Shooting Off at the Christmas Mouth

Christmas Eve proved to be an odd but not unpleasant experience. Two intensely hoppy microbrews on a chronically empty stomach did their share in giving me rosy cheeks to complement my multicolored scraggly Santa beard. Mix in a glass of pinot and stir by grasping cousins in both arms and carrying them around upside down while other cousins hop lightly onto any other exposed bit of weight-bearing flesh. Now, stuff your holiday Peter full of well-seasoned meat, and highly adorned starch and sugar. Now, with dinner accomplished, it's time for weird conversation carried out by variously tipsy people pushed out of comfort zones by the sheer weight of long-held religiousity and ritual, and the simple pressure accompanying the huge magnitude of exchange upon which daintily rests the fragile and precarious sanity of each of the young children in the room. I learn through a series of generally over-powered exchanges that each of the children has been very good this year, each performing the staggering number of tasks that can only be carried off through a complex division of mental gymnastics which provides children with a life of gradually decreasingly-unreflected zen and their parents, or perhaps just their mothers, with the complementary existence of unreflected, facilitatory, chaotic fanaticism. I throw people into a tailspin by confessing that among presidential candidates I resonate only with two predictable losers: an over-goofy, constitution-carrying, babyface and a (gasp) republican, (gasp) libertarian, (gasp) anti-federalist. It doesn't seem to make any sense. What about Jon Edwards? No, only socialists and avowed fed-killers are allowed on my political bandwagon currently.

I discover that the raw-hide, bone-like instrument that the dog has been slovenly jostling back and forth across the room is actually a dessicated dick of beef. They come in a box, thirty all hard and red and glistening. My uncles chuckle at this reality and pass me a Scarlett O'hara. This is apparently the manifestation of booze that corresponds best to wrapping paper and the act of witnessing childlike glee. As I sip the sweet, tart drink, I stare off into space, thinking about how the dog would fare encircled by her snacks, staring straight down the barrels of thirty re-bodied bull penises.

Finally, the time comes, and one uncle becomes my designated driver back to the big city. I say my goodbyes to all and am shuffled into the latest in business-acceptable automobila. And as we glide through the sparkling dark of the wet portland night I am made privy to those things which uncles hope will find common ears of masculinity, deviance, humor and zeal in their nephews. Finally, I am dropped off. I don't feel the facial dullness or the tingling shifting weight of alcohol any longer, they've given way to a deeply pleasant warmth. I stand in the street and watch as my uncle's car heads around the block before lighting a cigarette. Despite its apparent preference for plying me with drink, Christmas Eve is clearly on shrooms.

P.S. Thanks Eric for destroying those textual blueballs. Apparently, I've got semen reserves all over the fucking place, just raring to be digitized.