Grinches Get Stiches

It feels like the holiday spirit is hard to tap into this year.

I feel like i make this statement every year.
 The Herrband is sick, and this means the world stops for a little while.
He's a good man, but when he gets sick it literally shuts him down. He holes up on the couch and doesn't move. I shudder to think of when we have a little one and he realizes the days of being sick and getting left alone are entirely over.
I'm probably a jerk because, whenever I get sick, I refuse to stop. I got a sinus infection the first week of november and it took me two weeks to go to the doctor, and by then it had gotten so bad that I could barely hear out of one ear and I kept keeling into people like a drunk because my balance was shot.
It's not a competition, but if it was, I would totally win.
Anyway, so because of the holing up in sick fortress central, we couldn't go get a tree today, and we won't have another day off until next tuesday, which GASP is a week before Christmas and only about three days before Yule.
Okay, so I probably sound like I'm bitching about now, and I realize that, but it's okay.
I take lots of long sparkly walks at night through the twinkly diamond crusted snow and look at all the beautiful Christmas lights on the fancy people's houses and generally feel super pixie about everything-
Wait a second...
It's been fifty degrees for the last four days? Fifty degrees and raining off and on? WHAT THE HELL? Global warming is seriously putting a damper on my Holiday vibe.
Okay, now I know I just sound retarded.
So in an effort to be a rockstar sugarplum of my own creation, I am going to my sister's apartment tonight and I am going to drink a fuckload of wine and make about seven different types of Christmas cookies.
YES.
This sounds like a great plan that will inevitable result in me with a basket of beautiful goodies, bundled up, oh so adorably, traipsing about the neighborhood and giving away parcels of lovely, warm treats.
I know.
I'll probably just end up drunk on her kitchen floor rolling around in red and green sanding sugar.
I'll still twinkle, right?

You know, as I was leaving this morning with that very same sister to hit up the corner diner for our weekly Compound breakfast date (yeah, how do you like this run on sentence?), we almost tripped over the sweetest, white haired little old lady raking the foul mountains of dead leaves off our porch.
We exclaimed over her kindness, and she explained that she was just hanging out with our 95 year old neighbor, Mary, waiting for the delivery of her enormous Christmas tree, and she thought she'd give our flower beds a tidy.
We thanked her and asked if she'd like a coffee or anything when we came back from the diner. She refused politely, but asked that we just dispose of the piles of leaves that she worked so hard for.
"You can't have Christmas if it's still all covered up in Fall leaves, can you?" she said brightly.
We shook our heads in agreement, thanked her again, and went to breakfast a little shamefully.
You bet your ass I can find time to bag up those leaves tonight, and I think there's a nice lady next door to me who deserves some cookies.
Oh yeah...
there's that holiday spirit.

The feeling of twinkles and snow crinkles and warmth and smiling rosy cheeks and crisp cold is all there underneath the surface as close to spilling over as water tension on a bead of eggnog. Nutmeg spritely crown and all.

You make your own.

Trailer Park Love Story.

I slept beneath a sheet of tin.
I woke up with with a jar of gin,
for a pillow.
I wonder if you've ever sunk so low,
if you wanted to,
if you oughtn't to,

I could love you if you woke me up in the wormskin night.
The mothfeather wind blowing under lights shot through with blue.
You grip my face with greasesmoke hands and tell me to open my eyes.
I trip over the cat's golden cadillac box, and realize I'd follow you anywhere.
You stroke my blonde blonde curls with their green ribbons.
You promise me a chicken bone,
a second home,
a brood of babies with balloon stomachs full of wonderbread and peanut butter dreams.

I flash you my best ragged gum smile, and snap a click of peppermint as an invitation, and you lead me by the head to the pink flamingo bonfire in the middle of the trailer park, and surrounded by the noxious, plastic, black smoke you kiss me slow and luscious.
And you taste like honey bourbon and you smell like the floor of the basketball court at the high school. Rubber on rubber on rubber.
They know when we make love because we squeak
like mice.
They know when we leave town because
we set the trailer park ablaze and ride away in a whiptail of gasoline flames.
I fan myself with a booklet of foodstamps, and you flick our credit cards sock sock sock into tree trunks like ninja stars.
We didn't stop 'til we hit the strip. Stake a place out with the last of the money in his wallet.
I looked up at you from the deep, white, outdoor fresh scented swamp of a hotel bed, and you swandove on to me-your liferaft-and you sang.
You sang.

If you wanted to.
If you oughtn't to.
You could keep me alive for years.

I wore my mama's sleeping slip the day we got married. Her best slippers of pink fuzzy bliss, like wearing two marshmallow peeps on my toes I said.
I never dreamt of being this happy.
Six elvises tripping me up on tiptoes to teetotaller tragedy all over the gilded microphone.
It was Christmas in the desert, and everyone was holy and jolly or holly and rolling, and you slipped out before the reception, but for you I made an exception, and we danced until the sun came up on boxing day.
You came back to our honeymoon nutcracker suite the next day at 11:59am.
The digital ruby box screamed to click me all the way back home,
but you caught my throat before the scream got loose, and when you dragged me out into the glittering sunlight, the red sand and the dust just filled my blonde blonde curls with the holiday spirit.

When you buried me-
My throat wrapped in green ribbons like a present-
My pink tufted toes poked out of the red dirt like an easter egg hunt, and I felt like every birthday you had ever had or ever would.
I dreamt i could hear the rain on the tin above my head, but it was the stars falling. One by one, from the boughs of the joshua trees.
I pull myself free.
I pull my self free.
I get out into the night,
-like a piece of tinsel blowing on a tree on the curb waiting for the garbage truck-
-like the flame of a candle inside a watermelon with a monster face
-like my mama's sleeping slip
-like those babies with their red, white, and blue bellies swaying over the wet plastic slip n' slide back in the trailer park, waiting for a babysitter who will never come home-
I'm a blue neon cross over a thousand penitent sinners.
And I'm coming for you.
I stagger back toward that open wound of light inside the desert.
You can't bury me away, baby.
If you wanted to.
If you oughtn't to.
I will haunt your ass for years.

If Depression is Anger turned Inward, What's Anger eating a big pile of depression for breakfast?

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