Welcome to my holiday hovel! I’m on extended crone alone, so I’ve gone more feral than usual - the best kind of feral, in my opinion, the kind where time is more of a suggestion than a requirement.
Sunday night around 10 pm I made myself a piña colada and settled in with some garbage chips and salsa and dead mall videos, mainly from Ohio but I did watch this one from Long Island, which apparently used to have live parrots until some local teenagers taught them to swear at customers so they were yanked offscreen similarly to, I assume, the former student who came to my tenth grade health class to talk us all out of getting pregnant but ended up saying having a baby sobered her up and was the best thing that ever happened. I’ve also solved two critter mysteries: first the case of who’s been barfing in the cat chow dish (Sally); and second, who’s been stealing my paintbrushes (Trixie, that one wasn’t much of a mystery since she’s pretty brazen in her tortitude. Torties - the ultimate misfit toy).
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always been a sucker for a good dead mall video, but much of my book takes place in a Rust Belt mall just before its death throes era, the mid-90s, when teenagers still bought tapes and CDs at Sam Goody, perused the How To Do Wicca manuals at Waldenbooks and then tried to DIY flying ointment from vegetable shortening and 20-year-old oregano, and did whatever nerds did at Radio Shack, and I am trying to psych myself up to actually finish this book, so I’ve indulged in some rabbit hole adventures “for research.” I also emerged with Christmas shopping 1994 and What Was Lost by Catherine O’Flynn, the latter found on a list of books that take place in malls, I think. The story is set in the Green Oaks Shopping Center, built on the site of a torn-down factory in Birmingham, England, and is told in two timelines: 1984, when the mall is new, and 2004, when the mall has acquired its own history, lore, and ghosts. It’s that mix of funny, sad, mysterious, and dark that you find in very place-rooted British working class fiction and I think sometimes books like that must have a hard time finding an audience (alert: the audience is me).
What else have I been doing? Well, I have not been cleaning out the fridge or months-old piles of mail, but I spent a very wholesome evening shoveling mince pies in my piehole while watching first Nigella Lawson Christmas specials and then Jamie Oliver Christmas specials and sloppily doing a paint by numbers of a hummingbird sucking the juice out of a sunflower, which I don’t think appeal to hummingbirds but whatevs. Also, in an attempt to ennui-scroll my way into the alt timeline, I encountered the most Atlantic headline of the year, in a doozy of a year for the Atlantic: You Are Drinking the Wrong Eggnog. My plan tonight is not to drink the wrong eggnog, but to eat an inadvisably large cheese plate and dive into British kitchen sink drama from the 1960s, mainly because the Britbox schedule gets wonky at Christmas, and I am getting jittery without my soaps.
OK. Let me leave you with some Christmas wisdom on this, the last day of whatever novelty Advent calendar you shelled out on. Be decent to each other, find the things that make you feel less crazy in an increasingly enshittified world, cherish both the friends who knew you when you had hopes and dreams and those Internet-only souls who upvote your comments on posts like “hey other old people, who here remembers polio.” And for God’s sake, don’t trust a fart after you’ve eaten a load of mince pies.
Finally, this classic American Christmas carol.
Peace on Earth.
—CB