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I wrote this post last year and included the recipe for Apple Crack and I know it’s lame to double up on posts and even lamer to foist a link on ya’ll, but this stuff is freakin’ amazing.

Try it and I promise, you’ll believe and come into the light and eventually hate me.

Merry Christmas.

I wrote and re-wrote the stupid Christmas letter that we send out each year, refining it, making it flow, making it something that I didn’t want to just ball up and throw in the trash.

When Miss Carol read the final iteration last night she looked at me and said-

“Is this different from what you wrote before”?

So.

How about some bikinis instead?

Merry Christmas.

Is there anything more sadly pathetic than an unornamented Christmas tree?

I think not.

It’s Christmastime once again and so once again I dragged a dead shrub into our house and leaned it up in the corner. We’ll cover it in lights and ornaments and call it beautiful.

And it will be.

But, more and more , I wonder why we do it.

It’s just Miss Carol and me and Cutter and Tug and I know I could care less and I’m pretty sure Cutter and Tug are fairly unaffected about the whole Christmas thing so that leaves Miss Carol boldly pushing our holiday down the well beaten path.

And you know what?

It’s a good thing she does, ’cause otherwise I’d probably be spending Christmas on a lonely barstool bitching and moaning about life and Cutter and Tug wouldn’t have a blazing tree to bask in.

I loves my Miss Carol.

When I started reading this I was, like, it’s amazingly effervescent.

And then I hit mid-book and I was, like, it’s OK cute.

And then I kept reading even though I didn’t want to, and by the time I finished it I was like, whatever.

I wanted Robert to do BIG- he was a blogger gone novel and I’d wished he was gonna push the envelope.

But he didn’t.

But he DID get published. And distributed. And all that stuff. And I wish I could say the book is better than it is but it’s not.

And that’s not to say it’s not worth reading ’cause it is- kinda the same way cotton candy’s worth eating.

It’s starting.

The oft prodded slowly awakening juggernaut has been loosed.

I met the contractor whose gonna push the fill around and install the septic system and pilings on Sunday and we put up the construction post with our lot number, building permit, and plans and stuff and made it real.

It’s happening.

And I’m excited. Kinda. But I’m also starting to realize what it is I’ve done. I’m an idea guy. I like dangling what-ifs out there over the fence of actual reality. It’s fun and not real and imaginary and therefore, inconsequential. Who cares if I fuck around for three years drawing and re-drawing a make believe house?

And usually, looooong before the reality rubber hits the road I’ve pulled out of the parking lot, tires smoking and squealing. I’ve got lots of other fun thoughts to play with.

But not this time.

Standing there yesterday morning staring at the beginnings of what I had wrought, I suddenly realized that pulling the trigger and doing something is waaaaay different from messing around with the what-ifs and the maybe-somedays. It was a scary grown-up feeling and I didn’t like it one bit. It’s funny-you work for something and then when you get it you’re not sure if you want it anymore. Weird.

So I took a deep breath and thought WTF. We’re gonna do this thing. At some point, you gotta stop dreaming and start doing and keep at it ’til it’s done. I’m sure my enthusiasm will wax and wane over the next several months and I’m pretty sure I might even regret ever having prodded the beast in the first place.

It’s hard to stuff the genie back into the bottle.

It’s starting.

Miss Carol and me went to a party over the weekend, which in and of itself, isn’t weird- we go to a LOT of parties.

But what was weird was how hard the synergy hit. You know what I’m talkin’ about- the one plus one equals three shit. The wildly stupid contact high stuff that shouldn’t happen but does.

At least to me.

If people were smoking weed I could understand it and maybe even revel in it. But this was all beer and wine and it still hit me with the same blunt force trauma. I drank three beers and felt like I’d guzzled thirty.

I lurched home and walked the dogs and passed out before dinner and nursed a huge synergy-matic hangover on Sunday and was frankly astounded by the power of party.

Jesus, I becoming a pussy.

Does this happen to everybody? Or is just me?

Miss Carol was out of town this week, down in Raleigh NC for training.

I’m pretty sure Cutter and Tug at least LIKE me since I feed them and walk them and pick up their poops and hang with them EVERY day.

But. I KNOW they loooooooooves Miss Carol.

So when Miss Carol leaves they spend every Miss Carol-less evening staring out the window- ignoring me and waiting and wanting Miss Carol to come home.

And, you know, its not like it’s a competition or a yearning love-want or anything.

But sometimes? It’s like, hey, c’mon dudes.

I have an interesting job, to me anyway.

I work in peoples homes, adding stuff or renovating stuff or fixing stuff and sometimes I get to spend some quality time with the folks that own the homes and listen to their stories, their fears, hopes and anxieties, and, if I’m lucky, a real tale.

