Eve

 It's my first "post-divorce" Christmas Eve and it's...well, you can imagine.

At least I can enjoy the gifts the rural chucklefucks are now getting from their big win in November:

"Schools in 30 of Oregon’s 36 counties — and schools in other Western states — will receive less federal funding in 2025 after the U.S. House of Representatives failed to reauthorize a 24-year-old bill that typically pays up to $80 million a year for schools and roads in Oregon along with wildfire prevention and conservation work."

Merry Fucking Christmas, goobers. Y'done fucked yourselves. Happy New Year and I hope the tariffs bend you over, too, you ignorant bastards.

You handed them the goverment and now President Musk is gonna give you redhat rednecks a red-ass-whipping while First Lady Donnie Two-Scoops blabbers about Greenland and re-stealing the Panama Canal.

Are you surprised I'm not in a holly jolly mood?

I'm gonna get some rack and go see some nice shelter cats in the morning, then go cook Christmas dinner for Number 1 Son.

I sure as hell feel like 2024 could have gone better.

And why the hell can't you shitkickers get all jiggly about deporting THAT worthless goddamn immigrant back to Africa? Aren't you supposed to hate immigrant scum like him? Try and do SOMEthing right, K?

Honestly. This is the dumbest damn timeline.

Christmas Eve, 4:00 am

 The Little House is dark. 

 Well, almost dark; the IKEA light under the shelves in the kitchen corner is on - because I made a pot of coffee about half and hour ago - and the phosphor glow of the laptop screen picks out one end of the table that makes the east half of the front room the "dining room".

Have I ever talked about this house?

It's almost a century old. Ninety-nine years old in just over a week; built in 1922, when this part of what's called the "Peninsula" - the triangle that narrows to the northwest as the Willamette and Columbia Rivers converge - had been Portland for barely seven years.

(Before that it hadn't been much of anything, lightly-built-over farmland between the little city of St. Johns to the northwest and Albina to the south - to the east was pretty much actual farmland all the way out east to the mouth of the Gorge. But that was then.)

The area was slowly filling in, but slowly. Here's the Corps of Engineers aerial photo from 1936. Nearly thirty years after incorporation, and over a decade after the Little House was built, and much of this section of what is now the "Portsmouth" neighborhood was open fields, including actual FARM fields.

This house and the house just to the east were built on the same plan, presumably by the same builder, and because of that probably on "spec"; that is, not to a waiting homeowner but by a developer who hoped to sell the new houses to random buyers.

It's...well, my Bride likes to describe our house as having "ugly bones", and it's true. The two houses were thrown up cheap and quick and small. The original design had a pair of rooms facing the street; a "parlor" and a "dining room" separated by a structural wall from the back of the house. The dining room opened onto the kitchen, the kitchen onto a hallway that ran the length of the house. In the back were two bedrooms on one side and a bathroom on the other. A detached garage sat out in the back facing the alley.

It looked like this:

Both this and the sister house next door have been extensively modified since they were built. Interestingly, the house to the east still retains the original separate parlor-and-dining-room arrangement, but at some point (probably after the fire that damaged the front of our house in the 1980s) the owners tore out the wall between the two front rooms to make a single large one.

They also punched a hole in the load-bearing wall that runs across the house, opening the hall to the front.

At some point they enclosed the back porch, making the weird "room of closets" we ripped apart fo make Missy's now-filthy-trashpile of a bedroom.

Here's the current floorplan:

The best part of the house are the wood floors. They're not hardwood - remember; cheap, quick, and small - but they're a clear, straight-grain fir. 

They were also painted, for some reason, and were repainted numerous times. The earliest coat was the most peculiar; when I stripped the floors in both the bedrooms the bulk of the paint came up in strips. Y'know, the way paint does when you strip it.

The bottom layer, a deep red color, turned into a sort of vile jelly. I suspect it probably had a crap-ton of lead in it, too, but the consistency was the worst part. You had to scrape it with a blade and then wipe the blade to clear it. It also stained hell out of anything it touched. I have no idea what it was, but it was truly nasty.

After all the paint a former owner laid down a then-standard cheap, nasty Seventies or early Eighties short-nap carpet. Pulling THAT shit out was pure pleasure.

Anyway...that's the house. The roof is getting there; it's easily twenty years old and small parts tend to turn up in the yard after a big storm, so that's on the list. The boards of the deck we had built outside the east wall ten years are getting a little shifty, as well, so those need to be replaced soon.

And...well, this seems mean when I just say it out loud, but...the house is getting smaller as I get older, and I'm ready for the kids to move out on their own so we can have it to ourselves.

