The Best of Christmas v.I:I

 So then it hit me, like the hot kiss at the end of the wet fist. I was a chump, a clown, something for her amusement, a play thing left behind.

It was also Christmas afternoon, I was standing in my underwear on the roof of my condo.  I had heard military jets flying low overhead, and in a moment of depressed adulation, I figured the godless communists were attacking Arizona. There had been explosions and I figured now was a good time to get a lethal dose of radiation and just let my flash melt from my bones. 

I had been reading about Hiroshima in an attempt to bouy my spirits. It was December 1980. The girlfriend had moved out and I was alone, held captive by my ego and enjoying an unending orgy of “poor baby” fueled pity... Kind of an American Gothic,
neo-mid-disco era meltdown.

When I looked around from the top of my dingy home/dungeon of dismay, I realized the United States was not under attack, it was just the pregame festivities over at the stadium. In a more Disney and less noir version of this story, in anthropomorphic creature would have slithered up to me and offered a song of hope.

But this was not one of those  happy movies, this was my story, a hard-boiled contrarian with 'tude to burn epic. I needed to get down. I didn't have shoes on. The rocks on the roof were hurting my feet. The wind blew and turned my pink flesh to a carnival of goosebumps.

The pool was below me. Like a 10-year-old girl walking across hot pavement in July, I winced and yelped my way to the edge of the building.

Being cool, I jumped.

Gravity worked.

I fell.

The pool caught me.

The pool was unheated, it was winter; it was cold.

Cold.

The Genius Boy did not have a towel, or a key to his condo. He did have the shakes and shivers.

In the Cinemax version of the story, a bus load full of crocheting nymphomaniac cheerleaders would've shown up and offered “to help me get dry, before I got wet”. Unfortunately the creative forces at Cinemax rarely intervene in real life.

I did have a spare house key in my glove box, and a spare car key   under the right rear fender. I got back in the house, I didn't die.  I didn't get laid, I didn't have figgie pudding.

I  took a warm shower, made cheese macaroni, watched the football game and figured out that Christmas was a lot more about giving than feeling sorry for yourself. Not unlike life itself, It is more important to live and to give than it is to expose yourself to imagines nuclear fallout.

In the John Cameron version of the story there would be cool mind blowing special effects. Gratefully, Mr. Cameron is busy creating Avatar II,  The Jerry Garcia Experience.

So on the eve of the shortest day in the northern hemisphere,  it ist-120 hours in till Christmas. Time for all of us to get off the roof and into the season of caring and sharing.