SANTA MAY BE DEAD

Since I stayed up until the early morning hours Christmas Eve and abused myself in the spirit of the holiday season, I don't crawl off the floor until the early afternoon. I'm not too hungover since I didn't plunge myself into the unconsciousness last night. There were several young people at the gathering and it was pleasant to listen to their perspective on life. While the old folks busied themselves with family rumors and remembrances of past loved ones, the youth wanted to inebriate themselves, smoke cigarettes and speak of ideals.

To be honest, I don't know their major themes except Mexico has many more miles to trek and Trump is trash. While I grow less and less sure about myself as I age, they are firm in their beliefs. If it has to climb over their dead bodies, change will have to come. Like their adult counterparts, some things never change. They want to drink themselves into a stupor.

As benefits a Christmas morning, Santa has left a freezing wake on his journey to the south. It is rainy and gloomy. Thunder and lightning provide the frozen fireworks. There is an excellent Mexican greasy spoon less than a two blocks from my apartment. I don't think it is open and I don't want to venture into the inclement weather even though a hot of coffee seems worth the risk as well as a late breakfast.

I have no plans for today. I suppose as evening approaches, I'll drink a bottle of wine and eat a well-catered meal. I reflect on Brownsville and on all the chaos that exists for me here. My personal life has turned into a catastrophe as it seems to succumb to less and less meaning. Without sounding too melancholy, not one of my sons has called me although a few friends have been kind enough to forward their regards. How the mighty have fallen!

Franko Harris, the great Steeler running back infamous for the immaculate reception, suddenly dropped dead at 72. My old pugilistic buddy Joe Barguiarena suffered a permanent knockout last week. Whether they're national heroes or personal friends, they are dropping like flies. I'll be 74 in four days although I don't feel like I'm in danger of dying within the next few months although all these wide-spread viruses seem to be taking a toll on the best of all.

I fear that the state of our health is taking such a woeful toll on humanity that I wouldn't be surprised if someone informed me that Santa was dead.

MEXICO CITY CHRISTMAS

I will spend Christmas with my adopted family in Mexico City. They treat me like an uncle and I do my best to contribute to the festivities. It will be a traditional bacalao dinner although there will be pizza for the kids. 

As the oldest of eight, I celebrated Christmas with the youthful innocence of any child. My father was a white-collar salesman who brought home blue-collar wages. My mother had her hands full with a growing brood.

We passed through periods of poverty. We had so few family possessions that at one point there was a picnic table in the front room and mattresses in the bedrooms. Our situation was so dire that on an occasion all we had was a frozen package of pees in the freezer as we waited anxiously for my father to come home with food.

Despite our many challenges that we overcame through the years as we progressed economically, there was never a dearth of presents at Christmas and our stockings were will filled to capacity, apples and oranges the biggest items, but there would always be a tiny toy or two.

I don't have any idea the sacrifices my parents made to assure the holidays were a special time for us, but they never failed. And the turkey dinner, always my father's specialty, was second to one. I once called my mother to the front window and we spotted the outline of Santa Claus and his reindeer etched against the moon. When people find themselves depressed at Christmas, these memories are a double-edged sword that leave wounds that still bleed in one's heart.

Through three marriages, I took the lead in making sure my three boys and two step-children enjoyed Christmas as much as I had. Unlike my parents who stuck together through thick and thin, two of my three wives cheated on me, so there were festive seasons when I found myself alone and without the ecstasy of watching the kids open their presents. 

One wife and I were going to reconciliate for Christmas Eve, but when she told me that her latest lover had ejaculated twice on her stomach in the morning, I immediately lost the holiday spirit. In her demented and debauched mind, she thought she was being generous because she didn't want me eating her pussy full of his sperm.

Regardless of the less than merry Christmases that I missed, there were others that paralleled the joyful celebrations of my childhood. They remain with me, but I carry a bitterness that results from a combination of factors. 

When I think of ex-spouses who would rather open their legs to other men than sharing in the jolly moment their children were opening their presents, I try to overcome my pessimism by remembering the profound love my mom and dad experienced together as there was no tawdry temptation or cheap thrill that would ever threaten the beauty and and the bounty of the family.

