I have not been pouring my crazy into a barrel and scrying over it so much lately. Mostly because a) I am lazy and b) I am a professional procrastinator vs. slightly OCD once activated, so pushing the panic button and getting shit done generally has consequences, not all of them good. However you want to define it, I have to have one person, place, thing or task to be actively avoiding doing thus giving me the strength to do other menial miscellaneous tasks like pay bills or put on pants or put on makeup and take Tylenol and go to the MALL the weekend before Xmas and try to give people free samples of Purell whilst on my period. I was paid what is essentially a ridiculous amount of money to do this, so I jammed a smile on my face and wished America a gracious cleansing as my uterus tried to slide right out of my body. It was rapturous.
Did you know that people are afraid of free things these days? Well, they are. Many people acted like I had handed them a rattlesnake and walked away only to process my words and come back for the 'free' sample. One guy asked me what the 'catch' was. To which I replied, "Nothing good sir. Take it, and be cleansed." We're so cynical and obnoxious nowadays and savvy to the perfidious ways 'they' have of extracting our personal information for marketing usage...that we're immediately suspicious of anything free or a 'good deal'. I find it all to be a little sad, and plus, that mall was filthy. If you touched the escalator rail, and then didn't immediately sanitize; let it be upon your head when you come down with some filthy stomach flu or horrible bacterial colonization. *brrrr* Srsly, fuck the mall. There are still mallrats, people who are at the mall every single day no matter what the reason or the season. These are people who know all the mall employees by name; people I see every time I get hired to do one of these "spokesmodel-y" gigs. These tend to be short, balding, fat men of possible borderline retardation, but who am I to judge at least he is actively seeking socialization while I hide away in my house under layers of blankets and scifi novels and try to achieve human hibernation.
Two whole paragraphs to explain why I have been avoiding writing lately, but I have. Mostly because I want to write for the blog, and therefore, have been studiously avoiding it like the plague. Plus, it was Xmas, and this Xmas I kind of fell off the Xmas wagon and celebrated the Feast of Alvis. Christmas, though pagan in origin, has been co-opted by the Christians and the Capitalists, the C&C Music Factory of soul and wallet shredding delight. I usually do something to celebrate the season even if it is putting up a tree on Xmas eve, taking hallucinogens, and watching Cronenberg's Crash, not the Sandra Bullock rascism vehicle but the scar-fucking-in-car-wrecks version. Xmas this year just seemed like a waste of money, so I opted out and went for whiskey, ham, and pomp. Though neither pomp nor ham is really required, but whiskey is mandatory. Besides all I want for Xmas is a real live boy to FUCK loudly and for long time. Many of you kind, giving gentlemen out there have offered, nay feverishly volunteered, to render me this service, but I am afraid only one boy or man or male-type human bipedal will do, and he lives 1176.03 miles away. We (meaning Pinche Guero, Dreidel Mazeltov, and I) did get drunk and go see the lovely holiday lights in the Hill Country, so that counts as being festive, and we hit a brewery along the way, so score one for Alvis too.
All this avoiding and processing and having lots of drunken introspection has made me really think about the best Xmases I have ever had as an adult. Shockingly, most of them involve hallucinogens. I grew up in a teeny, tiny town above 9,000 ft in NM wherein it snowed a great deal. Only 700 people lived in this small town at that time. 700 really fucked up people. See, here's the secret about New Mexico it's actually part of the UNITED STATES. Wait, that's not a secret; that's a FACT. Sorry, that one was for the Deep South. No, the secret to NM is really that everyone who lives there is trying to escape something; that's why they moved to a state with a population of roughly a million folks, in the WHOLE state. Whether they're trying to escape civilization, religious persecution, or jail-time they come to what's left of the Wild Wild West to simultaneously both lose and find themselves. Due to this secret truth NM is filled with evangelicals, drug-users, new-agers, cowboys, drunken Indians, illegal aliens from Mexico (charmingly referred to as wetbacks), gun runners, ranchers, atomic scientists, and makers of hideous coyote and Kokopelli art. The Kokopelli is the sign of the apocalypse as far as I am concerned, but maybe I am qualified to judge in this case because I actually worked at a restaurant called Kokopelli's, and it was a hideous nightmare wrapped in artistically colored and beaded bandannas that had leapt full-blown from the very mouths of HELL. NM land of freaks, land of both Enchantment and Entrapment. Conspiracy Theorists are welcome!
Cloudcroft, NM, is a town of 700 people trapped on top of a mountain filled with crazies. Everyone in town is either super-religious -in that fall down, foam at the mouth, and speak in tongues kind of way- or filled to the very brim with dirty sin. Just guess who I'd rather spend time with? Sinners *hands down* are going to be more interesting, everytime. For a while there, we had this weird little tradition wherein everyone would come home from college for the holidays, and we would all trip on Xmas Eve. Here is a town half-filled with crazy tripping people and super uptight Jesus freaks. Here's the best part. We would all trip, and then visit each other's houses and the local bar, the Western to play Shitty Claus on the jukebox and drink copious amounts of whiskey. It wasn't just the college kids either, oh no, the adult population of town would get into the act, and then we'd stay up all night, and have to go back to our respective homes for our family Xmas' mornings while the fucking tree melted before our very eyes. And it is these memories, these Xmas mornings, that I treasure the most. I believe in embracing the insanity full-force and kissing it in a car wreck. Thus, it is that I have fallen upon the Feast of Alvis. Though Festivus, It's for the rest of us!, is not-mutually exclusive with the Alvian faith. If you wish to combine them both, then your aluminum rod can only be strengthened by your faith in whiskey and shamanism.
ps. This blog post was supposed to be all welcoming and laying down the path of what this blog will be and who the writers are, but you get what you get. I don't want to restrict either of us in any way. One day it may be whinging about Xmas, one day it may be pop culture, one day it may be a precise dissertation on politics, one day it may be a wholly incoherent rant fueled by alcohol and nonsense. I really have no idea, but I do know if we don't just start buckling down and writing the damn thing, it will never happen. Welcome to Beautyandtherobeast.com. May Alvis bless us everyone.
*Princess out*
