My impression of what an MRI of Pestilence Piggy’s noggin might reveal.
We pulled the plug(s) on the 2025-26 holiday season after breakfast this morning.
Herself boxed up all the small stuff — Bicycling Santa, Fat Cowboy Santa, Cat Santa, etc. — and then we disassembled and bagged the fake Christmas tree before dragging the unwieldy sonofabitch out to its corner of the garage, where the bicycles jeer at it.
“Ha ha, ha haaah, ha, you only get out once a year!”
Then I set about pulling down all the lights out front. I got a little carried away this year, adding a strand here and a strand there, until PNM sent us a thank-you card for using more power than the Coronado Center.
As a consequence, dismantling my creation took longer than I had expected, and by the time I started dragging all the bits and pieces back into the house the clouds were right behind me and splish, splash, my bike ride got rained out.
And yes, those are skulls you see in the pile there. Leftovers from Halloween that I decided to leave up for a while.
Far as I’m concerned, it’s still Halloween. It ain’t over until the last ghoul’s been staked and baked. And the White House is still possessed by devils.
Rooting around the Innertubes for some New Year’s recipes I was congratulating myself on picking a couple of winners, both from The New York Times Cooking section, which by itself is worth the price of a subscription.
But when I crowed about this to Herself I found she’d beaten me to the punch. She’d already found her own recipe and acquired the ingredients for it, too.
Good thing I shot off my big bazoo before heading for the grocery. We’d have been eating Hoppin’ John and cornbread from New Year’s right through St. Patrick’s Day.
Meanwhile, I had to quickly re-establish my primacy as tenzo of this zendo. Facing an economy of scarcity — a lack of fresh red grapes, which I dice up for the morning oatmeal — I displayed my resourcefulness in the kitchen, or “skillful means,” as defined by the late poet-gourmand and Zen student Jim Harrison, by locating a wrinkled honeycrisp apple in the crisper and chopping that up instead. In your face! as the sage Dogen has taught us.
Jimbo hated oatmeal. But he’s dead and didn’t have to eat any of it.
Our Chinese pistache is not quite in “Last Leaf” mode, but it’s getting there.
I fight off the snow I fight off the hail Nothing makes me go I’m like some vestigial tail I’ll be here through eternity If you want to know how long If they cut down this tree I’ll show up in a song
Not a lot of snow or hail to fight off in these parts lately.
Christmas brought a record high temperature — 65°, eclipsing the old mark set in 1955(!) — and it wasn’t even The Duck! City’s first record high this month.
Herself and I went out for a little pre-feast hike in the Sandia foothills with a couple hundred of our closest friends, their extended families, and their dogs. Only saw two cyclists in just under five miles, and their rigs didn’t look new to me, so, maybe not a festive holiday season for the local IBDs.
The good news is, we’re delivering the teachings of Jeebus to the Nigerians in the usual explosive fashion. So, at least the Military-Industrial Complex is ticking along nicely, if only in terms of supplying shiny objects to the news media, since it’s a little late to carpet-bomb the Epstein files.
The bad news is … well, not all that bad. I couldn’t locate any crosscut beef shanks for my beef vegetable soup, so I had to call an audible and run with another recipe that proved to be not quite as good as our favorite, which is from a “Better Homes and Gardens” cookbook with a 1981 copyright. After a week’s worth of chile-infused dishes I was striving for mild, and overachieved for a change.
However, Herself’s cornbread was superb, as was her salad, and thanks to exchanges with neighbors and colleagues we had an extensive menu of possibilities for dessert.
With the second season of “Fallout” finally available, we’d thought to revisit season one, since we’d forgotten what all the fuss was about. Alas, our Amazon Subprime Video membership is not ad-free, and the viewing experience was peppered at random with multiple sales pitches for depression meds, Range Rovers, and other shit that we don’t want, don’t need, and/or can’t afford, some of them running more than two minutes at a stretch.
Which was really a stretch. So this morning we decided to bring capitalism to its knees by signing up for the ad-free tier, then binge-watching both seasons before finally canceling the service entirely.
¡Venceremos! You’re welcome, comrades. Just crawl out through the fallout, baby.
I can’t say with a straight face that I’ve been a good boy this year.
So it must be that I was riding Herself’s coattails when Santa dropped off a holiday gift last night.
We both — yes, both of us — dreamed of our late cat Turkish.
The Turk at rest.
Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein (commander, 1st Feline Home Defense Regiment) left us far too early, on March 5, 2020. He and I reconnect now and again in dreams, but never have Herself and I met up with the old soldier at the same time.
In my dream, I was in bed, head propped on the pillows, but the bed was on the front porch of some vaguely familiar house from my past. I was just chillin’ there, watching the world pass by, when the Turk came aboard without so much as a bosun’s whistle and stretched out alongside me, as he did regularly when still he walked the earth.
Surprised to see my old comrade, I turned my head and said to Herself, who was nearby but out of sight, “Hey, check it out!” And then Someone hit the channel changer, the dream shifted gears, and I was lucky to have the warm memory of it when I awakened this morning.
Herself was scurrying around getting ready for work when I shambled into the kitchen and told her I’d dreamed of the big fella.
“I did too!” she said.
In her dream I wasn’t there, but her dad was, or might have been, though I don’t recall Bob Pigeon and the Turk being all that tight. He probably tried to explain how the Turk was going about the whole cat thing all wrong, and that would be as far as their relationship would ever go, because the field marshal was very much not interested in advice from junior officers.
Now, a cynic might write the whole visitation off as the upshot of eating spicy Mexican dishes for about a week straight, plus a few too many sugary seasonal treats.
But I know a gift when I see one. What a joy it was to have an old friend home for the holidays.
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