBerry addicts. The gadget freak in me looked on and fought with my mortal soul that wants no part of a short electronic leash to the office. The boss, like any good pusher, kept offering me the taste, the hook up, the memo to get my own, paid for by the man.

I declined. Repeatedly. Afterall, these people are mad. They don’t sleep. They tap tap tappity tap and talk and get their crackberry jones filled over and over through all hours of the day and night in literally every corner and quarter of the planet earth that has reception. They twitch in dead zones.

So I got my own. It’s methadone I pay for myself, instead of heroine fed from the office teat. It’s not the work tool always on to the workplace mothership. It’s fun and frolic with Rap ring tones and flashing lights. Fuck the office, man, I can hear Eminem and Kayne.

When my boss pointed out again that she had the hookup, I explained that I might want to call a whole lot of 976 numbers and couldn’t do that on a work phone. Best of all, in the world of gadget envy, mine plays the .WAV files of our VOIP phone systems voicemail messages, which Blackberry does not.

Work still surprises me. They recently hired an HR chick who has a personality and is funny and human. It’s a fucked up bizarro world out here.

Despite a general disdain for all things New England, my boy of Christmas cheer is planning a Yankee Swap on Christmas Eve. He’s kind of adorable on the holiday thing (in a geeky, let’s look it up in wikipedia kind of way).

Except, as been pointed out here before, he is, somehow, a medium channeling the ghost of Pat. He’s thinking a fake tree would sufficiently spruce the place up and claims to not see the difference.

Ho Ho ho.

I decided to get a Cali cell. Better yet,
I convinced T-Mobile to give me a Sidekick for $20.

I write from the wireless ether.

Pretty strange to be thousands and thousands of miles away from the original homestead. (OK, nearby the original, since the original is yet marked by an appropriate plaque noting my residency and is filled with strangers with the price of admission and appropriate Purchase and Sales agreements.)

I miss everyone, but not necessarily the family ritual of holidays. It’s a bit less stressful when you don’t gots to be anywhere, and it’s unlikely you’ll be picking a fight over 40+years of injustice and misunderstanding and betrayal and just good, old-fashioned sibling rivalry.

Besides, having the dinner at my house meant I could get my whole control freak on and Martha Steward the fuck out of the meal. I insisted on an almost entirely home-made feast, scoffing at M.’s suggestions to just buy pie and bread and all. Philistine.

My fresh-baked and hand-made crust apple scored two-to-one against his store-bought pumpkin cheesecake. My crust ain’t pretty, but it’s mighty tasty.

Jesus, what a lucky man that M. is.

And, here’s the Norman Rockwell scene. Only it has Asians. (M. insisted the bird be on the table so he could, man of the house style, make with the sharp implements right under the guests’ noses.)

As I told my brother on the phone last night to announce my non-arrival home for the holidays, “Yeah, the East Coast, you people, you’re dead to me.” (Maybe not so much dead as far away.)

To celebrate the transformation I have a hole in my Massachusetts driver’s license voiding it in some mystic states’ rights ritual to be replaced by a new card in the mail at some undisclosed point in time. And, the bumper of the vee-dub that brought me here is no longer sporting the tag that survived the Saturn SC coupe or its sister yellow New Bug. Gone forever is this:

Perhaps the last vestige of my New England self. (Well, that and my sarcasm and ice cold emotional distance.)

Goodbye old me.

(In related news, I pointed out to M. that in many a Lifetime original made-for-women movie the ever-present abusive dude starts by separating his victim from her nearest and dearest. It starts with distance, continues with an emotional severing (um, holidays, am I right ladies?) and ends with crippling emotional attachment.

The sun, moon and stars to me, the man o’ mine who invited me to live 3,000 miles from my family and friends. (OK, if you were to quibble, maybe 1K or so, if you think of my Western dwelling sister, and, if pushed, a few miles, but with a bay and peninsula in the way, of my oldest and among my best friends. But, the vast majority of the crowd are far.) Anyway, my cohabitation buddy, he thanked me for the tips, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he tunes into Lifetime more often.)

My weekend was partially spent in not-so-subtle, psychological warfare. In either vindication of my lovely sense of humor or painful proof of my unsuitableness as a partner the target of my warfare was the generally lovely, but sometimes not, M. In retaliation for grumpy fighting I mixed up some Streisand, you don’t bring me flowers, boohoohooofuckinghooboohoo, mens are means iPod goodness for driving around town.

By the fucking way, by drive around town, you must picture my sky blue convertible all topless and shit. Yeah, we still got some sun here in sunny San Jose.

The damnednest thing about trying to torture M. with love duets and broken hearted down and out sappiness is his always frighteningly revealing true life adventure “how I spent the 80s.” The man knows, like intimately, the song book of the Bee Gees. Sure, it got him mad Malaysian ass in his tender high school years, but still and all, I gets nervous about “the past.”

Right when I pulled out all stops with the Karen Carpenter medley, he revelled in the teenage joy of “For all we know.”

Meanwhile, we’re gearing up for a little home for the holidays. I started a little flour flinging of home-made white bread and pie crust to be refrigerated until the big day. Checking in with the brothers back home, it looks like I’m not invited to a couple of different dinners. (By not invited, that’s the story I”m sticking to as far as why I’m not holiday-ing in New England. Yeah, I would have come home if only I was invited, poor me, miles away and forgotten.)

Interesting conversation with the biggest bro about the home for the holidays, not, paradigm I look to be rocking in my new Cali world. I’m sure it’s the fodder for thoughts and pondering on family and what constitutes “home.” But, come on, I’m just fucking too lazy to make all the arrangements to get there.

And, coup de fucking grace on my laziness and all, a big old storm is being predicted to slam the east coast by the big day. I ain’t fucking dreaming of no white Thanksgiving, I tell you what.

Speaking of a white Thanksgiving (and trust me, that is a kickass segue for this paragraph), my racist core has been giggling for days at the Thanksgiving I refused this weekend. Here’s an excerpt from the Ranch 99 local market.

Yeah, whatever, M. You can force me into your psychedelic, hippie, West Coast, multi-culti, Bay Area, melting pot, peace, love and happiness nirvana. You can oppress me with words like caring and family and love. Whatever.

But, I ain’t eating no pork fried rice as part of my Thanksgiving feast.