Christmas Music

Sloppy Seconds once proclaimed that they love lesbians more than anyone. Well, while I don't really feel passionately one way or the other about lesbians, one thing that I do love is Christmas music. More than anyone! (Maybe. It's dangerous to deal in absolutes during such unpredictable times.) And so, here is a list of 50 Christmas chestnuts that are shuffling through my iPod this holiday season. Mind you, this is not every Christmas song I have, but merely the best of the best.

In no particular order . . .

“A Change at Christmas (Say It Isn’t So)” The Flaming Lips
“2000 Miles” The Pretenders
“Christmas Tree on Fire” Holly Golightly
“Happy Christmas” John & Yoko
“Don’t Shoot Me Santa” The Killers
“Please Daddy (Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas)” traditional
“Merry Fucking Christmas” South Park
“Snoopy’s Christmas” The Clumsy Lovers
“What Christmas Means to Me” Stevie Wonder
“Christmas” The Who
“Come On! Let’s Boogie to the Elf Dance” Sufjan Stevens
“Hard Candy Christmas” Dolly Parton
“Christmas Number One” The Black Arts
“Jingle Bells” Bing Crosby & the Andrews Sisters
“Christmas Time in Hell” South Park
“Step Into Christmas” Elton John
“The Christmas Song” The Raveonettes
“Father Christmas” The Kinks
“Christmas All Over Again” Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
“Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” Darlene Love
“Good King Wenceslas” Crash Test Dummies
“The Chipmunk Song” David Seville
“Feliz Navidad” Jose Feliciano
“Christmas Is Going to the Dogs” The Eels
“Donde Esta Santa Claus” Guster
“A Holly Jolly Christmas” Burl Ives
“Santa Clause Is Back in Town” Elvis Presley
“Mr. Heat Miser” Big Bad Voodoo Daddy
“Run Rudolph Run” Chuck Berry
“Christmas Wrapping” The Waitresses
“Christmas in Hollis” Run-DMC
“It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” Andy Williams
“(Ho! Ho! Ho!) Who’d Be a Turkey at Christmas” Elton John
“Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want to Fight)” The Ramones
“Christmas at Ground Zero” Weird Al Yankovich
“We’re a Couple of Misfits” Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Soundtrack
“Christmas Is the Time to Say I Love You” Billy Squire
“Oi to the World” The Vandals
“You’re a Mean One Mr. Grinch” Boris Karloff
“Merry Christmas Baby” Charles Brown
“Mele Kalikimaka” Bing Crosby
“Welcome Christmas” The Whos of Whoville
“Santa’s Beard” They Might Be Giants
“Christmas Time Is Here” Vince Guaraldi Trio
“Lonely Christmas Eve” Ben Folds
“Back Door Santa” Clarence Carter
“(Everybody’s Waitin’ For) The Man with the Bag” Kay Starr
“Sleigh Ride” The Ronettes
“Little Drummer Boy” Bing Crosby & David Bowie
“If I Can Dream” Elvis Presley

I realize that last one might be controversial, but it was the closing number to Elvis's '68 Comeback Special, originally a Christmas special. And it's easily one of the high points in his catalogue from that era.

Feel free to bitch, name-call, debate, or otherwise attempt to ruin my love of Christmas music. It'll never happen. (One absolute I am sure of.)

PS: As usual, that Pogues song can fuck right off. And I avoid that Tom Waits song because I prefer not to spend Christmas contemplating whether or not to pull the trigger.

TAR

Today I miss the smell of fresh tar.

Remember those days growing up when your dad would lay down a fresh coat of tar on the driveway? You'd leave in the morning to go ride bikes with the kid down the street who moved away just before your interests grew apart (but just after you started to think his older sister was cute). When you came back from the park, there would be those buckets sitting at the end of the driveway, twin plastic sentries, maybe with a two-by-four set across them, letting you know where not to step. No basketball today. No kickball. No setting up shaky, makeshift ramps at absurd inclines to launch your skateboard off of. Take your R/C car--your Grasshopper or RC-10 (if you were really lucky)--out to the street and hope the battery didn't run out just as someone in their Dodge Caravan came driving by. You want back into the house? Navigate the periphery of the driveway by way of the side lawn and use the back entrance near the grill, sidestepping the old green turtle-shaped sandbox with its cracked lid half off and the sand overgrowing with grass and weeds. Maybe inside mom will have a fresh jug of Wyler's grape drink ready for you, made just the way you like it, with a thin skin of sugar scuzz floating on top that lets you know there's just enough sugar in it to keep you going until sundown. After dinner you watch Real People or That's Incredible before you go to bed. The windows are open and all you can smell is the tar cooling on the driveway below. Tomorrow it will be okay to walk on. Tomorrow it will be okay to play on. Tomorrow you'll find a spot at one of the edges where the tar isn't fully secured to the pavement. And you'll start to peel.