SANTA AIN'T SATAN (CHRISTMAS CLASSICS)

 SANTA

AIN'T 

SATAN

(Christmas Classics) 

JESUS GREW UP TO BE A HORNY BASTARD

Jesus texts Mary Magdalene: 

You thought you were going

to be an untouched virgin

until I discovered your oasis

between Jerusalem and Nazareth

brimming with vaginal waters.

I gave birth to your wild side,

which isn't much more than yielding

to the ecstatic thrill of sex.

Even before I fondle you,

your innards drip with anticipation.

It excites me when you lose your mind,

inebriated by a concatenation of sensations.

Entering your viscous vulva

with my hard twitching appendage

never gets old.

Feeling it plunging deeper and deeper

into your dark depths gives me a boner.

more accurate than a diving rod.

I'm a snake slithering

into your damp hole.

And then there's that explosion of sperm

that floods your cavernous cavity.

Afterwards, I eat your pulsating pudenda

and then we share a sperm-filled kiss

with your tongue hissing inside my mouth.

You filthy, fabulous nympho.

I thank God he brought you into my life.

IT'S THE CHRISTMAS SEASON

In my contract with life, whether single or in a relationship, there is in microscopic letters a passage that is entitled the spontaneity clause.

There is also a warning against abusing it which I do my best to respect since the consequences are significant, but I have permission, granted by some anonymous power, that if I want to go for it even if it's cocaine, marijuana, cigarettes, beer and wine until the sun rises, it is within my right to exercise this freedom.

It's the Christmas season.

I did and today I am so discombobulated that I feel like I'm sitting in a jail cell awaiting my execution. So much for freedom. Please lock me up before I do something stupid again. That coke could have easily been laced with fentanyl and I could be dead.

Is it only a matter of time before a Herald headline reads: NOTED WRITER AND PUNDIT DEAD AT 73 FROM OVERDOSE. Like Santa quietly exiting a home after he has left the gifts, I'm hoping for a more mundane exit.

WHEN TRUMP & COVID RUINED CHRISTMAS

Didn't we celebrate Christmas eleven months ago? Didn't I just take the lights down from the front of the house in June and now I have to put them up again. I'm not climbing any ladder. You read every week about somebody who has fallen from a ladder, hit his head and died a few days later after complaining about terrible headaches. Why don't more women climb ladders?

Too much has changed from the time I was a child and when I had my own children. How does remembering happiness compensate for all the sadness that surrounds us? We have crossed the 270,000 death mark as the Coronavirus pandemic sweeps across the country unabatedly. And there ain't no Saint Nick occupying our highest office who gives rather than takes. He's big on numbers.

These are not good times. With all the uncertainty, paranoia rules our every move. I don't fear fear. I fear reality. From Washington D.C. to Brownsville and Austin in between we have no leadership. We have all these rabid Republicans whose religious fervor in their adulation of their cult hero has turned them into fanatics.

We keep hearing about the Far-Left, but I don't have one acquaintance who would identify himself as Far-Left, but the Far-Right are more prevalent than cockroaches. In fact, I've never known so many Mexican-Americans in one place who are proud to call themselves cucarachas.

Since adulthood I have endured many Christmases alone as I have gone from marriage to marriage. I will probably spend this Christmas alone. There are no children in my life with imaginations that know nothing but wonder who would give me that opportunity to revel in their innocence.

I'll buy a few gift cards to meet my responsibilities, but it will be another day for me as most my days are as I live the Golden Years with little gold in my bank account and mounting medical bills as an old, used car requires constant repairs.

I'm not complaining. I'm not asking for pity. For the most part, I am indifferent. It's like sex as you age: You're just not in the mood; the excitement is gone. What's a boner? What's a wet cunt? I'd rather listen to Jobim and sip on wine. I want the memories to go away. I don't want to dwell on the dead. I am the product of a perfect past. Even the bad times only made the good times better in those halcyon times.

The imperfect present has ruled my life for many years now. There is a burdensome dread that weighs heavy on me. I've grown disgusted with the imperfect me, but born reckless and restless, I can't escape who I am even though on the exterior I give the impression of a placid existence.

But I do have one Christmas wish: Get that fucking madman Trump out of The White House! And rather than filling his stocking with coal, bury the cocksucker in coal. Santa Claus should have never rewarded this naughty boy who grew into an even naughtier man.

