Sometimes there are moments that define the holidays.  This year I had three of them.  Memories that make me happy...

1.  Sitting at IHOP, 11pm  on Christmas Eve with Deshay, talking about her dressing up in a Santa beard and hip waders on Christmas morning, riding her bike around the trailer park ringing a bell, yelling out Happy Fema and throwing out goverment cheese. 

2.  At Enoch's with Brad just before Christmas.  2am.  closing time.  There is a large group of people from Ireland sitting at the end of the bar.  Two of the guys, 40ish, singing Irish drinking songs at the top of their lungs.  One of them, then standing up on the bar and singing American Pie while the other one gets up and starts yelling "FUCK OFF!"  repeatedly right in his face.  Stacy having to kick everyone out at closing time.

3.  Christmas Eve service at church with Saxon and Conrad.  A church I've never been to.  A  nice service.  Conrad with his long, long hair and beard, dressing in a vintage 70's suit and his black glasses.  Me, feeling like I was in church sitting next to Jesus dressed as Buddy Holly for Halloween. 


I also had a fabulous New Year's Eve. (apparently it's pretty easy to get kicked out of the Blue Monkey)

Am I an optimist to the point of being perpetually deluded? 

Yes.

It's the only thing that keeps me going in weeks like these.

I don't think that there is any other way that I could exist.

I think that if I were not this way, that I would spontaniously combust.

Christmas.

So far, Josh has asked for a Jesus action figure, some Tripp pants, art supplies and a Canadian gas mask. (no, brad, i still don't know the difference between a canadian one and an american one) Aside from the art supplies, these are all things that I have to order online.  Today.  If i want to get them by Christmas. 

Ugh.

We did get our tree put up this year...for all of you who have been wondering, since we put our presents under the TV  last year.  We have not, however, had a chance to do a Christmas card. 

But more importantly, who the fuck cares?

Not me.

BERLIN (Reuters) - A German Protestant youth group has put together a 2006 calendar with 12 staged photos depicting erotic scenes from the Bible, including a bare-breasted Delilah cutting Samson's hair and a nude Eve offering an apple.


"There's a whole range of biblical scriptures simply bursting with eroticism," said Stefan Wiest, the 32-year-old photographer who took the titillating pictures.

Anne Rohmer, 21, poses on a doorstep in garters and stockings as the prostitute Rahab, who is mentioned in both New and Old Testaments. "We wanted to represent the Bible in a different way and to interest young people," she told Reuters.

"Anyway, it doesn't say anywhere in the Bible that you are forbidden to show yourself nude."

Bernd Grasser, pastor of the church in Nuremberg where the calendar is being sold, was enthusiastic about the project which is explained online at www.bibelkalender.de.

"It's just wonderful when teenagers commit themselves with their hair and their skin to the bible," he said.

Today I got this email Christmas list from my son who was sitting in the next room. Apparently, these are the things so far that he wants for Christmas. Wow. I don't even know what to say.


Mom,

links--straight to the point....

http://www.snappysupply.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Category_Code=
packsandbags
--------either the alice bag or original red star paratropper bag

http://www.snappysupply.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?
Screen=PROD&Product_Code=CHEM005&Category_Code=
-------canadian gas mask


----josh

BELLE CHASSE, Louisiana (Reuters) - In Plaquemines Parish, south of New Orleans, the living mostly escaped Hurricane Katrina. Those already dead and buried were not so lucky.

Only three deaths were recorded here when the eye of the storm tore up the slip of land that follows the last bend of the Mississippi River as it spills into the Gulf of Mexico.

But more than two months later, local officials are still trying to identify dozens of concrete crypts, coffins, and bodies displaced by Katrina's high winds and water.

In some cases, now-anonymous remains lie out near grave sites where they have been bagged in black plastic, tagged with electrical tape and marked with exact geographic co-ordinates to await families to help with identifications.

Other coffins have been sealed up with the same blue tarps used to patch rooftops all over the storm-damaged Gulf Coast.

"I've had coffins in the tops of trees that I've had to take out with backhoes. I've had coffins in living rooms," said parish Councilman Mike Mudge, a plain-spoken former police detective who has made restoring the dead to their rightful resting places a personal quest.

"For the first month after the storm, I would come in here and our phones were ringing non-stop with coffin sightings."

The 15 cemeteries of the parish were ripped up by Katrina, which floated coffins from the above-ground crypts favoured because of the high water table and lack of real soil.

In some cases, 3,000-pound (1,360-kg) crypts were flung from one bank to the Mississippi to the other by the high winds.

In others, Mudge said, "disenfranchised coffins" were found floating in backwaters where work crews marked their locations with long poles and whatever colourful debris they could find at hand: a plastic pumpkin or a statue of one of the saints.

