December

So…It’s that special time between holidays where my guard goes down, my cold, stone heart turns all soft and mushy, and I throw the entire world a ton of slack…because I’m jolly as fuck!

That being said, I still can’t find it in myself to feel sorry for the poor corporations and the super rich who I’m being told every minute of the day need our help because their tax rate is too high.

Listen, dickless, get your hands out of my wallet and off of children’s healthcare!

Besides, we all know your wealth won’t trickle down. In all the years they’ve tried to convince us it will—it never has. I may be jolly but what do you take me for, a fool?

I’m also not buying the case for doing away with net neutrality. Everybody wants cheap, fast, and impartial internet access. Period. The end. Full stop.

Dear Ajit Pai and the FCC, if you know what’s good for you—you won’t fuck with our internet!

And what’s with all the lying? It isn’t just pervasive, it’s epidemic and it insults my intelligence!

“We never talked to any Russians!”
Oh, mah, gawd! Yes, yes you guys did. A bunch of you. A gaggle. A gang. A coven of suits, you all talked to the Russians.
A lot. Like, all the time!
Then you lied to cover it up, like we all do when we’re just having legal conversations about nothing with lovely folks who aren’t criminals.

I heard a story recently that reminded me of Paul Manafort and (Don Jr.? Flynn? Pence? — fill in the blank) about two dumb-shits who killed a third dumb-shit (this is just an educated guess because of his proximity and relationship to the other two). They hit him in the head repeatedly with a hammer and then tied a cinder block to his legs and threw his corpse into a body of water.

Of course they didn’t do any of that right because his body came up to the surface within an hour—with a head full of hammer marks—and while the police were scouring the area looking for the perpetrators, our hero’s got pulled over for a traffic violation that produced a bloody hammer and a couple of matching cinder blocks — IN THE TRUNK OF THE CAR.

And even though their finger prints and his blood was EVERYWHERE — they denied any wrong doing.
There’s nuthin’ to see here!
They were indignantly innocent because they said they were.

Sound familiar?

My dog thought so.

Here’s a case for trickle down lying.

Last night, for the first time in the four years she’s been alive, our little brown dog jumped up onto the kitchen counter and ate half a pot roast.

Judging from the suspicious look on her face, the drooling, and the licking of her chops as she left the room we were in on her way to the kitchen, I suspected as much. But my husband, his faith in her good behavior stubbornly intact, gave her the benefit of the doubt until she failed to come after repeatedly being called.

Ruby! Ruby? Ruby…where are you?

He got up to check on the roast at the exact same moment she left the kitchen. They even passed each other in the living room. The fact that she could not maintain eye contact, had her tail between her legs, and was virtually commando crawling past him was the clincher for me. It was her “bloody hammer in the trunk” moment as far as I was concerned.

“Motherf*#@$ dog!” He yelled, bounding back into the den and grabbing her sorry ass in a headlock all the while dragging her back to the scene of the crime amid a firestorm of obscenities.

“You bad dog!” he hissed. “You ate half a damn roast!”

Really? Did you see me eat it? I heard her say as she was forcibly dragged from my sight.

She obviously watches too much cable news and has come to believe this new truth we’ve been subjected to, that lying about and denying something—means it didn’t happen.

The beef was gone. She was the only other person in the house —and her breath smelled of…you guessed it—roast beef. Yet, she continued to deny it and her remorse in the end was tepid at best.

A lot of things could have happened to that roast. And besides, hypothetically speaking of course, it isn’t against the law if I were the one to have eaten it. Everyone knows that eating meat in this house is NOT a criminal offense!

She barked all of that from her bed, which is located in the lower back-forty of our home (fifty feet away) where she was banished for the rest of the night.

I felt bad. Bad that I had such a roast-eating-lying-liar of a dog and even worse that I knew I’d probably choke to death in my sleep from the horrendous beef farts brought on by her impending meat sweats.

So there you have it. That special time of year. When the government tries to take away all of your deductions, the wait time for online catalogue customer service is measured in hours not minutes, and some asshat comes up with definitive proof that raw cookie dough can kill ya.

I call bullshit on December—and while I’m at it, pretty much all of 2017.

Carry on,
xox

The energy was a bit frantic this weekend and it carried into Monday.

After all, It’s mid December.

I hiked, had some Facetimes with two of my tribe members whom I love, and then before I started gnawing on own arm I decided to make myself something to eat. These days I’ve been preparing a lovely riced cauliflower dish which I convince myself through the power of my mind and copious amounts of butter, salt and pepper, is perfectly steamed jasmine rice.

Some days it tastes like a big carb cheat. Most days it does not. It tastes like sock drawer lint covered in butter, salt and pepper.

I’m doing this during December because I just so happen to have the ingredients for Toll House chocolate chip cookies in the house and so I consider myself armed and dangerous. Dozens of cookies could be baked at a moments notice so I feel better eating them knowing I had something bland, tasteless, and carb free for lunch.