He became so arrogant that he could kill a person on Madison Avenue in broad daylight and grab women by the pussies if the urge stirred him and brag that nobody would dare arrest or prosecute him.

And Christians would trust their daughters with this accused rapist??? I so sick of hypocritical Christians who would flock to the polls in support of Lucifer if he promised to outlaw abortion. Jesus would be the first to proclaim that these lemmings couldn't possibly be his followers if they were pledging their allegiance to the debauched Trump.

And while people by the hundreds if not thousands every week are dying, he continues with his god-awful lying. More than 80 million of our fellow citizens voted against this disgraceful excuse of a human being for president because The White House deserves a more honorable resident.

ANOTHER CHRISTMAS MEMORY

I call myself a writer and I have nothing to say on Christmas Eve. Maybe there are too many memories that create nothing but chaos inside my cranium. We were a happy family when I was a child and my parents, in spite of the overwhelming economic challenges and eight children, did everything within their powers to create the perfect family.

Our Catholic faith dictated our lives. Both my parents worked the Friday night bingos to pay for our parochial school tuitions. My dad often reminded us that he spent two years in the seminary after WWII and my mother never forgot to inform us that she was named after Therese the Little Flower. And they both emphasized that being of Irish heritage was synonymous with being Catholic.

During the holiday season we heard nothing but Christmas music and my mother would rent a television for the month of December because she loved the Christmas shows, but the other eleven months were dedicated to reading.

Dickens' Christmas Carol captured the excitement that enveloped both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day for us. We never opened gifts until Christmas Day, but I was usually the one who shouted in the wee hours of the morning that Santa Claus had arrived and my siblings would pour out of their rooms. My parents would follow yawning since they had only been in bed for a few hours after assisting Santa with his work.

Though clothes were the least appreciated gifts, they were the attire that we would wear to Christmas mass as my mother would never support anything but an immaculate appearance at church. We could hardly aspire to being the perfect family if we weren't dressed for the role.

Since we had had turkey for Thanksgiving, turkey wasn't quite as exciting as it had been the previous month, but those were the only two days we feasted on the stuffed bird and there were no complaints since we weren't unfamiliar with empty stomachs when times were occasionally tough. We often asked for seconds, but the refrigerator and cupboards were bare.

"Eat everything on your plates," my mom and dad must have repeated a hundred times at dinner since there would be no more food until breakfast the following morning. "There are millions of children dying of hunger in China."

We were a struggling working class family slowly moving up the economic ladder, but despite our financial woes, my parents managed to place dozens of presents beneath the Christmas tree. They provided us with enough toys for us to forgive them for the clothes that we would wear until summer vacation when the bite of scissors would reduce our jeans to shorts.

December is a dreary month in Sacramento. The fog will hang over the Central Valley for weeks. The sky is gray, a mist falls and the temperature hovers in the mid-fifties. The elements never stopped us from congregating at the school yard to play football or basketball, but Christmas Day was strictly a family day and we never left the house.

With dinner at three and new toys to entertain us, we were content to remain as one. And my father, who never complained about the incalculable sacrifices he made for his wife and children, would convince my mom to relinquish the television for a few hours so he could watch a NFL game.

I take a deep sigh. Our lives are a flash punctuated by instances. It is beyond our comprehension that the moment we're living that we'll be reflecting on its more than a half-century later. And many of those on whom our memories rest are resting in peace. Since I was blessed, Christmas symbolizes for me goodness and innocence.

And, of course, there were the many Christmases that I celebrated as a husband and a father. With my parents as role models, the sacredness of the day seared into my consciousness and economically comfortable, I did my best to do my parents right by maintaining the tradition they had so lovingly instilled in their children.

During my adult life I have spent a solitary Christmas or two because I was no match for my parents 63 years of matrimony and on those lonely nights I have gone to bed early comforted by the past. Life ain't never a straight line.

Tonight will be a quiet family night with the mother-in-law's tamales the main dish. A few of the kids will return home and there will be an aunt or an uncle in attendance. Presents will be exchanged and good cheer will reign, but there will be an essential presence missing. What is Christmas without a child anxiously awaiting the arrival of Santa Claus?

And Christmas tomorrow? Sadly, it won't be much more than another day.