But you’d be wrong. Dead wrong, actually. After a little questioning we discovered that these are actually the young artist’s rendering of a pair of Cylon Raiders.

Innocence restored, for a season.

During the interview, Sting took a major departure from the standard guy-has-a-new-record feature, and he waxed briefly on Christmas. He pointed out that Christmas is not all “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” A lot of people get depressed over the holidays, which are so focused on home, hearth, friends, family and church. And when you don’t have those things, it can get kind of bleak.

I haven’t agreed with Sting (or bought one of his records) in years, but he nailed it for me. I’d carry it one step forward and say that the holidays can be hard for people who have disconnected from these kinds of relationships on purpose and live most of the year in peaceful isolation.

When my parents divorced and my sister and I started spending our Christmases in different houses, I started to understand that this holiday was joyous and that it also threw loneliness and isolation into high relief. The abundance of food and gifts during the holidays also serveed as a reminder that many are poor and hungry. So, while I was enjoying my presents and dinner at my father’s place, I was also acutely aware that my mother was alone.

Because this all happened as I was coming into my late teens, I was naturally predisposed by my biochemistry to be moody and melancholy, but I saw this feeling was reflected across the boards outside the bounds my own self-obsession. This is when I fell in love with It’s a Wonderful Life, because it really a dark film at its core. Jimmy Stewart is on his way to take his own life before he’s given his visions of the world without him. This really is a great tonic for teen spirit.

Similarly, A Christmas Carol is about a man who is warned by a dead colleague to change his ways before he circles the drain of human misery and is lost forever. In high school I played Bob Crachit in a dramatized version of the play; it was the hardest role I ever did, because being believably kind and decent on stage is infinitely harder and more complex than being wretched or pathetic.

I’ve also noticed (and I’m not alone in this) that a lot of Christmas carols are unbelievably sad. “I’ll be Home for Christmas” from 1943 reminds us how unbelievably sad it is to know that everyone else is together and you are not. This is a carol resigned to the fact that you’ll be away, which is why it hit so close to the heart for so many of our troops during WWII.

“Blue Christmas” is pretty obvious, but the older I get the less this song seems like a gimmick (sorry Elvis, your version of this one blows) and the more this song crumples my heart like an empty paper cup. This guy is sitting at home or in a bar somewhere thinking about his girlfriend “doing all right” happy without him. This is the quintessential expression of misery.

And when those blue snowflakes start falling
That’s when those blue memories start calling
You’ll be doing all right, with your Christmas of white
But I’ll have a blue, blue, blue Christmas.

I have had my share of Christmases in this state. I much prefer the ones I have now, but this song is good for keeping my head in check.

Longfellow’s civil war Christmas poem-turned-hymn is particularly full of despair. In most hymn books it has been dutifully cleaned up, striking two full verses:

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound the carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn, the households born
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” from Vincente Minnelli’s Meet me in St. Louis has been similarly flocked to hide its edge. I’d go so far as to argue that 99% of the people listening to and performing this carol have forgotten about the context of the song or its history. The original lyrics were deemed way too depressing for the film. Take a look at the original:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas, it may be your last,
Next year we may all be living in the past
Have yourself a merry little Christmas, pop that champagne cork,
Next year we will all be living in New York.

No good times like the olden days, happy golden days of yore,
Faithful friends who were dear to us, will be near to us no more.

But at least we all will be together, if the Fates allow,
From now on we’ll have to muddle through somehow.
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

Despite the revisions, the song also became a favorite of troops serving overseas in WWII. I love the lines:

Through the years, we all will be together
If the fates allow
Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow

Sinatra purged the last line from the song so it would be more jolly—this is where we get the “hang a shining star upon the highest bough” nonsense. There’s a great NPR piece on this song from 2001 that deals with James Taylor’s decision to put “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” in its full muddleness, into his own Christmas record.

All of this gets to the core of what Sting was saying in his interview on the normally bubbly CBS Sunday morning show. It was a nice leavening of the non-offensive programming of the morning: this piece was slotted between David Pogue’s geek gadget list done in light verse and a Splenda-sweet piece on ugly Christmas Sweaters.

The culture has done the same thing to Christmas, I think. We’ve cleaned it up so that it better fits our need for economic stimulus and for treating bleak midwinter seasonal affective disorder.

