Christmas 2007

Good evening. Happy holidays. Are you all set, there by the fire, snug as a bug? I see you have put down your book, but have not finished your brandy. Is it because you are tired? Well, then I had best make this short.

I am writing to you from my new twenty-two inch monitor. (Is it unnecessary to mention that it is flat panel any more?) I've got Gordon Ramsay's "The F-Word" playing in a YouTube screen to the right of this text editor. I feel like I'm "blogging" at a rich friend's house. It may take a while for me to take the word "blog" out of quotes, since it's such a stultifying neologism (or is it a portmanteau?). I definitely don't want to hear from anyone who has an opinion on the things in that last sentence. I have a hard enough time just wondering when I am going to take all the ugly junk off my front porch, let alone read all kinds of stuff regarding people's thoughts about ideas.

Christmas was good to me in other ways, as well. I got a case of mixed wines from my father's travels, the latest food industry books, a lot of flavoring agents, and a small device which measured rum in the 1930s. Why did they measure rum in the 1930s? I always thought it was kind of a crazy time, a time when businessmen in double-breasted suits would drain off immoderate amounts of rum and agree to finance the sort of Broadway musical where the chorus girls kick their legs up in the air and the female lead warbles like her throat was being pinned beneath a boot at the bottom of a salmon ladder.

Hmm...what else did I get...oh, who cares. A lot of beef dinners and sausage breakfasts. The end of the holidays has left me feeling as though a dexterous raptor with seven feet of Saran Wrap could just roll me up and poach me like a plump boudin. I wish I didn't feel this way about myself.

Maybe 2008 will find me in an improved state. I did join a gym, and have been going with a pleasing regularity (there is this one chick — damn. You know the one? FOX Motorcycle tattoo across the back of her neck?). I've mainly been doing the machine near her.