Listen though: SOME OF THE TIMES, you stay up too late reading because you can’t stop switching back and forth between A Memory Called Empire and The Delirium Brief, and THEN you have to get up early on what’s supposed to be your day off, and ALSO you can’t have your Diet Cokes–your only goddamn vice–because you’re going to the doctor this week and you’re trying to artificially reduce your blood pressure before your doctor–and here I quote–is “forced to take a medical lead pipe to your fucking knees.” (It’s not the threat that annoys me, it’s the obvious implication that she would then fix my knees and get to run up another tab on my dime. I’M NOT MADE OF COPAYS, LADY. )
All of which to say: sleepy and salty about it and about to make it your problem.
January 8th:
How Far Back In Your Family Tree Can You Go?
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Like everybody’s, my family tree is a complex shrub, half of which was shorn off in a horticultural geneology-massacre some years ago. The remaining branches focus upon a central limb, and have as long as I’ve been alive: my grandfather Jack Halloran, a composer and choral director of some renown in that circle.
FAMILY LEGEND tells it that he composed (arranged?) the modern, popular rendition of The Little Drummer Boy (y’know, rum-pum-pum, misunderstanding what sleeping babies want for their birthdays, Angela from The Office, etc.), which Harry Simeone then stole the credit for and rode to what one presumes were the mega-millions to be made in the cutthroat blood-sport that is choral arrangement and direction. Even their flats are sharp enough to cut a bitch.
I dunno if it’s true or not; it wasn’t the kind of thing one had opinions on, but it’s on granddad’s Wikipedia, and it’s not like a Californian Christian school librarian would ever edit such a thing to support her anti-Simeone agenda. I’m pretty sure they fact-check stuff over there; that must be what they always need those two buckses for.
AND NOW, if the good people of the jury will see fit to excuse a brother, either I’m having a caffeine-loss headache or my walls are actually turning orange, and either way: my attention is required elsewhere. GOOD-BYE.
–The Bageler
I felt the heat that enveloped me
And what saw I liked to see
I never knew where evil grew