I was lucky today.

One of my regular customers is on older retired couple (not that that’s strange- I’ve many and many single mothers wondering dispiritedly what the hell happened to their perfect life) whom I’ve always felt a little sad for.

She’s been fighting cancer for a long time and he’s been embracing alcohol for a longer time. Which is fine. Not the cancer part, but the alcohol part- we live at the beach and I’ve often thought that between the constant partying and the salt air drying us out I’m surprised we’re not ALL alcoholics. Or maybe we are. Whatever. Throw the first stone, dude.

Anyway.

I was back working at their house today and she was back in the hospital (but doing well) and he was shakily, jerkily, trying to help me install a new propane gas line from their leaky old tank.

Finally he stopped helping (something I normally charge customers double for) and sat watching me as I dug the ten foot trench to bury the gas line, swinging his big leg back and forth and kinda grinning.

I didn’t pay it much mind until he said- if you find something it’s mine. I shrugged mentally thinking well, hell yes, it’s your house, and kept digging. Whatever dude.

And then he said- if you find a PVC tube it’s full of cocaine and money and pictures of lawyers and judges snorting coke and it’s mine. I buried it years ago when they were chasing me and I forgot where it is and it pisses me off.

And I stopped my digging and I looked up at him and, ya know what?- I don’t know if it was the light glinting off the water or what, but, for a second, for maybe a minute, the years, the decades, washed down off of him and for the briefest of seconds I saw him as he’d been.

His normally bloodshot hooded eyes crackled blue and his smile was one of those engaging, don’t fuck with me just ’cause I’m havin’ fun right this second smiles. His eyes glittered briefly and then he settled, sighing, back into his beat-up old life.

For a second there, though, he was what he’d been.

A pirate.

And honestly? I like him more because of it.

And I wish I’d found the tube.

You know that feeling of exhausted accomplishment you get when you’ve completed something difficult and strenuous? When you sit, panting, head in hands staring blankly at the wall?

That’s how I feel when I finish reading a book by Jose’ Saramago or Hemingway or Faulkner. Kinda like I’ve wrestled something tenuous and tough and come away, if not the winner, at least a little bit better having done it.

Blindness ain’t no exception.

Not only is Jose’s’ work translated from the Portuguese which adds it’s own twist to the story’s tone but he writes in a free-flowing style that buries dialog in the narrative making the whole thing kinda hard to figure out, especially for tiny simple minds like mine.

But it’s good. Way good.

Blindness is the story of an entire country suddenly and inexplicably infected with a white blindness. Think the common cold gone suddenly and dangerously crazy.

But more importantly it’s the story of the doctor’s wife (who can still see), the doctor, the girl with the dark glasses, the boy with the squint, the man with the eye patch, the first blind man and his wife and later, the dog of tears and how they all come together and bear the unbearable.

Blindness explores the worst in human nature while serving up the best in little bitty bits.

Like anything tough and hard and worth doing, reading Blindness will leave you tattooed for good.

So anyway.

I was moving through my day and it was getting late and I had to stop at the bank and the grocery store, but before I did those things I had to stop and let Mr.Greene. slurp up some diesel. At 12 miles a gallon he likes to slurp.

The diesel pumps where we live don’t allow credit cards at the pump. You have to go into the store and surrender your card and then go out and pump your shit and then go BACK in and pay for it.

Pain in the ass, but honestly? usually painless.

Until today.

I pulled up and walked into a line that stretched to the door. At first I just thought it was a busy Friday afternoon. But then I watched and waited and watched and waited.

Two women were at the head of the line buying cigarettes. Simple, yes? You’d think so. But it wasn’t.

The first woman, clutching her silly looking adolescently hopeful pink wallet, kept pointing out  brands she wanted and then changing her mind like she was surprised that the cigarettes she wanted weren’t sold there and nudging her partner.

It would’ve been cute and maybe even laughable if they’d been 20-somethings in thong bikinis and high heels. But they weren’t. They were the older, used up, rode hard and put away wet chicks, plumply primping their bristly hard straw colored hair and dark tints that they think make them look edgy and cool but screams too much salon time and wearing those big, garish, rings on their mannish fatty fingers that are either trailerpark trash fake or the marrying and burying rich old guys real thing.

Whew. How’s that for a sentence?

Anyway.

They both had that dusky, smoky, end of the bar , been that, done that, sort of voice that maybe boys masturbate to, but men steer clear of.

And as I watched them holding up life while they went through their stupid routine of blondness gone old and not cute I got mad. And then I got sad at how pathetic their badly bleached blond lives had become.

What if this was the highlight of their rum soaked middle-aged do-nothing lives?

Sad.

But I still wanted to punch them when they finally walked by me.