Merry Christmas, Happy New Years…A Tale of Horror and New Beginnings

I’m home with the family for a joyous Christmas celebration of hoarding turkey lard calories and catching up on prime time cable. Life’s grande. Here’s hoping I don’t bus any tables in 2012 and can continue writing debaucherous yet inspiring prose, running bootcamps and changing lives.

My family is gathered in the living room sucking down rum and eggnog and watching How I Met Your Mother. They’re digesting media and I’m creating it, chipping away at my target of endless world travel, passive income and beautiful bisexual girlfriends. I should move back home. “Mom! Pass the god damn remote! Jersey Shore is on!”

Just kidding.

It seems every young girl in this small, small town has a newborn whelp to suckle and coo and fawn over—like when Michael Jackson has a sleep over: it’s the talk of the town. If we’re not taking pictures of the kids, we’re enjoying digi slide presentations of their eating habits, playing habits, sleeping habits, shitting habits, candy habits, habit habits. It’s a hell of a lot of work being a parent…like an eternity of the best and worst day of your life.

And the men; the cousins and uncles and stepbrothers and sturdy husbands who drink beer and stare with opaque servitude through the lcd screen, beyond the walls, across the frosty lawn towards an apparition they can hardly fathom. Freedom? The ghost of Christmas past? A broken condom after too many glasses of Champagne.

Perhaps this is the hope they signed up for: A purpose. Whatever ambitions once harbored are now shattered by the bitter truth of fatherhood. Safe for the present with stuffed guts and their babies chewing on their Chinese made poison delivery systems (toys) they drift off and chant silently, almost unconsciously, “Living the dream, living the dream, Merry Christmas, living…the….dream….”

Merry Christmas Indeed…

And for you my readers…

You still have the future…