To my gentle readers–yes, all three of you–I wish you the best in the coming year. I have soundly, often cruelly mistreated you, turning you away from my doorstep with a silence befitting a mausoleum of mimes caught in the still grasp of winter. And yet you return again and again, possessed by a passion and faithfulness normally reserved for pre-neutered puppies.
Come in, then, and sit a spell. I have much to share with you, and you doubtless have gone on long enough without advice. You must know why One Hundred Years of Solitude garnered the Secondhand Stamp of Approval and the Nobel Prize; why Beyond Good & Evil, occasionally trite as it may be, deserves your gaming dollar; and why One-Man Wry has been scandalously doling out his real e-state without concern for self or bottom line.
That last point is important. Also of import is how my shitty studio was the target of burglarizing most outré and masterful, but that is a story for another evening, another sitting, another month. I’m kidding about that last part. I think.
When was the last time you savored a sense of place, gentle reader? I got a pleasant serving of it as I brushed snow off my car in the dead of night. 1:30 AM, the witching hour: the confluence of snow, quiet, and the click-clack of a traffic light served as a comforting comma to an evening of fine company. There was something eminently pleasurable about the there-ness of it all, and it’s a feeling I haven’t felt in months. I am having trouble explaining this to you, dear reader, but I am trying.
For starters, you know–you know you’ll only be here for a year, two years, and then there will be uncertainty–and there is contentment in knowing. There is a feeling of transience, but there is also a feeling of being richly rooted.
How Things Were and How Things Are bumped into each other on a tidy street corner. Stopped. Talked. Wondered. And by happy coincidence realized that they could switch parkas, trade scarves, and no one would be the wiser, at least for a little while. The exchange is made, they part ways, and the night draws on.
I thought of you yesterday evening, dear reader, as I walked briskly to the entrance of my apartment complex. The setting was a dreary, rainy night, the kind that is quickly becoming the trend du jour for fair Evanston. One of the fellows sitting in the park nearby held forth emphatically–to himself and to any other passersby–about something. While I didn’t catch his conclusion, I did manage to catch a few snippets: “Bill Clinton,” “f*ckers,” “f*ck,” and “f*cking” all made grand (and often repeated) entrances in his park bench monologue.
Faithful readers will quickly point out similarities between this fellow and the Wolley Mammoth. I appreciate the astute connection, I really do, but this was a whole different animal, one that I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole taped to another ten-foot pole. So where do you come in, gentle reader? It’s quite simple, you know. The park bench reminded me of you. Whom else do I rest upon as I dispense nugget after nugget of wisdom, the likes of which are unavailable anywhere else?
With that in mind, I will give you a sage piece of holiday advice. If you’re ever hankering for that divine blend of internal bleeding, driving, whiffle balls, and whiplash, check out this sport. Part of our office holiday party consisted of rousing 5-on-5 matches. I failed to score a single point, though I managed on several occasions to ram into the wall at full speed. This is new for me because I usually walk into walls at full speed. Bruises aside, the very sight of my colleagues shrieking wildly and ramming each other savagely for the ball warmed the cockles of my corporate heart.
Speaking of holiday cheer, I need to make a cheery confession. Santa Claus actually was real. From what my cleaning staff tells me, the jolly pip apparently mistook our trash chute for a chimney during one of his recent test-runs. This trash chute leads straight to our trash compactor, so I apologize to children the world over for the ho ho holdup.