I'm tired of the mess, and tired of the clutter, tired of having little or no privacy or quiet when everyone's home. They're good kids and I love them, but...I'm ready to start loving them from a bit more distance.

I suspect that makes me a bit of a bastard.

But as I think I've mentioned. I am a bit of a bastard. I've got some sort of deep-seated survival thing that makes me more than a little callous. I'd be the guy who walks out of the airplane-crash-in-the-Andes-where-the-survivors-resort-to-cannibalism having gained three pounds. It's not that I don't feel the griefs and regrets. It's just that I do, and then I go about my business.

So I don't want my kids out of my life; I just want them in it a bit further away.

And I want my life back.

I realize that things would have been difficult during a global pandemic regardless, but I'm quietly furious at Tubby Twatmite and his merry band of incompetent GOP grifters and stooges for fucking it up so badly that I have to sneak around like a weasel in a minefield. 

I miss all the little pleasures; the evenings out, the casual times with friends, the little small change of life.

And it's worse because that time is running out. I don't have thirty or forty years to make up for this lost time. I've got, if I'm lucky, another fifteen or twenty good years and then it's going to go to hell in a hurry. I'm not looking forward to my eighties, assuming I make it that far. 

So I rage at every day we're immured behind the high walls we need to keep the Mongols out, and that makes me resent even more every moment I'm losing to this fucking Plague, and that makes me even more pissed off at the goddamn nitwit and his slobbering cult.

And I'm tired of watching my country and my countrymen become smaller and meaner and stupider and angrier. 

I'm tired of the past four years where everything is transactional, all about the Art of the Deal, contingent on What's In It For Me. I want us to be better, and kinder, and smarter. 

I want a brighter day.

I want what Charlie Pierce wants and said sooner and better than I:

"...may you all have the rest and peace of this mid-winter holiday season. May all your whiskey be mellow and may all your lights shine. And may there always be a candle in the window, calling you home, calling you out of the storm, calling all of us home, together, and home."

Mary Asks for a Miracle

"behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing"
—Luke 2:48

How do you approach a miracle? She forgets her son
has sky spilling out of his mouth, so she doesn’t look
in the temple, where he’s practicing a prayer
that sounds like the only rose-colored feather
on the wing of a desert finch. She searches the road,
with the revellers, the travellers, returning home,
but the miracle is a beak that snaps the pinyon pine
shell apart like a lever, releasing its heart from its case.
The miracle is a set of questions made by the river
that clips its blue leash to the sea. The miracle is
only partly a boy, only partly a bird or a beach.
She forgets the part that is made of fire and wind,
the part that opens what’s closed or finds what’s lost.
She is sad and worried in her unremembering.
What do you say to the miracle you’re missing
when the miracle tells you it is already home?

~ Linda Dove

This evening we celebrated Christmas Eve with all the traditions of our family; lazy idleness, videogames (for the Boy), desultory exercise (for Mojo and myself), and a meal of honey ham (because honeybaked ham...), scratch mac n' cheese with sharp Tillamook cheddar because the Boy - whose diet generally consists of whatever is on the "prohibited" list published by the American Diabetic Association - specially requested it, and a garden salad because it symbolizes the rebirth of Sol Invictus or Christ, whichever comes first, or who takes two out of three thumbwrestling.

I won't pretend that this winter solstice doesn't feel dark and dim, and not merely because we're into the Dark Ages here in the Pacific Northwest, the rainy months when we see the sun only randomly from week to week. To me it feels like the December of 1860 must have; a tense, louring time vibrating like a tightening string, turbulent with anger and danger. The election of 2016 has made evident what has been true since 1980; that We the People are a house divided against itself, that we are in a cold civil war, and the the only thing left to question is whether we will continue in this tortuous state or break out into open struggle to become all one or all the other. I can neither effectively fight that struggle or win it; all I can do is try and turn it from me and mine.

So I hope you and yours are together, and safely ensconced in love and light. The night is long and dark, and we are our own candles, flickering bravely against the cold outside the glass.

May all of us find our way home safe tonight.

White Christmas!

For the second time in three years we had snow on Christmas Eve. It says something about how old the kiddos are that they were stolidly unthrilled about that.

The other family member who was less than excited was Drachma the Merkitty, who seemed to take the whole snow business as a personal insult.

The day before Missy and I went for tea at the Lan Su Chinese garden downtown. I seldom visit the garden in the winter; I should. It was serene, an enclosure of stillness within the cold, busy city around us. The garden teahouse was a retreat from the noisy holiday season, as well, the only turmoil the steam rising from the dark oolong in the stoneware cup.