Let’s remember that the Christmas story goes like this: a couple of young parents-to-be are living in an occupied territory. The colonial presence has called for a census, so everyone has to go to their birth towns to be counted. All this is to expedite taxation. The pregnant lady has to ride a donkey. When they get to Bethlehem, there’s no place to stay, so the pregnant lady has to sleep in a stable, which was most likely just a cave. She probably has the baby there without a midwife or any help. In a few days the king hears that some “new king” was supposedly born, so he starts killing all the babies. The parents go underground until the heat is off. Unfortunately, this is just the beginning. The heat never tapers off.

But behind all that is the miracle. It’s not on the surface. For me Christmas should remind us this is a sad and beautiful world—both things at the same time, perhaps not at even distinguishable from each other. This world is full of glitter and doom, an image I stole from the title of the latest Tom Waits record. He and I see eye to eye on this matter, think. So, I’ll let him have the last word.

Young Boy: Hey mister.
Me: What?
Young Boy: I put boobs on my gingerbread man.
Me: Which one is yours?
Young Boy: (pointing to a cookie) That one.

I looked down and said cookie had two great dollops of frosting on the chest, accented with two M&Ms, one yellow and the other red.

Me: So, it’s not a gingerbread woman, is it?
Young Boy: That’s right. It’s a boy.

Young boy walks away, making fart noises to the tune of Jingle Bells.

(And, scene.)

Sleep well.

Dr. P,

Once again the simple minded folks at the Utah DOC have set me loose upon society. I want to express thanks for the great things your mentoring provided to me. I can and will write, perhaps even shit people will want to read. In spite of the fact you have previous knowledge of this, I want to say that you are a great mind, you have and will continue to inspire. There are great writers who are a little mental, or a lot. I count myself among them, the really disturbed and dysfunctional, unique futuristic writers. I know your [sic] probably thinking, “Get off my leg.”

Thanks anyways.
Warren (not his real name)

Well, good luck, Warren. Stay out of the pokey, and write something that counts. Do I really hope that all of my incarcerated students think about me on the inside? I guess that would be kind of awesome, sort of…

I walked a few blocks, maybe a quarter of a mile, and I found Newbury Comics. For a while, I looked at comics and graphic novels and some really awesome kitch that would never fit in my suitcase. Over the store sound system was playing some very new, very early-eighties-sounding band, something I’m sure that cool people everywhere will soon be dumping on their iPods.

After I lost interest in the rest of the store’s obscure Manga robots and badly done anti-McCain bumper stickers, I walked along the street, checking the menus of the street side bistros. While I was stopped and reading the menu of an Indian restaurant called Kashmir, I noticed two Middle Eastern dudes in their early twenties. They were dressed like they were part of a hip-hop entourage: pants sagging, ball caps perched high on their heads.

The one closest to me went up to the short iron fence and leaned across it. “Khalid,” he said. “Yo, man. Khalid.” I looked to where he was throwing his voice, and I saw another young middle eastern kid, dressed up in a white shirt buttoned to the collar and dark jeans. His shoes looked remarkably expensive.

He was with the kind of girl who I, when I was in college, would have thought was twenty-six but who I now understand, having taught in universities now for twelve years, just appears to be sophisticated. She was remarkably pretty, like someone going into broadcasting. Her hair was blonde and cut expensively, piled up for her date with calculated abandon. She appeared to wear no makeup at all, though that was certainly an illusion. Her fair skin was even and unblemished. She wore a light grey dress that lifted her breasts into view. Around her thin shoulders was a cream knit shawl. In college you could guarantee that I would have gone for the girl in the shawl.

Then there was a hand on the iron fence, rapping against the metal. “Khalid, don’t pretend you don’t see us.”

The blonde asked Khalid if he knew these guys. He nodded. “They’re my roommates,” he said, and he took some of the flat bread and dipped it into a bowl and ate it.

The two dudes next to me on the street, groaned. The guy next to me pointed to the west above the roofs of the shops on Newbury Street. “The sun does not go down for another ten minutes, dude. You should not be eating.”

Khalid looked at his date and shrugged. She checked her phone and then set it down. Khalid jerked his head to one side, to get the guys to move along.

“Aw, shit,” the guy next to me said, then looked at his buddy who straightened his cap and repeated the oath back to him.

“I’m gonna call his moms,” the other guy said. “He should be fasting. This is bullshit and he knows it.”

“Ten minutes, Khalid. Ten minutes,” the guy next to me shouted at his friend in the restaurant. Then the two of them made a show of dismissing him with a broad wave like two old men on a stoop. The waiter setting down more food at Khalid’s table looked like he thought was doing to die in a hail of gunfire.

As they walked away, the guy who was yelling from the street shook his head and said, “But she’s hot for a white girl.”

