TWO WHOLE MONTHS OF IT

A dream before waking up: train travel through pork country, and sympathizing with the Muslims and Jews on board. Being a pipe smoker, I keep wondering where the smoking car is, and I sympathize with them because adaptations and compromises have to be made. Good heavens, is it nothing but vegan hippies running this transit system? How cruel!

But it could be worse. Cigar smokers!

Or Americans. The food on board would be horrible, and the piped-in music nightmarish. For the past few decades I have largely avoided all popular music, and the closer to Christmas we get the worse it becomes. The only light in the turbulent sea of ghastly schmaltz is that among the Mariah Carey and Rudolph, a computer search programme will have flagged Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' as seasonally appropriate. Worshipful and religious, right?

I envision a chorus of kindergarten kiddies being taught that song.

So as you can probably tell, I am not fond of the holidays. Schmaltz, saccharine, bland fattening foods, and existential struggles between man and turkey. Christmas sweaters.

Window displays that lure the giddy suburbanites to downtown.
Good lord, the chattering plastic people!
Glittery wrapping paper.

And, of course, SantaCon, the one time of the year when crimson sex-glam elves and the future incels of America in red onesies or Santa Pervert jammies get together on the same page and make their parents ashamed to have been heterosexual.

Which, fortunately, I can largely avoid now, because I work in a wasteland out near seagulls wheeling over salt marshes and people who drive Teslas. While I am shoveling Republican manure, the city will be filled with drunks jigging to Mariah Carey and puking festively with gay abandon. Frat boys. Marketing droogs. Techno-yups. Real estate agents.

No wonder little kids are so twisted these days. They grow up seeing Santa and his helpers acting like degenerates. So shortly after Halloween too, when they were traumatized for life by Bo Peep wearing fishnets and falsies. They painfully remember Valentines Day and Saint Patrick's, when the smell of cheap tequila was everywhere, and college boys were arrested en masse for public drunkenness and licentious behaviour. Their childhood has been ruined by the adults.

You know, kid, there's a good reason for drugs.
Compromises have to be made.
And adaptations.



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