Random Bits from Other Novels

“Sometimes I feel like my life is just a shitty remake of the most boring movie ever made.”

“What movie would that be?”

“I don’t know. Dr. Zhivago?”

“Dr. Zhivago?”

“Yeah. You ever actually try to watch that thing? Oh my God! Boring!”

“People consider it a classic.”

“People consider Coca-Cola ‘classic’, and that’s just flavored sugar water.”

“Don’t you find joy in anything?”

“I should have been born Russian. Then I could write stories about me walking around pointing out all the crazy, depressing shit in the world. Then people would consider me ‘classic.’ But no, I had to be born American, so people just think I complain too much.”

Don't Believe the Hype

New York is a city for the young and the rich.

Everybody else is just part of a glorified service industry.

(Yes, I am feeling particularly bitter and cynical today. Thanks for asking!)

ORGANOMICS

From an MSN article about Organic Food Myths:

MYTH #1: ORGANIC FOOD IS ALWAYS BETTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT.
Organics don't contaminate soil and groundwater with pesticides and chemicals like regular farming does, but there's a surprising downside: Since organic farming is only about half as productive as conventional farming, it requires far more land to produce the same amount of food. Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute's Center for Global Food Issues estimates that modern high-yield farming has saved 15 million square miles of wildlife habitat, and that if the world switched to organic farming, we'd need to cut down 10 million square miles of forest. Less-productive farming could also lead to even less food for the world's undernourished.

I bold that last sentence because it's the most ridiculous part of the whole thing. Are they really trying to play on people's fears of a potential food shortage? You've seen the Average American lately. We all know how fat they are. The fact is, "the world's undernourished" aren't starving because there isn't enough food to go around. They're starving because of three things:

1) Totalitarian regimes that would rather see their people supplicated and docile through starvation, so they deny any foreign relief programs to enter their countries and feed their people.

2) The generally shitty state of foreign relations around the world. Everybody's building walls and circling wagons. Everybody hates everybody else. And until we can all talk to each other like civilized monkeys, no progress will be made to get food to people who need it.

3) Like Audrey 2, fat fucking Americans are eating anything put in their path.

There's no food shortage. There's no threat of a food shortage. There's just an obscene disparity in the distribution of food. Bertha, the 348-pound housewife in Danvers, Massachusetts, is eating a 182-ounce bag of Doritos everyday because she can get the damn things in bulk at the Costco. Food is the new Manifest Destiny. Which is to say it's a retarded idea perpetrated by those in power to keep the ignorant masses from asking too many questions about the more important issues. Bread and circuses, fer chrissake. Bertha's not going to care about Darfur or Tibet when she can get a quintuple bacon cheeseburger off the dollar menu at Wendy's.

Maybe if we didn't have as much space to grow food, the food we did grow wouldn't be turned into edible garbage, and that food would be considered a little more precious. I remember when I was a kid steak used to be like "treat" meat, which is to say something we ate maybe a couple times a month or on special occasions. And I hardly grew up poor. Now it's about as affordable as iceberg lettuce (and probably about as nutritious nowadays). What does it say about this country that beef has turned into a discount item? And if meat is a so cheap, ya think maybe we could pass a little of that on to the starving kids around the world?

Stop me before I start sounding like a USA for Africa song.

The only thing I can comfort myself with is the fact that Bertha will be dead by 45 from a massive coronary.

Who am I kidding? Bertha's insurance company will drop $750k to get her a spendy new heart to keep her alive another thirty years and then pass the bill on to me and all the other people getting sucker punched.

Baby's Love Cancer!

I'm on a charity committee at my company, and last night we decided how much to give each organization that applied for a grant from us. Everyone makes their case and there is much discussion and arguing. It's all kept very civil and polite. But how can you be polite when you morally object to the very premise of one of the organizations?

That organization shall remain nameless, however, the point of the organization is to educate and assist people who have been diagnosed with cancer and still want to have the option to have children following their cancer treatment.