“I know,” the other guy said. “Damn hot.” Then they walked off, joining the flow of foot traffic on the sidewalk.

I live in a deeply religious community in Utah, where the thought is that by living together and sharing the faith, we can support and sustain our shared beliefs. Though I have lived in this community longer than I have lived at any one address in my life, I have never seen the young people of my own faith reaching out (however ineptly) to preserve the integrity of a friend. Not to this extent.

I can see now, the fear, that religious leaders have about mingling of faiths. Until this moment on Newbury Street I hadn’t seen that scenario, (as old as the Old Testament) at play in reality, and I was strangely impressed.

I also felt as ambivalent as those young men must have felt. Khalid’s date was hot. I can only wonder what was the rest of that date like? Did Khalid get lucky? If he did, how much would Ramadan observance have actually mattered in the face of that other indiscretion?

It’s strange to say it, but really hope that one day, in my own home town, on the first Sunday of the month I might see two cowboys hauling a buddy of theirs out of some house, a fork in their buddy’s left hand and a plate full of pie in the other. I hope they throw him in the bed of their truck and drive off, with a beautiful dark haired girl from Vegas in a tank top and jersey shorts watching on, screaming after him, “I’ll text you.”

I hope one of them says, “You can come back for dinner, bro, and you can kick my ass if you want to, but you’re riding out your fast with us.”

I know that doesn’t say much for agency, but it would make a great story for General Conference.

ALISA: Hi, this is my sister, Josie.

NEIGHBOR: She looks like a sister. What brings you up here from Oklahoma?

JOSIE: Actually, I live in Nigeria. In Lagos.

NEIGHBOR: So, do we have you to thank for all the internet money schemes?

JOSIE: No, that was someone else.

Truth is stranger than fiction, and I love it.

Then, early this Saturday morning, I awoke with a feeling that was not unlike having half a brick wedged into my throat.

I went to InstaCare and discovered that the May instance of uvular edema was not some sort of pilot error on my part. The doctor said that there had been multiple cases recently, and they suspected a viral cause. In any case, the by product of a massive dose of steroids is a weakening of the immune system.

Which brings us to the massive case of strep the doctor found squatting in my throat on Saturday morning. I got a big shot of antibiotics (they threw in the Tigger band-aid), then I went home and slept pretty much constantly until the next morning, at which point I grabbed my headlamp and checked my throat in the mirror. It felt like the brick was gone, but it looked like a brick had indeed been shoved in there and then yanked out with a piece of vinyl clothesline.

So, that’s what’s been going on with me lately.

As a side note, I’m making good headway into my revision of Rift. It’s been really quite enjoyable. My editor need not fear.

UPDATE 6.11.08 :: Alisa has it, too. So, to clear the house we all went to Kung-Fu Panda. I had a surprisingly good time.

UPDATE 6.12.08 :: Ike got it, too. Zoë seems to be in the clear. Cross your fingers.

The kids were eating some almonds. I was right there, because you just don’t cut kids loose with nuts. I think they actually grill you at the pediatrician about it. You get a list of everything that a child can choke on. I thought it would be easier to list the things they can’t choke on: The Astrodome, Belgium, a crane, two shipping containers, and a rhinoceros. Zoë is nearly six and Ike is nearly three, so a person has to relax a little bit and let them try things with supervision.

Well, as it goes with old gun argument, the problem wasn’t the nuts, it was the kids. As they were sitting at the breakfast counter in the kitchen, something happened: a shoe dropped or somebody was sitting too close to somebody, and Ike started screaming at Zoë.

As he was screaming his eyes went suddenly wide and his tongue lifted and began poking out of his mouth like the tongue of a chicken. There was no sound, nothing. He didn’t know how to make the “I’m choking” universal throat grasp.

Zoë said, “Something’s wrong with Ike.”

I was right behind them both, literally 8 or 9 inches away. I reached around Ike’s middle and gave him the Heimlich three times, then looked at his face. No change. He was getting scared, and Zoë said exactly that. I picked up Ike and kicked the stool out of the way and flipped him upside down and gave him one, quick smack, right between the shoulder blades.

The next thing I heard was a scream.

I don’t know if something shot out of his mouth or what. But Ike was really pissed off at me for hitting him, until Zoë said, “Ike’s breathing again. He didn’t choke.” Then Ike figured it out and leaned into me. I stood him up and he hugged my neck. I hugged him back and listened to the snot bubbles fill and snap against his lip. I felt his little back swell and collapse. I was never more glad to hear sobbing in my life.