For Christmas Eve dinner I made a huge cauldron of the Hungarian mushroom soup that was once a gift to the city from the funky Old Wives' Tales restaurant. It's rich and thick, full of sour cream and dill and paprika, the perfect winter soup to go with a crusty bread and dark beer; my brew of choice was a Deschutes Brewing stout called The Abyss. It hit like a barleywine and was ideal for some Christmas cheering.

I hope you are with your beloveds tonight. Certainly the history of faiths, like that of nations, suggests that the old grinning ape within all of us can and will use them for our own malicious ends. But beyond those histories faith, like the best hopes of nations, promise a better world than the one we have created. The promise of tomorrow is the promise of the birth of Hope, the promise of a peace that passeth all understanding. That we cannot seem to find a place in our hearts for that peace is the fault of our hearts, not of that promise.

So I wish all of you hope on this cold, silent night. Hope for love, and peace, and happiness, for you and yours.

And...

May all good fellows that here agree
Drink Audit Ale in heaven with me.
And may all my enemies go to hell!
Noel! Noel! Noel! Noel!
May all my enemies go to hell!
Noel! Noel!

~ Hilaire Belloc

Watches of the Night

It was a practice in Headquarters Company, 2nd Battalion (Airborne) (Light) 187th Infantry Regiment - stationed in the tropical paradise of Fort Kobbe, Panama - for the unmarried sergeants to volunteer to take holiday duty for the wedded guys. So that's why I found myself standing on the landing outside the dayroom of the HHC barracks Christmas Eve day dressed tastefully in holiday-green tropical fatigues and a santa-red beret being violently abused by a Panamanian taxi driver.

It seems that one of our American heroes had, in an excess of Christmas cheer, commandeered the driver's services to motor all around Panama Viejo attempting to find a shapely little elf who would supply a Christmas stocking that he could fill.

Not surprisingly, given his slobberingly drunk condition, the only attentions he could find came from ladies who expected to receive green, folding presents in return, which struck our young hero as more than a little Grinchy.

This seeker of the true Spirit of Christmas imbibed some Chistmas spirits and then resolved to return to his only REAL family, his buddies at HHC 2/187, only to find on arrival that one of Santa's little ho-ho-hoes had lifted his wallet during his importunations. Or he had left it on the bar. Or whatever.

The upshot was, anyway, that he now had nothing to give the infuriated driver whose worn taxi now reeked of cheap perfume and drunken G.I. Worse yet, he turned out to be nimble as a monkey - even drunk - and had shinnied up the mango tree in front of the barracks and was hiding in the branches lobbing the occasional overripe fruit at both the driver and the taxi windshield.

The street in front of the barrack reeked of mango juice and the combined noise of a furious taxi driver and an intoxicated arboreal G.I. This, in turn, drew a small crowd of pre-Christmas revelers, who took turns abusing both parties and shying additional fruit at the taxi when the driver wasn't watching.

I managed to pay off the driver, scatter the crowd and talk the monkey-boy out of the tree just as one of my other single friends came sauntering down from his post as battalion staff duty NCO.

"I see life in the slums is still exotic and vigorous, even on Christmas Eve" he sneered.

SGT Chief: "Little you know about it, lolling about up there at Battalion as you do. It's like a freakin' Jerry Springer show down here, you know. Oh, and a Merry Christmas to you, too, jackass."

BN SDNCO: "Yeah, well, lucky for us that the first Christmas happened in Bethehem, not Fort Kobbe, eh?"

SGT Chief: "Why's that?"

BN SDNCO: "'Cause where the hell'd you find three wise men and a virgin around here..?"

It was an old joke but I was still chuckling as I ran back up the stairs to the dayroom to share warm Coke with the three guys watching football.

This year, as they have for the past fourteen years now, American soldiers are preparing for a holiday in faraway places much less entertaining and far more hazardous than my Panamanian Christmas Eve nearly three decades ago.

I'm sure that they share many of the same feelings I did then: loneliness, regret, some pride in a hard job well done in demanding circumstances, but mixed with others I didn't; fear of death or wounding, anger and grief at lost friends, hope that their own homecoming will be soon and safe.

As do I.

And to you all; Merry Christmas, Joyous Solstice, Happy Kwanzaa...whatever, where-ever, and however you celebrate, may the light of love and laughter be with you though these long nights and on into the sunlight of tomorrow.

A Christmas Story

Odd...this occurred to me today on the way in to work. I haven't thought of this time, and place, and the people connected with both for years. But it's Christmas time, and this is a Christmas story.