So, you're taking people who already have cancer and you're harvesting eggs or vialing sperm so that these people can later reproduce . . . and have a kid who will be genetically predisposed to have cancer also! Wow, thanks mom and dad, that's some gift! You're already bringing the kid into the world with one strike against them. Way to go!

How about educating these people on the fact that since they have cancer they are bad for the gene pool and should, oh, I don't know, maybe adopt one of the countless unwanted kids who might otherwise end up thrown into our shitty foster care system--where, after most likely being beaten or molested by a series of fine people, the child eventually will give up hope and turn to a life of crime and/or substance abuse? (You can put it in nicer terms when you tell them, of course.)

Here's why: Because people want their OWN baby. Because people feel some kind of primitive animal belief that their DNA is so amazing that it absolutely must be carried on. Which is clearly bullshit or else you wouldn't have cancer, now would you?

Would you love a child less if it were adopted? If it didn't grow up to look just like you in 20 years? If it didn't squeeze out of your own womb?

Pregnancy only lasts nine months. The whole point of raising a kid isn't just to say you punched one out of your vagina and were done. Birthing a baby is the easy part. The purpose of having a child is to raise a decent human being. And what lesson are you teaching your kid from the very start: That rather than help out a child who is already here and needs a loving home, you were so selfish that you needed to have your own progeny even though that offspring will most likely have to face the same life-threatening, painful disease you had to.

Chemo is so much fun you just have to share it with your kids!

Yeah, that's just good parenting.

Eostre Candy

I finally get what all those snooty Europeans have been talking about calling our chocolate junk. I am now one of those snobs. My palette has grown too used to high-end dark chocolates from all over The Continent. I am now ruined (forever?) from enjoying Eostre candy.

It's all just so goddamn sweet, and, dare I say, lacking nuance. Real chocolate--the kind where you pronounce the second o (chock-o-laat)--has a natural complexity to it, a life. Once you get up over 58% real chocolate you can start to sense something going on. You let it sit on your tongue and reveal itself. Hints of strange fruits or spices that are infused in the bean, dusty notes as you get up around 78% (any more and you cross over into the realm of baking chocolate). Where it was grown actually means something to dark chocolate.

Good chocolate tells you a story. A delicious, delicious story.

For Eostre I had a King Size Reese's Peanut Butter Egg, a chocolate and almonds bunny, and a Cadbury Cream Egg. You want to know what kind of "story" those things told me?

Here's a big wad of sugar in your mouth! Now shut the fuck up!
The End.

Dear European Guy in the Gym Locker Room,

How about covering your dick?

I'm already in a bad enough mood when I walk into the gym after a shitty day at work, knowing I have to spend 30 minutes sweating my own balls off on the elliptical when what I'd really rather be doing is lying on my couch with a bag of Pepperidge Farm cookies and watching Paranormal State. The last thing I need to see as I'm being bombarded by the putrid reek of musclebound sub-verbal XY's is your uncut wang dangle. It's kind of hard to miss, what with it being surrounded by that massive bush you have.

And that's another thing: Could you maybe do some grooming so if I absolutely have to see your cocksmanship, at least it doesn't look like an uncooked bratwurst poking through a giant slice of Black Forest cake? I happen to like bratwurst and Black Forest cake, and your donk is ruining both of them for me.

Cover your dick!

Thank you

PS - Guy in the locker room who lotions his junk: Why do you lotion your junk? Seriously, I'm totally in the dark on this one. The only other guy I ever saw do this was Jamaican, and I assumed it was like the problem black people have with dry elbows. I mean, really, nobody wants an ashy johnson. But you, you're a white guy. If you're longfellow gets ashy, who's going to notice? And anyway, why isn't your dork getting enough moisture? Are your nethers the only nethers that don't get enough moisture? In that case, may I suggest corduroy pants?

Purple Power!

Why is it, when some cracka is trying to prove to you he/she isn't racist, they always say something like "I don't care if someone is black, white, or purple . . ."?

When have any of us really had to worry about purple people? It's not like there are packs of purple people crossing the board from Purplico and stealing those dishwashing jobs we used to really enjoy.

Have the purple people begun producing superior consumer electronics in Purplokyo?

Are we figthing purple insurgents who are upset over our occupation of Purplistan?

I don't know. As long as we keep the purple people confined to the purpletto of South Central Los Purpeles, Purplifornia, I'm really not going to worry about it.

Besides, it's those orange and green people I really can't stand. I just don't get what our white women see in those tangerine and olive muthafuckas.