I said, “Buddy, that’s choking. Are you okay now?” He nodded.

Ike pointed to the ground and said, “Daddy, pick up dat stool.”

I’m pretty useful in an emergency. I go into this space I call the funnel. I don’t freak out, and in fact, the worse things get, the calmer I get. Sometimes people misread this: because I am not freaking out, I don’t understand exactly what is going on, or don’t care, or don’t value other human beings. In essence, I become a robot, usually a command-giving robot. It’s useful, but it takes a while for me to come down.

You go there, do this, then come back. You do that, this way, then do a second thing a second way, then stand still and wait for my next set of instructions.

When Ike cracked his head open, I did that to my wife. I had all the kids in the car, and we were going to the hospital. I called my wife at work and said in a very even voice, “Meet me behind the library in five minutes. We’re going to the hospital. I will explain when you get in the car.”

Later, I realized that such a phone call is probably the worst thing you could ever do to somebody. But when I get into the funnel, there is no context. There is only the next thing to do—that’s what keeps me from freaking out—there’s no time to think, what if this or what if that? There is only do this, do that.

This time, as I got down and picked up the stool and righted it and moved Ike back onto it, I had a moment to come out of the funnel, because the next thing to do was check on Ike’s breathing, which was there. I had the time to think, what if he would have choked? what if the next thing for me do have done was to call an ambulance? call Alisa and tell her Ike was dead? These were not options, the option was hold him until he calmed down enough for me tell him again, “That was choking. That is why we have to be so careful while we’re eating. We don’t want you to feel like that again. It’s too scary.”

One thing I have to keep in mind, now that I take at least a part of every day and think about how easy it is to lose a kid, is that you can’t hover over them or quarantine them or chew their almonds for them? It’s really like one of our family rules goes: “Have fun but be safe.” It goes in that order on purpose. We’d all be really safe if we just stayed in bed, but aside from the occasional extra hour on a Sunday morning.

Erwin Lowinsky’s Weisse Maus was a cabaret night that encouraged hopelessly amateur performers to get on stage — dreamy housewives, deluded bank clerks. They were encouraged to make fools of themselves. Sounds familiar.

The Black Cat Cabaret featured theme nights — nude girls in imaginary sacrificial Mayan ceremonies, mock bullfights, and naked novices being humiliated by lesbian nuns — with rituals involving silver crucifixes.

Then came Hitler.

Despite the change in control of the House, this is pretty scary to think about.

To say that this last semester was greuling would be to completely under-rate the experience. By something like the third week of school, I was behind. And I stayed behind for the next 13 weeks. I won’t bore you with the details, but let me say that most of it was my fault. I tried too many new things at once, and I found myself once again perhaps a little more concerned about some of the details of my work than I needed to be tangled up with, under the circumstances of having a new baby and a three-year-old in the house.

Things piled up and kept piling up. It was exactly like that episode of I Love Lucy when Lucy and Ethyl got jobs at the candy factory while Ricky and Fred stayed home to do the housework.

For me, the only way to make do was the same: stuff the candy down the front of my uniform or stuff it in my mouth and hat. It was literally three months of paper after paper after paper after paper. It stopped literally on the day grades were due. So, it was swarms of papers.

It got to the point where I lost sense of how to live without the papers.

I wasn’t quite sure anymore if I would get clear of the work. It was depressing. I became sick — passed three kidney stones, had a renal infection, became violently ill twice inside of two weeks right there at the end. I had days when I passed out face down on the bed with the kids screaming. Sometimes I would pull into the carport after taking Zoë to school and fall asleep in my seat because Ike was sleeping, too, and I didn’t dare wake him. I lost my appetite but continued to eat food that I knew was horrible for me. I took only occasional joy in anything happening from day to day.

Any time I spent in my house was a reminder of promises I had made and broken. Right before Halloween I came home and bagged the leaves on the front lawn by headlamp because I’d heard on the radio that it was going to rain. It did, and I took pleasure in that. As I drowsed in bed that night, I thought of all those black bags lined up against the north side of the house, under the eaves, staying dry, gloriously dry. But just about everything else fell by the wayside. Christmas literally caught me off guard (aided by the fact that the week before Christmas was abnormally warm — in the 60s).

I’m not sure I want anything in my life to be that hard or quick again, ever.