(Optional musical accompanyment to this story, The Wexford Carol with Yo-yo Ma and Alison Krauss)



More than fifteen years ago - it must have been at least that long, since I had left the company by 1999 and the company itself fell apart within another couple of years after that - the company I then worked for had its annual Christmas party. That year it was lunch at a local restaurant down along the Willamette River.

Unlike most "company parties" this really was a genuine party. We were a pretty friendly group then - this must have been some time in the early-mid-90s, before the outfit fell apart and the desertions and bickering started in earnest - we liked each other and our work, and so when the whole mob adjourned in the middle of a workday a couple of days before the holiday it was to enjoy a good meal and a pleasant time in one anothers' company. I remember it as being a very convivial afternoon.

We were sitting around after the meal, probably having drinks and inventing reasons not to go back to work, when the hydrogeologist, a woman named Nancy Speaker, began to softly sing The Coventry Carol.

I love and know that carol, and so I dropped in and sang the harmony along with her. Our voices blended well; her clear contralto and my bass-baritone dark and deep underneath, and - although we had never sang together and, indeed, didn't know each other could sing - had a fortunate ability to support each other's passage from melody to harmony and back.

We finished together. Sat, and smiled at each other, and I began Silent Night.

We proceeded to sing perhaps another half dozen or so carols. Nobody else joined in...but no one protested, either. Our co-workers quietly sat and listened, smiling pleasantly. By the time we were done the whole corner of the restaurant was watching and listening to this strange little spontaneous concert.

Try and imagine how odd that must have seemed if you'd have wandered into the midst of it; there, in that public place, with the broad river flowing winter-dark with soil outside the great window-wall below the unrelenting gray sky of the Dark Months, all those tables full of perfect strangers, gathered only through random chance - through their own seperate reasons and their own seperate lives converging there and then - sitting together listening to the voices of two other strangers rising though the silent room with the old songs of mystic birth and redemption.

When we finished there was no fuss or applause but just a long thoughtful quiet; it was as if we had not performed but had sung out loud what everyone else was feeling and thinking at that time of the year. We smiled and they smiled back and we had our last drinks and gathered our coats and left.

The oddest part was that it was that if you'd have scripted this as a scene in a Hallmark Channel Christmas film I'd have laughed it out of sight as completely, ridiculously, unreal. If you'd have suggested it to me earlier I'd have been too embarassed to have even considered doing it. But it happened, and I did, and at the time it seemed right; not just right but perfect.

And for all that it has been years and miles since that time, and place, and those people, have vanished...it is one of my most beloved Christmas moments. And for no reason other than my own sentimental remembrance of that time I wanted to share it with you.

May you all have a peaceful and joyous season.

Christmas Eve 1986

It was a practice in Headquarters Company, 2nd Battalion (Airborne) (Light) 187th Infantry Regiment for the unmarried sergeants to volunteer to take holiday duty for the wedded guys. So that's why I found myself standing on the landing outside the dayroom of the HHC barracks Christmas Eve day dressed tastefully in holiday-green tropical fatigues and a santa-red beret being violently abused by a Panamanian taxi driver.

It seems that one of our American heroes had, in an excess of Christmas cheer, commandeered the driver's services to motor all around Panama Viejo attempting to find a shapely little elf who would supply a Christmas stocking that he could fill.

Not surprisingly, given his slobberingly drunk condition, the only attentions he could find came from ladies who expected to receive green, folding presents in return, which struck our young hero as more than a little Grinchy.

This seeker of the true Spirit of Christmas imbibed some Chistmas spirits and then resolved to return to his only REAL family, his buddies at HHC 2/187, only to find on arrival that one of Santa's little ho-ho-hoes had lifted his wallet during his importunations. Or he had left it on the bar. Or whatever.

The upshot was, anyway, that he now had nothing to give the infuriated driver whose worn taxi now reeked of cheap perfume and drunken G.I. Worse yet, he turned out to be nimble as a monkey - even drunk - and had shinnied up the mango tree in front of the barracks and was hiding in the branches lobbing the occasional overripe fruit at both the driver and the taxi windshield.

The street in front of the barrack reeked of mango juice and the combined noise of a furious taxi driver and an intoxicated arboreal G.I. This, in turn, drew a small crowd of pre-Christmas revelers, who took turns abusing both parties and shying additional fruit at the taxi when the driver wasn't watching.

I managed to pay off the driver, scatter the crowd and talk the monkey-boy out of the tree just as one of my other single friends came sauntering down from his post as battalion staff duty NCO.

"I see life in the slums is still exotic and vigorous, even on Christmas Eve" he sneered.

