The Christpocalypse

It sure was nice of God to do His immaculate conceiving in springtime so that His human form son would be born in winter, thereby assuring that 2109 years later, in the darkest days of December, we’d all have reason to celebrate, and the end result would be another fine Christmas disaster, complete with muddy nighttime bike racing, hot toddies, and baby powder right in the face, blinding you, but making everyone smell so clean and fresh that you’d want to wrap the whole evening up in a warm blanket and cuddle all the way through the holidays if it weren’t for the fact that there were still two or three more thrilling and dangerous events to survive before settling in for gift-giving and soul-baring and all this before eight o’ clock on Saturday night.

All I want for Christmas is the video recording implant, so I can play back on the insides of my eyelids a few of the visions dancing like sugarplum fairies in my head: the snaking line of red taillights bouncing through the sex trails at Volunteer Park; the meandering but quickly accelerating descent through Interlachen and down to the soggy Montlake playfield; bikes slipping sideways in the muddy soup of the oval track while I took fourth place by cutting across the grass.

I’d like to review the tapes of the gift exchange, too, so I could see how I lost the Ahearn flask and holder and ended up with some sort of weird kitchen or bar contraption that will, I promise, find its way back into the mix for someone else’s comfort and joy next year.

Minor catastrophe, success: we didn’t exactly get kicked out of the bar, but we were asked to leave so cleaner people in uglier sweaters could have their room, which frankly, was a gift, since it resulted in one more bike ride, to a place beyond disaster, where the stars always line up and twinkle catastrophically.