So, this morning when I got out of bed, I decided I would try to take care of months of outside chores before another storm rolled in. The forecast called for 50% chance of rain and temperatures in the high 40s all week, but the way my life has been going, why gamble. At the very least I wanted to feel like I had managed to get control of something in my life. I wanted to feel the security E. B. White wrote about in his essay on preparing for a hurricane. When White’s storm finally came, he knew everything was in order. He went to bed and let it blow.

Prodded by that work ethic, I worked all morning, jump starting cars, washing them, blowing leaves, raking, sweeping, filling bag after bag after bag of leaves. It was getting dangerously close to being a leaf factory. I drank Cokes and flopped once or twice on a chair, but I kept at it until all the leaves were bagged and everything put away.

As I grabbed my coat and gloves, the first few drops of rain began to fall. Within an hour the yard looked like this.

For the first time in months, I was on top of things. It was marvelous, truly marvelous to behold.

Alisa and I took my mother on a picnic to Kolob Canyons, which is, frankly, an amazing little section of red rock about 25 minutes south of us. When we got to the parking lot, we met a trio of fellas just a-leaning against the chest high iron fence, taking in the vista through a variety of optical devices ranging from a disposable camera to mid-range Nikon field glasses.

The middle dude was talking about Robert Redford, which led him to discuss the Hole in the “Rock” (he assured his companions it was just on the other side of the mountain). That discussion of Hole in the “Rock”–I’m sure he meant Hole in the Wall–led him to speak of an article he’d read in a magazine (in flight, or was it the Sunday paper?). The article was about how Paul Newman said something about the time when he played the Sundance Kid.

“Sundance Kid?” this man protested. “Newman didn’t play the Sundance Kid. They need to get their facts straight, for crying out loud!”

The other fellas grumbled their assent and went on with their viewing. My mother, came trundling along and called out to me with a “Hey you?” The fella who had been initially outraged at the article turned to her and said, “Like Sylvester Stallone said: ‘You talking to me?’” Everyone sort of laughed, and my mother said, “No. I’m talking to my kid.”

Now, this put me in a spot. Under the best of circumstances, people don’t like to be corrected. But facts is facts.

I didn’t want to have to break it to him that Robert Deniro had, in fact, said those words in Taxi Driver, but it seemed important to say something, given that guy’s whole “get your facts straight” line. But some wiser part of me whispered that if I corrected him, he would probably go through some elaborate social escape algorithm, which would embarrass everyone.

So, I let it ride, and I ended up happier than I might have otherwise been. I write this because I want to remember the lesson.

We pulled on it pretty hard, the both of us, and it snapped furiously, pieces flying into the air. When we looked down, each of us was holding a straight stick of bone, and the crotch of the wish bone was underneath a chair.

So we’re both wishless tonight.

Alisa wanted a baby boy, and I wanted my Introduction to Creative Writing course to not be cancelled.

I can tell you one thing: He did not remember. And now I will hunt him down and kill him, with my lawyers.

The students in my upcoming visual literacy composition course will never believe it. They’ll think I staged it, but I didn’t. As soon as I showed my wife (it’s she who is reading on the couch, not Hussein) the photo, she said, “so you’re going to put up another blog entry tonight, aren’t you?”

I sighed and said, “Yes, sorry.”

P.S. If you think about it too long, that Raggedy Ann in the background is also very scary, but in a Poltergeist “don’t-look-under-the-bed” kind of way.

Please don’t look at that doll. I’m not responsible.

No, the strangest part of the was coverage for me was the weather.

Both the Weather Channel and CNN in particular have been covering the weather as if there was no war going on at all. Without the least bit of fanfare or transition, some news meteorologist glides in front of a chroma-keyed map of Iraq with her thumb button where she begins gesturing to a high pressure ridge descending from Turkey.

These reports go something like this: “In Karbala, today there will be a slight change of precipitation, and in the capitol of Baghdad we’ll see overcast skies until just after noon, when the low lying clouds will burn off. Highs in Baghdad will be in the mid-to upper 90s.”

All this complete with icons of the sun partially hidden by fluffy cartoon clouds and a computer generated map that whooses past like the map of the Colorado ski areas.

It’s almost too much.

Though I am reasonably competant in French (I could vacation without too much discomfort) my vocabulary is quite small. And I’ve never heard of this word — abbatoir — before.

I awoke from the dream and stumbled down the hallway, took a piss, and then went into my study and looked up the word in a French/English dictionary. Even though I had not seen the word in my dream, only heard it, I went right to it.

The word, I discovered, means: slaughterhouse.

Strangely, enough my best friend Michelle, had only yesterday been reading about slaughterhouses in Fast Food Nation.