SGT Chief: "Little you know about it, lolling about up there at Battalion as you do. It's like a freakin' Jerry Springer show down here, you know. Oh, and a Merry Christmas to you, too, jackass."

BN SDNCO: "Yeah, well, lucky for us that the first Christmas happened in Bethehem, not Fort Kobbe, eh?"

SGT Chief: "Why's that?"

BN SDNCO: "'Cause where the hell'd you find three wise men and a virgin around here..?"

It was an old joke but I was still chuckling as I ran back up the stairs to the dayroom to share warm Coke with the three guys watching football.

This year, as they have for the past eleven years now, American soldiers are preparing for a holiday in faraway places much less entertaining and far more hazardous than my Panamanian Christmas Eve two and a half decades ago. I'm sure that they share many of the same feelings I did then: loneliness, regret, some pride in a hard job well done in demanding circumstances, but mixed with others I didn't; fear of death or wounding, anger and grief at lost friends, hope that their own homecoming will be soon and safe.

As do I.

So Merry Christmas, Joyous Kwanzaa, Happy Hanukkah...however you say it, however you celebrate it, all you young - and not so young - men and women in the hard places far from home; I hope you will all be home soon to enjoy this time with your families.

And to you, all my friends here, from near and far, let me say that although I have no more religion than I have hair on the top of my head and no more faith than I have illusions regarding nations, men, and women I'm touched on the heart a bit every year on this night of all the nights when we pretend that there really can be Peace on Earth to men and women of goodwill.

May you and yours find sleep this night at peace, surrounded by love and the loving of those you cherish. May you wake tomorrow to good cheer, and the promise of a better, brighter day.

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof; tonight let us put aside what we know of the world and our fellow men and simply live in hopes that there can, indeed, be a silent night made holy by the caring and loving of one for another, and of us all.

Goodnight.

LP on Christmas Eve

Enfant Perdu

Verlorner Posten in dem Freiheitskriege,
Hielt ich seit dreißig Jahren treulich aus.
Ich kämpfte ohne Hoffnung, daß ich siege,
Ich wußte, nie komm' ich gesund nach Haus.

Ich wachte Tag und Nacht - Ich konnt' nicht schlafen,
Wie in dem Lagerzelt der Freunde Schar -
(Auch hielt das laute Schnarchen dieser Braven
Mich wach, wenn ich ein bißchen schlummrig war).

In jenen Nächten hat Langweil' ergriffen
Mich oft, auch Furcht - (nur Narren fürchten nichts) -
Sie zu verscheuchen, hab' ich dann gepfiffen
Die frechen Reime eines Spottgedichts.

Ja, wachsam stand ich, das Gewehr im Arme,
Und nahte irgendein verdächt'ger Gauch,
So schoß ich gut und jagt' ihm eine warme,
Brühwarme Kugel in den schnöden Bauch.

Mitunter freilich mocht' es sich ereignen,
Daß solch ein schlechter Gauch gleichfalls sehr gut
Zu schießen wußte - ach, ich kann's nicht leugnen -
Die Wunden klaffen - es verströmt mein Blut.

Ein Posten ist vakant! - Die Wunden klaffen -
Der eine fällt, die andern rücken nach -
Doch fall' ich unbesiegt, und meine Waffen
Sind nicht gebrochen - nur mein Herze brach.

~ Heinrich Heine

Forgotten outpost in the Freedom War
I have held faithfully these thirty years.
I fought without hope that I would win,
I knew that I wouldn't get home safely.

I watched both day and night; I could not sleep
as my buddies did in the hootch nearby;
though the loud snoring of these heroes
made sure I couldn't nod off even had I wanted to.

In the night weariness would grab me -
or fear - for only idiots have no fear -
and I would pipe up my rhymes and rouse myself
and them, taking my revenge.

So...there I was, my weapon in my hands
when some sneaking rascal showed his head,
and I shot him good and proper and gave his brain
a good warm dose of hot lead.

But war and justice have far different laws,
and worthless acts are often done right well;
The fuckers' shots were better than their cause,
And I was hit and fell bleeding.

The LP is overrun! With his wound undressed
the sentry's down and the other guys grab a hat -
So I died unconquered, my rifle still combat-ready;
Only my heart was broken.

When I was on active service the tradition was that the single guys pulled holiday duty. So I'll bet there are a lot of guys without wives and kiddies in the TOC, on Staff Duty, on CQ, and tower guard tonight.

Whoever else is thinking of you tonight, guys, I hope you will come off your shift whole and sane, and that you will return gesund nach Haus; safely home.