Oh boy, my favorite time of year has come around again.  I hate to admit it, but I’m a big Grinch when it comes to the holiday season.  The weather is finally becoming crummy on a regular basis, the mutants on the street have an extra kill factor on their difficulty level, and the general malaise of having to send out cards and accumulate gifts for the other planets in the Federation starts to set in.  It’s depressing.

I put on a merry face and pretend the gloom isn’t getting to me.  The only thing I like is the decoration of the Xmas tree, which has been denied to me for some years now.  The folks don’t have the room for even a small tree, and the cats mean K and I have gotten out of the habit of putting one up.  The destructive rampages of Frankie and chomping nom-nom insanity of Michael’s pine needle appetite make such a possibility ludicrous right now.  Just another reason to be sour about the “Season to be Jolly”.  Grrr!

The stores are filled to the brim with two-legged personifications of desperate panic, outright greed and smoldering resentment.  Come on, mutant robots of death, I just want to buy a carton of milk and go!  The parking lots become re-enactments of the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan.  And here I am in Micro Blue, my little go-cart, trying to avoid getting taken out by the Mammoth Car.  Sheesh!  Back at the homebase, the general ambient neighbor radiation goes up.  You can feel the jitters, usually right when you are undergoing decompression and decontamination procedures after work.

I don’t have any horrible childhood memories of Xmas.  I’ve had quite a few wonderful Xmas experiences over the years.  What I’m describing is a kind of background feeling that comes over me.  The doom is all around us at all times, I suppose I notice it more around this time.  Even during this time of greater awareness of so called “higher principles”, people are still acting like they’re on the Planet of the Apes.  I keep thinking about Sandwich Wagon Boy keeping the eatery treadmill open on Xmas Day while Toot Nugget and his screaming brats open their disposable auto-garbage plastic enviro-bot practice annihilators.  I want to jump on the top of the table with my Casio-rebellion keyboard and yell like a stupid fool!

Yup, that’s how I honor Xmas.  By being in the dumps.  I’ll celebrate when Santa Claus conquers the morons.