Hello, World, I'm back...or, How I Spent the First Part of my Christmas Vacation (the visit South)

BLOT: (25 Dec 2012 - 01:34:58 AM)

Hello, World, I'm back...or, How I Spent the First Part of my Christmas Vacation (the visit South)

Got off of work Friday night and slept fairly soundly, though could have done so more soundly, because we had a long weekend in front of us. Normally, when you say long weekend, you mean to brag about the extra days off. I mean it in the sense of a thing to be endured much like a long stretch in an upstate prison. Family was involved.

It actually wasn't that bad. Got to stay with my mom late Saturday through early Monday. While down there, got to visit with my siblings and their various offsprings and spouse-typesd‐including seeing David's snazzy new house in the middle of outright nowhere—and visit briefly Evergreen proper, which is probably the best way to see the place. It was a cold, wet day: which I think is true of the last half-dozen times I've been there. Maybe the town's own ennui has finally warped reality around it.

Alas I took no pictures and it was mostly a matter of playing games with my mom*, trying not to talk about race or politics or religion, and driving up and down the sort of roads that might surprise a decent percentage of this country by still existing: small, dank, quiet concrete paths barely a lane-and-a-half wide, dotted with old houses and more memories than your average old folks home, all lost to crumbling moments glimpsed as burnt out stores and broken houses and barns and strange wood-and-metal temples to get-quick-rich schemes, one of the major pantheon of Alabama. An aborted attempt at a vlog (left behind after I said "um" too often) became doubly so when a planned second/first one with my brother fell through due to utter lack of time.

On the way back up stopped off at Sarah's Nana's sister's house for a family get-together sort of thing. Bringing the tally to a couple of big meals, couple of gift exchanges. There is one last gift exchange, with the possibility of a meal, tomorrow (or, since this is past midnight, today): Christmas proper. The gift exchange, meaning the one between Sarah and myself, will be the largest yet, and there will be pictures, by Jove and Jehoshaphat, because there will be adornments draped upon Sarah's person, and I will ensure she cute/sexy-ies it up. As I am wont to do.

I wish I could list some highlights to the trip, but it really was sort of plain and pleasant and, up until I completely ran out of juice this afternoon**, a positive albeit bland sort of thing. What I'll try to do is sum up a couple of anecdotal type things, a couple of mood pieces, and work them in to the next couple of posts, rather than simply chronicle much else about the weekend.

Except the traffic, and I'll get that out of the way now. While you had your standard safe-brand sports car types driving at stupid speeds on the Interstate, what I find the most bleakly humorous are those guys in the mini-vans and the station wagons and the oversized SUVs (clearly bought for the wife) doing the same asshole swerves and rapid accelerations and near hits. They are just about ubiquitous this time of year, the men who don't drive the family vehicle to work because they don't think of themselves as the sort to do such a thing, suddenly thrust into a car that suspiciously seems like something their dad might have driven them around in, and they freak the fuck out. They whip between lanes without having any idea of how close they are coming to others, they race up right behind other drivers, they even sweep around sports cars with obvious glee, not realizing that no one is ever going to go for the balding fat guy in the minivan over the balding fat guy in the sports car, no matter how much like a dick the former acts. I'd say it was kind of sweet, this permanent man-child behavior, as though Chuck Lorre had let some of his poorly-written-yet-award-winning characters out for a holiday, except that it is stupid and does no one any good. I could probably work up to good old fashioned rant on it, except we all know how dumb it is, even those of us who do it, and so there is nothing I can say more damning than the obvious fact.

And, with that out of the way, to the rest of us, and even to the jackasses whom I honestly hope got to whatever their stupid thing was that they thought justified being an idiot and risking the lives of others, I say MERRY CHRISTMAS, YOU JOLLY BASTARDS, and I love you all.

* My mom has a subscription to satellite company's Game Center thingie, which means she gets to play what are basically simple Flash games through her receiver. Every time we visit, she has another game that she focuses on, in this case it was a simple "match three" game called something like Chainz 2: Reloaded, which seems sort of a strangely hip title for a game I guarantee is mostly aimed at older people. She is actually quite adept these puzzle games, and will spend hours throughout the week playing and, many times, damn near mastering them. While it seems quaint, nearly backwater, it is an awesome mishmash of generations. And, a major source of alone time for her, and that's good, because she definitely needs it.

** After running out of juice, I did seek to pick a fight or two, with Sarah, but soon came to my senses and, much as PKD says in his good book, VALIS, learned how to shut up.

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: December 2012