Christmas Ramblings

A grizzled redneck once pointed out to me that no good would come out of attending a company Christmas party. I think that’s pretty sound advice unless it’s a cake-in-the-conference room type thing. Getting drunk around your coworkers and telling them what you really think or perhaps making a pass at a female (somehow, they always become more attractive when you do that) you’ll need to work with the next day isn’t going to play out well.

He also explained to me that he drank liquor at this time of the year and would become “real mean” as a result. I politely inquired why, with foreknowledge of this outcome, wouldn’t he just stick to beer? Not that this would do the trick, but it seemed like a fair question. These are the happy holidays, after all. His countenance darkened and he declared that I think I’m “so fucking smart.”

He then became incandescent with anger and threatened to slit me “from dick to throat” to which I threatened him with a lawsuit. I asked him if he’d ever been deposed in a lawsuit before because it’s not a fun process. Animated by sheer rage, he promised that after my gruesome murder, the authorities would never be able to apprehend him “out in these woods.”

This wasn’t exactly the only time this sort of thing happened, so I’m not sure if he was ever really serious. Although, on one occasion he did actually show me the chainsaw with which I could potentially be dismembered. He eventually stormed off into the night. I speculated that he’d simply retired for the evening but someone else pointed out that “he could be waiting underneath the porch with a shotgun right now to kill us all.”

When he passed away, a large cache of weapons, from medieval to modern, was discovered. You never really know with these things, so I choose to cherish his memory. I wouldn’t purport to be maturing but I’m certainly aging. The more that goes on, the better I appreciate the fact that you need to appreciate what you’ve got because besides your immortal soul, you probably won’t have it for very long. I’m not saying you should start reading from the Book of Revelation in your bunker, but it does help you appreciate your life.

I don’t want to get too morbid with this stuff, but I think about all the people freezing in Ukraine who’ve lost family members and are facing becoming refugees from a permanently collapsed nation. Did they know what was around the corner last Christmas? The same people who’ve inflicted these horrors on them have a stranglehold on America. I try to be optimistic, but I must admit we’re probably in store for some rather unpleasant times.

The good news is that because America hasn’t collapsed yet, there’s still an ample supply of booze. For Christmas parties, I like to make a batch of mulled wine. Usually what I’ll do is empty a couple bottles of Merlot into a pot and slowly heat it up. Ground spice packets are available, but I prefer to add everything whole, including dried fruits. A technique I learned from the Poles is to also dump vodka into the mix, which works quite nicely. Your guests will be slurring their speech and slugging each other in no time at all. Those people have lots of experience with these sorts of things.

I just had a member of my extended family, who was rather young, die suddenly. All of them took these injections except for me, the racist rightwing lunatic conspiracy theorist who’s now started adding all sorts of biblical quotations to his rants. The only thing I haven’t done to qualify me as a nutjob in their eyes is start my own militia. I honestly attempt to keep my mouth shut about these things in their presence beyond stuff about the Mark of the Beast and declaring I’d rather be shot in the head than injected. Most of them are very good people, and I truly hope this doesn’t happen to anyone else, but I harbor very troubling doubts.

I’ve accepted the fact that they’ll live and die with whatever it is they believe because that’s the way they were designed. Meanwhile, I’ve got the capacity to discern right from wrong on such matters, so in order to stay right with God I need to act accordingly. That’s what truly matters in the long run. With all this deliberately dechristianized music and consumer culture, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that this is the point of the holiday. I try to keep that in mind as I value who and what I’ve been given. That’s enough rambling for today. Merry Christmas!