A letter from the pre-Christmas Fast

Dear Felix,

I wonder if you used to cause epileptic seizures and migraine headaches when you laughed. No wonder so many of our grandfathers hated cats, hated them with all of their raging 20's fury, tied them into burlap sacks and threw them into the Erie Canal. I hope you are not nervous.

-

B. is very horny lately. I usually do not bother to initialize fuller names, but with B. I can say things like "What up, B.?" which is a popular question to ask. But B. has had a girlfriend for almost a year and a half. It is excruciating for him. He went to a club with his friends for the first time since he was twenty-seven years old, and he had ample opportunities to make out with all sorts of female people. He explains about how all of his friends cheat on their girlfriends and wives all of the time, and he would like to also.

(B. is the type of guy that all of the smartypants girls go on and on about how they can see through and resist effortlessly, but then B. charms them anyway. He is very entertaining. I am always entertained, too.)

I tell B. that I could empathize but I will not. He considers it a looming disaster that he almost has more years than the number of girls that he has slept with. I tell him that I am more than an entire generation behind, but I am too tired to try to catch up. I tell him that he has had too many opportunities and too many successes. Towering inhibitions and tumbleweed sociallives inspire impeccable character as considered by religious figurines or whatever. I guess there is mystique for some guys in having relations with more than one person at a time. Nobody has the courageous testicles necessary to sever the relationships that they have become bored with. Ahead of time. I guess that people want to hedge their bets so that at least someone will spoon with them next Saturday morning. I do not say this, but instead "Damn man. Maybe you should have a cold bath and watch Schindler's List." We are very different, but I like B.

-

I like when you become slightly baffled, and a question mark appears just above your head, and then you reach up and grab the question mark and use it as a tool for solving whatever problem you are having. I think that is very clever.

-

We are still trying to investigate the details, but as far as we are able to tell, Tom was a victim of a bank robbery yesterday. He had just completed a deposit, and a man came in the front entrance and told everyone to get down. The man came to the wicket that Tom was at and demanded money. Tom had his head down. The man pulled at the back of Tom's collar, presumably to use him as a hostage in case this became necessary. Tom played limp and did not get up. Tom does not know if the man had a gun to the back of his head at the bank yesterday. Tom said he was looking at the floor and it was all over within a minute. I cannot find anything in today's newspaper this morning, but maybe it was too late to make the press or maybe there was no weapon and so it was of little consequence. We do not know enough, yet. Tom talked to police officers about it for awhile, and then he came home and drank alcohol for the entirety of the day. He was very slurry by nighttime, then he played piano and I played guitar and it was an instrumental postrock saga about bank robberies and bad dreams and hair kept getting into my eyes because I have not had it cut and we felt like musicians, almost. I play chords and that is all.

-

Felix it does not feel like Christmas at all. Soon I will go to the family house and I will sit on the carpet and I will assemble little plastic train tracks for little plastic locomotives. Nate is almost two, he is one of my nephews and I will hide Thomas the Tank Engine in a little plastic coal-loading station hanger, and I will close the little plastic door, and I will ask Nate: Where is Thomas? Where is Thomas? Where is Thomas? And Nate will be very excited to spot Thomas through the little window in the little plastic door, and I will say There's Thomas! And I will ask Nate if he can open the little plastic door, and Nate will open the little plastic door and take out Thomas the Tank Engine and I will say There's Thomas! again. And then I will ask Nate What color is Thomas and he might say "Deeen" which is green, but then I would say Noooo, isn't Thomas turquoise? But then I will not be so sure, myself.

And so we will settle on Blue. It will be a worthwhile compromise.

-

Go ahead and take next Tuesday off, you've earned it Felix. That was a popular joke I made at work yesterday, that everyone enjoyed even though it is cliché.

Merry Christmas from Your friend,

-Tim.

Relocation, Part #1

I would like to be phasing, and making misspellings.

You cannot begin to know.

I have been couped. These are the times which are now.

John is a person my age from work. He is quitting the job to move to Paris and go to business school. He wants to be very important. I want to be very important in ways that are completely unimportant to business. I committed to visiting sometime over the next year. I like Paris, i said. It is true.

I am almost two years into a delegation to Canada. I am supposed to be from the United States of America. Today my newest boss told me that my Human Resources Department expects me to report to work on January 2nd, 2008 in the city of Trenton, New Jersey for a permanent assignment. It is December 20, 2007. It was a surprise to him.

Nothing is a surprise to me. But I will not be moving to Trenton, New Jersey.

I have several options. I will need to utilize one. Several involve my resignation. There are some that do not involve my resignation. One involves Calgary. One involves Buffalo. One involves Richmond. One involves staying where I am and becoming an Official Canadian.

It is my nature to not like any options.

I am accustomed to not preferring any of the options.

I am accustomed to making a split decision that I will regret in two more years. I will move to the Gobi Deserts. I will move to the Congo. I will move to your basement. I will save a glacier with my stubbornnesses. I will save the environments in one fell swoops. I will live on a crumpled map of the Earth.

I would like to be phasing. It is supposed to be Christmas.

I'm On, Top Of The World Looking, Down On Creation, And The Only Explanation I Can Find.

I have saved enough to live for two years with no income, maybe ten if I am not frivolous, but frugal instead. Hey look I did something for me.

An exchange about the weather

"It is going to be eight degrees on Sunday," said Steve. "Might be a green Christmas."

He said these two sentences as if his grandparents had been blue-collar French Canadians with chips on their shoulders and who seldom dusted their fleur-de-lis.

"There's a lot of snow to melt, though" I said.

It was all very Socratic, and then we told each other to have a good day.

O Tannenbaum & All of the other Baums

Felix the Cat
Originally uploaded by nlejuste

On Friday night there was some snowfall on the ground, outside of all of our warmwarm humidless houses and establishments. I went to visit Tom and Jessica and they had the fireplace turned to eleven, and we sat on couches and watched Felix the Cat silent cartoons from 1924, and fortified it with a mix of Vince Guaraldi jazz and obscure oldies, and drank and watched for synchronizations. It was a brilliant uninteractive activity, even though it almost seemed as if we should have been passing around a bong as well. Or a blunt. Or whatever the other marijuana things are called.

The flue capitulated over the entire duration. The house was filled with smoke. I figured that the harm was already captured, and so there was no point in turning down two clove cigarettes. My lungs wretched all of the next day, but i don't know whether to blame the cloves or the beechtree wood, or whatever was on the hearths.

I wished that i could tell wood just by the smell that it makes while burning, but this is a talent that i lack all sorts of.

My unwashed and plentiful hair also wreaked as if it belonged to a homeless man populating an italian garden. I was something special, destined to fall asleep.

Felix stayed out all night, drinking liquor, or Flapper-inspired concoctions containing opium. His wife watched the clock at home, tapping her kitty foot and flaunting her dough-rolling pin.

Colin Bailey brushed his snare all the while.

Morning Interjection Dec. 14 2007

It is probably neurotic to prefer some of my clothes hangers to some of my other clothes hangers, because in the end they all just hang clothes.

Last friday

Isn't it all so much more mystical for me, on traintracks, crossing the Delaware effortlessly, gazing through a pane of glass one hundred feet above the water, on a bridge, with dull gray lights glancing off of the waves like George Washington would.

We waved as we passed in opposite directions, from 121,466,880 minutes apart.

He was going to the Battle of Trenton. I was coming from the same.