DECEMBER 21, 2014
DYOKA-YUDI BORK! BORK?!
So anyway, there is nothing like listening to a bunch of Norwegians in Minnesota singing a putative Finnish folk song with a spurious Spanish title that was actually written by a Swede and which consists entirely of nonsense syllables.
That situation pretty much provides the emblem for the state of America today as it should be. Everything is so damn ridiculous and over the top, what with the Midterm elections and the Tea Party and Boko Haram along with DAESH and the nonsensical Alaskan pipeline and the Rambo police everyone should just grab the nearest banjo, or something similar, and start singing "El Hambo."
Your boss is a jerk, has doubled your hours and wants you to work through the Holidays and be on call 24x7? Serenade her with "El Hambo."
Your neighbor has spiked your electrical line to get free power and insists on complaining about you to the landlord after she stole your garden tools? Render up a chorus of "El Hambo" to the old female dog.
Your colleagues conspire behind your back and make up stories about you in ways that help Management enslave your soul with special "Self help" programs from EAP? Belt out a good rendition of "El Hambo" since they think you are crazy anyway.
Some maniac former enemy with a grudge boobytrapped your vehicle with an Infernal Device involving nails and fishing line so as to flatten your tires in the dark away from home? Belt out a verse of "El Hambo."
Your wife wants you to move out, and your daughters disown you, and after the last doctor visit you have come down with the sickness blues. Your health is gone now and you have become pretty sure god no longer takes care of old folks and fools. Sing "El Hambo" with a mouth harp.
It probably will not help the situation, but it certainly will make you feel better. If you are lucky they will put you away in a quiet room where you can at last finish that novel on which you have been working for years.
Islanders handle this time of year in various ways. This year we see a lot more LED drapery out on the housefronts and apartment balconies than we saw during the Great Recession.
Speaking of the GR and the Midterms, isn't it fascinating how the Democrats who have left office, like John Kerry, Carter, both Clintons, and other individuals remain vital and active in the world, contributing to society and otherwise continuing to act useful to the Nation, while some others just lounge around the pool and engage as dilettantes in arts by presenting amateurish painting exhibitions.
Just an observation.
So anyway, Marlene and Andre's Household are prepping for the Horror Days in the usual manner for that benighted household of the Rejects of the World by securing seasonal employment as UPS baggage handlers, special banquet waiters, event security, and Department Store Elf Santa Assistants.
It's not much of a life, but vastly superior to working in an office as a lower level step-n-fetchit.
As last year, Pahrump, Jose, Javier, and Martini set out to fetch the Household tree, which they brought back from some unknown source very late at night on the official household Transport Vehicle, which is and has always been a children's red Flexible Flyer wagon.
Once safely inside the cottage the tree was set up in an old steel washtub and secured with a cinderblock as a base. The tree was a bit gaunt, lacking needles on one side and having a pronounced crook in its trunk, but for all of that it was a noble fir. After Martini went at it with garlands of led lights he had made by soldering together parts of discarded circuit boards it started to resemble something, Decorations consisted of any sort of ad hoc item that represented the Household inhabitants. Confetti consisted of torn aluminum foil that had been used to sharpen scissors. Ornaments ranged from condom wrappers from the Jack Sparrow Psychiatric Institute and from the Crazy Horse, along with paperclip people, spraypainted origami, bottle caps, discarded underwear, saran wrap, tin foil, cd's and movie DVDs, beer-tab strings, and glass fragments glued to molding hooks together with seawrack found down along the Strand.
In the end, it was a sort of Charlie Brown sort of tree, a bit sordid and lost, not unlike the Household inhabitants themselves, but still possessing its own sort of warmth and stoic grandeur.
Other households on the Island had their proud trees gaily bedecked and displayed through the windows, but this tree possessed genuine sincerity, as each and every ornament represented a part of the lives of the people who had helped decorate this thing.
The only ornaments of any repute consist of half a dozen fragile brown glass globes belonging to Marlene. They are all that remains of what her grandmother brought over on the boat from the Ukraine years ago. Marlene's grandmother had taken care of here for a while after the trouble with her father fell out, and was alone of all that benighted family who had retained a sense of humanity through that dreadful time.
Like any other decorated tree this one came freighted with memories. A brass belt buckle had belonged to Harold, who had lived in the house years ago. He had looked long and hard for work and got a job as a roofer, which he did until one day he fell off. A slipper belonged to Diane, who had always wanted to be a dancer. She came lightly tripping across the country, a spritely blond with elfin eyes from some wretched place in New Jersey and found a sort of refuge here. It was a MUNI bus that nailed her in the crosswalk that broke both her legs and for ever after she was a dancer imprisoned within the shell of a body that would not work anymore. Eventually she moved, as so many disappointed people do, up to the north coast where it rains all the time, but in the Household her dancing slippers remind people of her blithe spirit as it was and how she pirouetted across the tiny livingroom space to land all in a tumble in the arms of the surprised Occasional Quentin, laughing like mad.
As the evening segued into the deepest reaches of winter night, and tired souls relapsed into the dreamworld folded by comforters and blankets and pillows, the Opossum who escaped from last year's tree ambled along the fence with his new family of little opossums past the window menorah display and on over to the opposing yard to visit briefly the chicken coop of the Almeida family and pass underneath the window where Ferry Boat pressed up his nuzzle and whined with an urgent desire to speak with these creatures and learn their intentions so as to perhaps circumvent them with a ferocity of barking and toothy defense.
During the longest night of the year, exhausted humans overworked now for many years with less to show for it, dreamed the dreams of peoplekind and the Opossums continued on past the blinking lights of holiday and animatronic deer and LED crèches with polystyrene Jesus and on past the abode of Senor Don Guadalupe Erizo who observed impassively the massive round of the star-packed Milky Way as well as the passage of the marsupials.
On a quiet night, the longest night of the year, no sirens rent the night air and no one got shot and no one got stabbed and all was Peace on Earth.
Then came the ululation of the throughpassing train from far across the water as it trundled from the gantries of the Port of Oaktown with their towers bedecked with holiday lights, letting its cry keen across the waves of the estuary, the riprap embankments, the grasses of the Buena Vista flats and the open spaces of the former Beltline, through the cracked brick of the former Cannery with its leaf-scattered loading dock, its weedy railbed, its chainlink fence interstices until the locomotive click-clacked past the shuttered doors of the Jack London Waterfront, trundling out of shadows on the edge of town past the old Ohlone shellmounds to parts unknown.
That's the way it is on the Island. Have a great week.
