Christmas 2001

What I Got For Christmas

1. A lethargic three-legged female iguana named Sam that has a band aid over her left eye, a bad rash on her underside and a note stapled to her back that says, “Kick Me”
2. A Bull Durham bag with four glass marbles from spray paint cans
3. A losing scratch ticket from 1998 with trash truck tire tracks on it – must’ve come from the dump and I can’t imagine why or even why whoever sent it to me sent it anyway ( does the term “loser” come to mind?)
4. Two halves of two, broken, non-matching 13 balls from the local tavern with a ¾ empty tube of JB Weld™ cream hardener and a broken, rusted mill bastard file… Where’s the steel additive for the JB Weld™? (That kind of pissed me off.)
5. A large manila envelope with black and white photos of the so-called first clones’ (Dolly the sheep) real mom and dad getting it on behind the wood shed, a forged, autographed portrait of Osama bin Laden with a note stapled on the back that read, “Shoot me if you can find me”; A group picture of those yo yos in California that thought the world was coming to an end a few years ago so took their own lives but they looked alive to me and seemed to being doing pretty well on a beach somewhere that looked like maybe Mexico or Alaska – Can’t really tell because it’s either vodka or tequila smeared all over it and the corners appear to have teeth marks on them; And, a bunch of pieces of other fragments of pictures that I’m still trying to put together like a puzzle and the best I can make of it is they are either some other shots of Dolly’s real parents or the remains of a garbage disposals guts after someone put a bowling ball into it…
6. A set of jacks with a ball, minus the jacks… well okay, there was a jack but the legs were gone off of it unless it really wasn’t a jack – in fact maybe it was just a crusty old bugger someone peeled off the pew at church where I used to sit… Yah! That’s what it is. Never mind but, thanks for the ball – Oh, maybe that’s not a ball either. Never mind.
7. Four paper grocery bags full of mail from some guy named Jed Pope who must’ve lived at 401 East Kickapoo and forgot to put a forwarding address in but, he kept up his subscription to Hustler (for the which I am grateful) and he is also helping me hone my extra sensory abilities because I’m getting very good at predicting his past due phone bill after checking postmarks, putting the mail in order of dates received and finding that as of July 11, 2001, it’s a pretty sure bet his August bill is going to be $84.19 because that’s what it was from April to July – Maybe there’s something about that I don’t understand… Let’s see, yuppers, $84.19. Man I could get rich with this gift!
8. A box with seven empty cans of spray paint – they’re empty I know because someone poked holes in them and took out all the marbles. Hey, I only got four of the marbles. This must be a joke or something.
9. One of those real fancy scientific calculators with the fancy buttons and fancy gold trim and fancy LED readout and a fancy little window like thing that looks fancy enough to let light into it but I’ve tried to make it come on here in the basement and I can’t see that even works so I pried off the back and there are no batteries nor a place to put a battery in it so I got mad and threw it and it hit Sam in the other eye and I took her to the emergency room and the receptionist had something that made the rest of the people in there start running around and yelling something like “code blue or code red” or something I think I heard once during an air raid in London during the BIG 1 so I left and came back and the damn thing still wouldn’t work. Maybe I’ll get a good one next year. (Sam is pissed!) What do they eat anyway? She doesn’t seem to like caramels dipped in blue cheese.
10. Oh! One of my favorite presents – I can’t really tell if you are supposed to eat it, sleep on it or use it in a way that I probably know my mother would not appreciate me mentioning in private let alone in public but it is really cool looking and has the funniest texture and mellowest creamy covering that seems to be growing at a pace I can’t really describe because when I stare at it, it doesn’t do anything, but if I look away for a few minutes or maybe a few hours, or actually it was a couple of days, it has something like white crust that’s building up on it and it’s much bigger than it was when I pulled it out of the lead box (and man was it heavy then) and the pain on my tongue and gums seems to be dissipating slowly since I quit licking it and I have the feeling I should not sleep on it again tonight and see if those blisters start going away on my butt and other places I know my mom won’t like me talking about because I remember when my brother said something about that part of his body once and she heard him and she got mad and threw hot water on him before he cried. But it’s still a cool present. I’m trying to figure out where to sleep tonight because it really has grown a lot and I tried to get it off my bed but it’s sinking into the mattress now and emitting some very noxious smelling fumes from around this weird looking yellow symbol it has on it that looks just like the symbol on the lead box it came out of. And I ain’t kiddin’, I damn near got a hernia lifting it out of that box and there’s something else really peculiar because I just saw the calculator come on and the lights are off but it’s starting to look like morning in here and I know it’s only just now 1 AM. Sheez! This is weird. Well, at least the calculator is working and Sam is – Oh my goodness. Sam! What’s the matter? She’s really looking bad. Well she can’t really look; not anymore, but she’s doing some funny looking dance on those three legs and there’s stuff coming out of both ends that resembles that thing in my bed except it’s not totally projectile shaped nor does it have the symbol attached to it. Guess I’d better make one for her and get my staple gun loaded up again.

But anyway it was a good Christmas and I hope you all had a good one too because if not I hear it’s your own fault if you got screwed for Christmas and I didn’t have anything to do with it cause I know I was a good boy cause Santa gave me a very good Christmas.

P.S. I almost forgot, there was another thing which really wasn’t a gift from anyone but I thought it was until I started reading them and discovered it was (at last count, 32) the copyright pages out of a bunch of paperback books that have a statement that the book has been stolen if the cover is missing and it should be reported to the rightful owner and I tried to find out how to call the rightful owner and return the pages but I finally remembered getting drunk one night and reading that and found a couple of my own books that had the covers missing and I tried to kick my own ass for it and that didn’t work so I got mad (again) and went through all of my library and tore out all the pages that had that thing on it about the books being stolen so I figured jail isn’t bad if you have no other place to hang out but I’d rather stay down here and listen to the smoke alarm upstairs and the sirens and watch all these crazy firemen and women and a bunch of people (or maybe they are aliens but if they are I don’t think we need to worry) in space suits who seem very entertained for a few moments then they start running up and down the steps yelling something about some crazy guy with a dancing, sick lizard, trying to play with a broken jack that resembles snot, calculating the half life of plutonium with a broken scientific calculator and reading Hustler while bouncing marbles off the wall in a glowing basement…

© 2001 L Brink