nothing you dismay
Welcome to the holiday edition of No-Delete Thursday! I can hear you now, offering me the standard holiday greeting of our people: Where the fuck have you been? I have been mildly bummed out, to be honest. For no real reason, which is the totally 21st-century way to be bummed out! My grandfather died, and that is sad, but he was 97 years old and went as well as any of us can expect to go. Maybe it is just the standard seasonal ennui, where we all alternate periods of low-level anxiety and anticipation with rather frantic party drinking. So either I’m tipsy, or tired, or moping about, and none of that particularly makes me want to keep a diary. (“Dear Diary: Everything sucks. No, YOU shut up.”)
However, I think I may have blasted through that now, with the help of upping my green tea intake (caffeine really is a mood elevator! No, YOU shut up!), scouring out the inside of my head with wall-of-bent-chords Kevin-Shields-style music played at very loud volumes, and reading a lot. So with my mumbleteenth cup of tea, I am going to sit here all glasses-sliding-down-nose* and not deleting (typos excepted) for thirty minutes. Let’s see what happens.
*I bought these glasses online last summer and they are too damn big for my face. They look okay, but I have to push them up like Urkel (Old-Person Cultural Reference Alert!) all the time, and they have a tendency to flop off altogether if I spend too much time in adho mukha svanasana. It is annoying, but on the other hand I keep seeing hipster girls with enormous slidey-down glasses, so maybe it is the hipster thing to do now. Mimi Smartypants, accidental hipster.
EVIL USES NO LUBE WHATSOEVER
I recently read a novel called The Dead Path by Stephen M. Irwin. Or rather I read about three-fifths of it, because toward the end I was just like come on, showdown betwixt good and evil already, let’s go. Not badly written, but ultimately it was just too much horror classicism for me and back to the library it went. But first, there are two things I want to tell you about this book.
1. The lettering on the book jacket is glow-in-the-dark. I think this was supposed to be all FREAKY and SPOOKY and OOOOOOH, and maybe I am a snobby literature person who is no fun at all, but really? Come on, book designers. Come on.
2. The main character gets a handjob from a demon witch, while an enormous spider squats on his chest. (It might go without saying that this is a forcible handjob, for demonic purposes, that he does not enjoy—but I’ll say it anyway, just to be clear.)
Although I personally did not love The Dead Path, that alone might be enough to recommend it to others. “It wasn’t that great…but there is a scene where a guy gets a handjob from a demon witch while a spider sits on his chest.” It might be the only book with demon-witch handjobs and large otherworldly spiders; that is not a very common trope in Western literature. Well, it was the underlying theme in Middlemarch, but other than that. (What? You didn’t get that? I pity the state of your literary education, I really do.)
So. Demon-provided spider-witnessed handjobs! That’s festive, man. That’s the holiday spirit right there. They should market The Dead Path as a Christmas book. It even has ghosts, just like A Christmas Carol! No handjobs in A Christmas Carol, though, unless you put them there yourself, during your holiday read-aloud or your fringe theater production.
OUTTA HERE LIKE HANDJOB SANTA
Already had my work holiday party, with lasagna and quietly making fun of other people’s holiday sweaters. (Although it was semi-tedious, it was also a welcome distraction from my lengthy email fight with a genetics researcher about the random use of headings and italics in his paper. Sorry, not going to change style and possibly even break the DTD just to make your little researcher heart happy, so get over it.) LT’s is tonight, with booze and getting introduced to people I don’t know. (Underneath my planned outfit, assuming I don’t chuck it all out the window in a fit of petulance, will be my first-ever item of “shapewear.” Yes, it makes the dress look better. No, it is not comfortable. Yes, I totally hate myself for striking this bargain with the beauty-industrial complex.)
Then there is Nora’s ridiculous “Winter Assembly,” where (to her mortification) the third grade will be performing some sort of Polynesian dance. This is the last year she will be forced to perform, unless later she joins choir or band or something like that. (Fat chance. Maybe if school starts a competitive powerlifting team, but otherwise no.) After that there are several family things, then my Christ-free Christmas itself, then MY BIRTHDAY and New Year’s and all that jazz. And handjob-giving demons, and their pet spiders. Deck the halls with creepy sex scenes! Fa la la la la la la la oh shit!
—mimi smartypants can’t get it out of her head.