Sharing a narrative about how I will fool my parents this Christmas

The plan is simple, but let's go back a year.

A year ago, I called my mother to tell her I had enough time and money to visit home for Christmas. She was Very excited, but I told her to can it, because I was going to surprise the family. So, to her dismay, she lied to my aunt and uncle, my cousins, and her own father, saying I couldn't make it and that I would be completely alone for Christmas. Well, I did make it, and my parents picked me up on the way to Ft. Collins via DIA. I waited at the bottom of a mountain until all had settled, the walked up to the front door, and, SURPRISE!, was the best Christmas gift anyone had gotten that year. Then this happened:

No, those are not shiny things on her sweatshirt, her tits really are that big. Really!

Anyway, I'm not that fat this year (although I could be by Christmas), but I can still surprise a bitch. My biggest (forgive the pun) regret was not having a white elephant gift. This year, I have the PERFECT one! For my house-warming, I promised a fireplace, but netflix didn't deliver as promised, so I had to PURCHASE a DVD full of nothing but continuous video of fires. As a matter of consequence, it was perfect for the party, but it is nothing I would like to own. RE-GIFT! The funny thing about this particular gift is that I'm pretty sure every member of my family, I being the only exception, has a real fireplace. However, I'm probably the only member who doesn't have a TV in multiple rooms, unless you factor in how I could roll my AV cart into a doorway for the technicality.

I booked a flight today to arrive the morning of Christmas eve, told my sister (and as a consequence, her husband), and plan to be the surprisorist again! I have a perfect funny gift and will even shop around for a bad sweater. I have dropped this bad ensemble:

FOR which, I will add, I won a bad sweater contest. I'll do it again, chest hair and all. I had the very best bad Christmas sweater of all for a couple of years, but never used it in a contest:

It's small, but basically it's mice carrying christmas packages across an ugly red sweatshirt. Embroidered. I should never have given it away! Blast!

Well, anyway, Je and I devised a plan to "spend Christmas together in Levenworth." Levenworth, besides seeming like a nice place to spend a life sentence, is Washington's North Pole, a veritable winter playground that takes Germanic Christmas fables very seriously. Christmas is to Levenworth as Wine is to Walla Walla: street cred. So anyway, we are making "plans" to stay there for Christmas, but "something" will happen which will leave us "mad at each other" or "displaced without a way out" or "stranded." We'll share this tale on Thanksgiving, when we video chat with the family. If we're not contingent on the plan, it will all go down hill. My sister needs to know right away.

Sharing a lack of mystery, also, I hope I don't die.

The lack of mystery is startling. I hosted a party and basically blacked out for the latter portion of the evening, and yet there is a lack of mystery.

I've blacked out and found more cash than I started with, blacked out and woken up naked in a Costa Rican hotel room, a little wet and bruised, woken up with some person whose name I had to find out, but this has never happened. First of all, I somehow knew this guy's name, like I had been repeating it over and over. Also, I knew how the cheap furniture had been broken (I fell on it). I asked around and I had recollected the whole night. Perhaps it wasn't the best party ever.

Also, I hope I don't die. I drank some meed which (as all meed these days is) had been homemade. Hopefully, as all things alcoholic tend to do, the death in it had been killed, although it doesn't taste alcoholic to me, which make me wonder if it isn't a cesspool of germs and bacteria that are waiting for some unsuspecting host to deliver their spawn unto the world. I could be patient zero for the apocalypse. I had hoped very much that I would be one of the last survivors, eeking out a meager existence on found fall-out shelters, vending machines and dog flesh. If I act like a zombie by next week, please remove my head from my body. It isn't going to turn out well if you don't.

Sharing some thoughts on the eve of the first annual party I've held for two years

We have a lot to celebrate. Of course there is our health, the fact that we are alive, the love that we share, the great wines we enjoy a little too much, also we have the beauty of our youth, too. We can make up any reason to celebrate. It helps us justify the wine and the whiskey and the beers and the what-have-you. "Cheers to not having to make up an excuse to drink on a Monday morning! Cheers to this crumby yet abundant cup of coffee! Cheers to this floppy burger with shredded, bagged, pre-washed lettuce!"

But that's not what I'm getting at. That is guilt finger-scratching at the corner of my vision. It's my mom's gentle disapproval. Perhaps when we doubt the seriousness of the process of living we would be better off dead. Even the frivolous is sustenance, such as this glass of wine, my body gets just as many calories from three glasses as it would get from an average meal. It fuels my brain just as well, and I dare say is filled with fewer frightening chemicals than most manufactured foods.

Celebration is a necessary practice similar, I think, to laughter. I'm not proposing a theory as to exactly how it is necessary (you know I'm cooking one up), but we don't want to imagine a life without laughter, its ability to cut through nervous, awkward, obscene, terrible, fantastic or profound experience. I propose that celebration is a vacation from sorrow. Christmases have taken place as they would any other year in the face of deaths and diseases, like the year I was four and my grandmother had just died from ovarian cancer. It was a celebration with her, knowing we had to act as she would, with a supreme love for family and an abundant warmth.

Then again, there is this party I am to host in a few hours.

My major concern is the flow of drink and presence of food. I baked a pie but have nothing really to offer other than some cornichons, olives, and a dwindling pile of pumpkin seeds. In the beverage department, I have no intention of offering more than two bottles of wine and a little beer and gin. The rest is up to these crazy people who have agreed for some reason to attend this party. I'm not concerned yet with celebration. I guess we either will or we won't. I'll write a speech just in case:

"Beloved guests and other guests: Welcome to my home. If you have not already poured yourself a glass of something, please do, because I will offer a toast after this unnecessarily long-winded speech. As such, pour a fuller cup than you might be accustomed. Hell, grab the bottle. Also, there is at least a pound of butter in the pie. I thought it would be a good way to guarantee that Jessica would arrive. The topic of this party is Thanks But No Thanks Giving, which is just a clever arrangement of words, but I really to have an intention here, or at least I have made one up in time for this party. Next week we will probably all get together with family and friends to give thanks, mostly as a sort of abstraction, for as much as we give thanks for Grandma, it's hard not to yell at her when she makes racist remarks. We give thanks for the food, too, but the turkey is always dry and your brother's girlfriend doesn't eat anything, and you might want to throw something by the end of it all, if you weren't too drunk to stand. We give thanks.

"It's nothing against Grandma, but I'd rather be here. I'd rather choose the company I keep and keep it well as a practice of living rather than as an ablution. I'd rather care for my pie than have it from a can because that is what everyone expects. I'll say no to dry turkey and gloopy cranberry jell from a can. I will no longer pretend to be interested in cousin Alisa's second baby with that dirt bag she's married to. We are pioneers, making new friends in old lands, making family with strangers. We appreciate finer common denominators. We'll enjoy a pound of butter in our pie, thank you very much, and we're not apologizing for it. Thanksgiving? Thanks, but no thanks.

"Please remember to behave yourself this holiday season. Also, don't spend beyond your means. Also, I have love in my heart for each and every one of you with no more than two or three exceptions. My toast this evening is to you, my friends."

Sharing an apology...

I'm not very good at this, because I have a sort of stubborn rigidity that keeps me looking forward, sometimes at the expense of those left in my wake. I do however have a lot to be sorry for. I'm sorry that I missed my 17th birthday party because I was secretly making out with some boy from another school. I'm sorry about not blogging. Mostly, though, I have learned to write information with integrity and compassion. Upon publishing one's thoughts in a public format, one is responsible for the content of those thoughts. So I am sorry that I have shared details which could have caused certain pain. It was not my place.