The first priority was to get the dead away from roadways and the homes that some of the 24,000 residents -- many of them in shipping, fishing and oil -- are now returning to repair.

Said Mudge, "Looking at a coffin in a cemetery is not as horrifying as looking at a coffin where your coffee table used to be."

Parish President Benny Rousselle said he decided early that "no bodies would leave the parish" and that all the recovery work would be done locally, without federal involvement.

Rousselle put Mudge in charge of recovery efforts, reinforcing his crew with national guard troops and outfitting them with GPS tracking devices and airboats.

Well, friend, you're favorite sign in town is 3/4 of the way to being completely gone. Yes, you know the one...the Catfish Cabin sign on Louisiville. That appetizing, rust-drooling, 20 foot fish that we all know and love.

I am sorry for your loss. May it rest in peace.

Someone should consult me before doing these things. I say, leave the fish. It's old, it's big, at least it has character.

Take down, however, the church marquee by my house that constantly spounts, "all are evil" and "happiness is not the bottom line".

Also, could you please do something about the Herringstone's billboards. No matter how rich you are, if your daughters look like drag queens, they should not be blown up to historic proportions and placed out where everyone can see on North 7th street.

But then again, maybe that's just me.

ps. hope to see you guys at enoch's tonight.

I'm going out of town this weekend...me and deshay...sort of a pre-birthday, damned- Katrina- for -fucking -up-voodoo- fest- trip. I'm not sure exactly what we're going to do, but I do know that the journey will involve a 70's and 80's dance club in Dallas and this makes me very excited.

Speaking of getting older, my son has been making new friends in high school. Friends that look very mature. Friends that drive. (yes, drive) I spent some time today remembering back to when I was 14 and thinking, yes, I did have friends that drove...older friends..this is not the end of the world.

Still, I wasn't ready.

I thought I had at least one more year of taxi-mom duty before his friends started getting licences. He's the youngest of his close group of friends and I could deal with the fact that the other boys would be driving in a year or so and I would become obsolete as the only one in posession of a car. What I didn't count on was that he would be making friends who were two years ahead of him in school and had hair longer than mine.

Don't get me wrong. I love that hair. That's not the thing. I distinctly remember seeing these guys in books a million playing chess and looking bored. It's the fact that I look into the eyes of these guys and see my son's future. It's crazy..it's like looking into a time machine and seeing what he will be like in two years.

I think these guys are still a little suspicious of me. They don't know me yet. I don't know them yet. All I know is that they dress like my son, have better hair than I do and seem to be pretty laid back (which is good). They've been over here almost every afternoon this week.

I think it'll be ok. I heard one of them use the word "interloper" correctly in a sentence this afternoon. That's pretty much all I needed to know.

I met Patrick when I was a senior in high school and he was here as an exchange student from France. The first time I saw him, he was boarding a school bus, wearing a red jacket and eating a banana. He had the most amazing black curly hair which I will never forget. I remember thinking that no american guy would ever get on the school bus eating a banana.

I knew I had no chance in hell at ever dating this guy, so I did what I usually do in that case and just sat back and talked to him like I was the most beautiful and intelligent girl in the world. I didn't try to impress him and I just joked with him like we had been friends for years.

We quickly became close.

When he left for home at the end of the school year, we kept in touch through phone calls and letters...this was way before email. In one of our phone calls, he asked me how I felt about leaving the states and coming to live with him in France. I often think how different my life would have been if I had gone.

I eventually got married and had a child and lost touch with Patrick, but thought about him often. In 1999, I decided to use the internet to try to find him. I found several email addresses with his name attached to them...addresses from all over the world...but one caught my eye. It was "theinternetmonk@yahoo.fr". I remember thinking...that's got to be him! It was exactly his sense of humor and if I had gotten all caught up in the internet age, he probably had too.

I sent him an email and we corresponded on a regular basis...even talking through instant messenger. He moved to Canada in 2000 and married a friend of his there to get a visa. He became the web master for the Raelian organization and I began to lose touch with him again.
Apparently, the cult had a pull on him.

I've been dreaming of Patrick this week. I dreamed that he was alive and that my learning about his death was a mistake. I talked to him in my dream and he told me that he was fine and that he missed me. I told him how I tried to email him one weekend at the end of October and that his best friend emailed me back telling me that he had jumped off a bridge in Switzerland after a long stay in a mental institution. I told him how I cried and cried.

We used to joke about our precarious mental states, he and I. In my dream, we did again.

I miss you, my internet monk.

A little side project of The Lady Jane and I....

Oracle of the Alpacas

Help us get the ball rolling....click here to submit a question to the Oracle.

Thank you and goodnight.