The Bourbon Logs

Santa Claus is drunk
Tom Waits

Ho ho ho. It’s Christmas. Bloody hell.

It has a way of sneaking up doesn’t it? One day your laying in the hammock, fanning yourself absent mindedly, doing your best to keep the mid-summer heat at bay while listening to Bob Marley sing Three Birds and sipping from a cooler full of Red Stripe, the next you’re standing in a lineup somewhere, feeling wasted and overdone, listening to canned Christmas music piped through tinny, shopping mall speakers, watching everyone around you behave like dogs, and bracing yourself for the flood waters outside because of the fortieth consecutive day of rain pouring down from a hole in the sky. Ho ho ho.

Yes, it’s Christmas, my favorite time of the year. I especially enjoy the shopping. The sheer joy of moving out into the hustle and bustle of the jolly Christmas crowd, elbow to tennis elbow and eyeball to bloodshot eyeball with that strange hallucination known as the last minute shopper, trying to pick up those gifts that make every Christmas a heartburn of a time, like electric socks for Uncle Bob, a good rubber cleaner for Cousin Sue, or a can of microwavable InstantKarma for that troublesome holy man on your list who has nothing and wants even less. The feeling is hard to describe. My thoughts grow warm and fuzzy when I think about all the phoney baloney good cheer dished out by the hosts of unenthusiastic, overworked, underpaid, little appreciated, part time store clerks brought in to fill the ugly breach created with the onslaught of the season, and as i shudder with these thoughts i think, didn’t we do this thing last year?

Well, i’m sure you aren’t like me at all. I’m sure you have all your gifts bought, wrapped, addressed, stamped, mailed, signed, sealed, and delivered. I’m sure your freezer - do you actually have a freezer? have you been holding out on me? - is full-to-bursting with Christmas baking, as well as with pre-made homemade gourmet meals that you can bring out in a minute flat in the advent of any unscheduled company, like a troupe of horny dwarves dancing the Macarena on your doorstep for example. I’m sure your preparations are virtually complete, except for those things that just can’t be done ahead of time like bating your Santa traps on Christmas Eve. You’re probably kicking back listening to old Bing sing White Christmas, enjoying a nice cup of hot spiced wine, warming your toes by the roaring fire, staring out your window nicely touched up ala Martha Stewart, and entertaining yourself with the antics of mad idiots like me racing their engines at the red line, giving each other the finger, duking it out over the last remaining Sex-Trade Worker Barbie and settling for half each. Ho ho ho.

Christmas. Definitely the worst time of the year, next to Valentines Day maybe. No, i believe it’s even worse than that. For me it’s a point of departure: when it’s over i feel as if i can breathe again. You don’t know what it’s like to hold it in for four long months. By the end of September i’m beginning to feel it in my chest, you know, a little tight there doc. A month later and i’ve moved up a size or two in shirts. By mid-December, with the dawn of Christmas staring me square in the face, my eyes are bugging out, my face is turning blue, and i’m singing Hark, the hairy angels sing as loud as i can, only thing is, nobody hears me screaming….Yeah, once it’s over, i feel as if i’m on easy street. No more parties, no more giftwrap, no more cheesy Christmas music from the likes of Tom Jones or crummy Christmas specials on tv where fossils like Bob Hope pass wind on some Christmas schmaltz for the goshdarned gazillionth time. No more be here be there push and pull hi how ya doin merry ****in whatever it is whatdyamean my credit card is MAXED OUT? For the love of money have yourself a merry little Christmas too.

Life is what happens after Christmas. Definitely.

Well, who’s in charge here anyway? I am, certainly. Ho ho ho. What kind of Christmas would i like? It’s true, i don’t dislike everything about it. I like some of the Christmas movies: It’s a Wonderful Life, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, and of course Black Christmas - you know, the classics. Every time the final scene plays out in Frank Capra’s film i must admit my eyes well up with tears. Mind you by the time it’s finished i’ve usually put away ten fingers and all eight toes of my sister Anne’s evil eggnog so that my tears have to be taken with a grain of salt. BE ALL THAT AS IT MAY BE i’m almost certain i could have a grand old time sittin round the old tv watching the above list of Christmas movies, my features glowing in the warm radiation cast by the good old cathode ray tube with the ominous and discomfitting old buzzz, sipping from an old bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon with some old friends and family and just getting mellower and mellower, until i get so mellow in fact that the movies become blurred, and i grow confused as to whether i should cry, scream, laugh or just scratch myself lewdly when they’re over. That’d be a Christmas to remember.