So you can imagine my horror when I opened the butter dish only to find a sliver of butter left behind and none in the fridge. This sliver should have never been left there. It was barely enough to butter one piece of toast. The culprit, and I’m not naming names, but his initials are RB, should have just used it up and left out the empty butter dish so I would have bought butter when I was out shopping, oh, I don’t know, every day this past weekend.

Anyway, I has just enough time to run to the market to fetch some butter for my lint before my friend Kim was due to arrive, AND I had on the appropriate clothing. I have been known to run to the market for a stray ingredient (not big grocery shopping mind you), in whatever I have on in the moment. Pajama bottoms, a stained sweatshirt and flip-flops, shorts, no bra and Uggs to name a few examples. It’s like I’m running out to the garage, not a public place. So…if you ever see me—I apologize in advance.

Today I had on real pants…a bra…and some proper shoes. This is worth mentioning.

So, I raced to our nearby Ralphs, grabbed a butter (salted, of course), and finally, finally, several poinsettia plants that did’t look as if they’d fallen off the back of the truck. I checked myself out at the Self Checkout (because I am so fast it’s not even fair), ran back to my car in a very crowded and chaotic December parking lot and unloaded my one bag while an SUV waited patiently for my primo spot.

In my rush to expedite the entire process and because I was pressured by that freaking SUV, I took my purse out of the cart and put it down in the back so I could maneuver the dog cushions and a rogue rug I’ve been driving around with for the past day or so.

Hey! The poinsettias were delicate and they needed breathing room!

That was my first mistake.

My second mistake was shutting the back when I was finished.
As I flashed a quick smile and an I’m going as fast as I can hand wave (sans the middle finger in case you were wondering), to the waiting SUV, my smile was instantly replaced by the taste of vomit when I realized the back tail gate had just clicked shut and LOCKED itself—with my purse inside.

The last time I locked my keys in the car was…NEVER. I have never locked my keys in the car.

I have one of those new fangled cars that works without keys. It has a push button ignition and the doors will lock and unlock and it will start as long as the key is close enough to smell. I’ve tried to lock it many, many, many times with my purse still in the back seat and the doors refuse to lock. It is smarter than me. It knows things. Yet, somehow the same rules don’t apply to the back of the station wagon.

You know how I know that? BECAUSE I COULDN’T OPEN THE F*CKING CAR!

At least I had my phone in my pocket, so I called my husband who, when he was done laughing, said this:

Me: I locked my purse in the way back of the car.
Husband: How?…Never mind. Looks like you have a walk home ahead of you.
Me: Of course! I can walk home and get the other key! It’s a fifteen minute walk. That’s genius!
Husband: I know. Between the two of us we have one brain that’s firing on all cylinders.
Me: Right?
Husband: Gotta go. I hope I haven’t used my one great idea for the day.

As you can imagine, the SUV lady was NOT happy when I mimed I locked my keys in the car accompanied by the universal forehead slap and the Doh shrug.

So, off I went a walkin’.

This was the perfect opportunity to slow down. Something I decided to embrace. I also decided to pay attention. This was my quaint little neighbor hood that I usually race thru at fifty miles an hour. Walking at a decent clip the first thing I noticed were all of the changing leaves. My God! It’s SoCal, not New England, I get that, but still! Look at this!

One thing I could not avoid noticing was all of the smeared poop on the sidewalk. It was like avoiding land mines and I couldn’t help but wonder if it was the result of one incontinent canine or that the dog walking people in my neighborhood are seriously THAT rude.

My neighboorhood has real holiday spirit. What I hadn’t noticed before were all of the holiday wreaths. Every single door has a wreath of some kind. Even some gates and garages have wreaths. I even spotted one on the front of a truck. Some of the old-fashioned lamp posts in the neighborhood are wrapped with ribbon and many a mailbox is tied with a bow. Is that a thing? Putting a big red bow on your mailbox? I saw so many, I think it’s a thing.

Something else that was really surprising were all of the phallices drawn in chalk on the sidewalk. I’m serious. I counted five. Is there a band of depraved, sexually precocious six-year olds wandering our neighborhood drawing dicks in colored chalk? Or is this Pompeii? I’m still scratching my head on that one.

By the time I got the spare key and started to walk back it was starting to drizzle. Not enough to get wet. Just enough to frizz my hair into a giant gray afro. Terrifying. But I was glad I had on pants and real shoes because, you know, weather.

After my half an hour walking tour of the neighborhood I have to tell you I was never so happy to pull into my driveway—in my car. The sheer gratitude I felt for reliable transportation and for my swell little neighborhood was barely overshadowed by the fact that sitting happily in the driveway, admiring the white lights of the tree glittering through the window, I suddenly realized I’d left my Christmas tree on the entire time I was gone.

I need to slow down. How about you?
Carry on,
xox