The holiday festivities probably technically began the moment I left work Friday for vacation. For our purposes, however, it’s going to be better to jump straight into Saturday.
The Mall
Got up especially early and started the coffee. Wife and I had a precious few gifts left to buy before Christmas Eve.
Took a ride out to Great Northern, which was a mob scene as expected. The mall parking lot was absolutely, completely full. Which led to me dropping off my wife in front of [insert store name here] and circling the grid until she emerged.
I managed to NOT get into a fight in a department store for the fourth consecutive year, and I barely even grazed that old woman in the parking lot … That’s not to say that I didn’t want to strangle a few strangers, however.
Most disturbing trend noticed during this annual trip to holiday hell:
Parents who bring their children to stores during this time of year to pick out their own gifts.
What gives? I can’t stand kids. The fact that most parents have had the good sense to leave their loud, phlegm-spewing asses at home has been the saving grace in this orgy of conspicuous consumerism — until now. That may sound harsh. I don’t care. Leave the brats at home next year. It only gets worse from here.
The Big Dead Thing
My wife and I returned home from our expedition to the mall, and I went down to the basement to flip a load of laundry as soon as we got in. I was down there for about five minutes and realized that I needed to piss.
“No problem,” I thought. “I’ll just use the bathroom down here that probably hasn’t seen any action since September.”
So I make my way into the tiny, confined space that holds a commode, some pipes and very little else and turn on the light. I turn around and unzip my pants.
“Aaarrrrrgggghhhh!!!” (think the sound that Howard Dean made at the end of his famous melt-down speech in 2004.)
Blood streaked the seat, outside and inside of the toilet, and floating there in the bowl was a large, obviously dead rodent. It hadn’t been there long.
“Anthony, are you OK?” she called down.
“No. Don’t come down here.”
“Are you hurt?” she asked.
“No. You don’t want to see this.”
“That’s it! You better be dying. I’m coming down.”
“I’m OK,” I insisted. “Just give me a minute.”
So in my flight from the bathroom, I forgot to zip my pants, which was definitely a very good thing. I still had to pee, which was not. At the bottom of the steps, I gave my wife a very brief rundown of what I saw, and begged her not to look. Then I went to the upstairs bathroom.
We disposed of the carcass when I returned. She did most of the work. She seems pretty convinced that it somehow made its way through the sewer pipes into our cellar toilet, where it attracted the attention of one or both of our cats. It was a short, messy confrontation.
120 Minutes
Traumatized twice-over (first the kids, then the rodent), I made a conscious decision to start drinking heavily. I also needed to be over-stimulated (read: DISTRACTED), so I busted-out the guitar, had the TV going and was surfing the web — all at the same time.
My poor wife sat with me and pretended to feel my pain, enjoy my singing and relish having me home for the next ten days.
Also, late in the evening, I figured out that VH1 Classic has a 120 Minutes approximate that plays some cool older stuff. Not a bad way to finish what turned into a surreal first day of vacation.