Well, i’m not being completely honest of course. After all i have kids, and kids are what Christmas is all about. They kindle that good old Christmas spirit in me, if only because they’re willing to use a blow torch to do it. They make me realise what Christmas is all about: money, greed, excess, plastic - no scratch that, family. I mean, even ignoring the religious significance the day holds for so many people (and most people do ignore it so why can’t i?), it’s a good time to reconnect with our families, reestablish long-neglected friendships, renew our sense of values, remember old times we never really had together, reopen long festering wounds, rekindle long-slumbering hostilities, release the old jealousies, recalibrate the old tensions, etc. Family stuff in other words. We all need a dose of that now and again, moreso if we don’t have a family around to do it with. We have to make one up then, which is a difficult thing to do, and perhaps more meaningful when it comes off.

I guess Christmas brings up a lot for me. A lot of memories i don’t typically remember, a lot of emotions i don’t usually feel, a lot of that good old Catholic guilt. Pain, feelings of separation, a bit of bile just to keep me honest. It comes in spades, rains down from the heavens like acid snow (the worst kind i’m told), and nobody ever thinks of buying me an umbrella. Ho ho ho.

I must say i’m no emotional giant. I failed the Charles Ignatius Atlas program - you know, the one for metaphysical weaklings. I don’t deal all that well with the scene. I become tight lipped, silently miserable, quietly desperate. I bring up ghosts from Christmasses past, when things were a little less “crazy” in my life, when i seemed to have a general idea of what was happening or at least was ignorant about my ignorance. I think about Yuletides of my youth: large, mad affairs with tons of kids, grandchildren, pets, and assorted others, all under varying degrees of intoxication, where there was lots of food, wine, presents, lights, cameras, action, lots of everything really, and where everything felt…i don’t know, christmassy. It seemed to happen every year like clockwork and i didn’t have to lift a finger to make it so. Man, that brands me now. How did they do it?

Well, life, life was different then. I have to keep telling myself that. Slower. The biggest changes were the way people looked. Some got thinner, some fatter, everybody got older, some got born, every once in awhile somebody died, but society stayed much the same. Nowadays, it’s all a flux. Everybody and everything flying off the handle in all directions without a paddle to get ya back upstream when the fur stops flying baby. Everybody just like me in that they’re as different from the next person as frogs from fire engines. Add in the ever present time pressures, financial pressures, tire pressures, accupressures, and pretty soon it all adds up to a lot of pressures. WHAT THE HELL AM I TRYING TO SAY?

It’s a bit of a ride, Christmas, a supersonic super slo-mo sleigh ride surfing between Hell and the Mall with pitstops in between for refreshments, sure, but it’s more than that too. Christmas has it’s moments, good and bad. I think the main difference is that there’s just more of them. Christmas makes us feel something. We feel bad and we feel good, and we feel both of these things in wider increments than is the usual case. The end result is growth i think (is it malignant doc?), and sometimes, if you’re lucky, a piece of writing with a happy ending.

Merry ****in’ Christmas everyone! Ho ho ho.

Chinaski, Lost in the Mall
From Christmas of 1992 or 93, with small updates since…

Probably, but sometimes you make a quick decision when presented with circumstances. Here’s what happened.

We were coming out of DIX Barbecue and Brewhouse at the conclusion of a successful fundraiser for Erin’s India trip. It was a cold, wet, dark Sunday evening. We were walking to the Stadium skytrain station. On the corner of Georgia and Beatty we were approached by a young couple. He was clean cut and presentable; a twenty-something man who may have been of First Nations background. She was Caucasian, neatly dressed and pushing a stroller. He made a case for needing money for hotel room. Told us that they were in Vancouver overnight to take the baby to the hospital and something about lost luggage or something similar.

I verified that the baby was “real”, and then both Chris and I made a snap decision. We each pulled out a $20.00 bill and handed it over.

Probably a scam but if it was it was a pretty good one and one we couldn’t ignore. The couple walked down the street parallel to us. At one point they asked someone for directions to Homer Street, and even shouted across the street to us for directions as well. Ah well….