Merrie Hollidays

Best season's wishes to all of you who who are or, more likely, aren't reading this blog.

I apologize for my last few, extremely unhinged postings. Once again, I find myself in Moogyblog territory--this blog was supposed to be fun. Once again, I need to get my head screwed on straight.

Fortunately, lately I've been in a marginally better mood with the holidays coming up and a lot of work to keep my mind occupied with things other than misery. I've also been taking my Wellbutrin again, which must help some. We had a Secret Santa at work today; my gift, to one of the dudes in the coffee bar, was a copper-colored martini shaker to which I applied a little, retro-looking handmade tag that stated: "For use with COFFEE ONLY!" I thought this impromptu holiday gift idea (there was even a thematically related card that I found) was pretty damn clever, considering I walked into Target with the vague idea of a hat/scarf/mittens combo that another coworker suggested to me and the shaker idea didn't hit me until I saw the thing on a display table and a flashcube* in my head went "pop". Cherie commented that she liked seeing me in those now-rare occasions when I get excited with a creative activity. I designed, drew (with Prismacolor markers--they still work after a decade!), and cut out the tag in about an hour. I still have it in me, at least, that much is evident.

For the time being I am going to concentrate on putting financial worries and bill stress and general miserability out of sight except when I'm dealing with them. We've decided that we are getting rid of our car in favor of something cheaper; what and how, we don't know yet, but Cherie constantly reassures me that we'll figure it out. Meanwhile I have to send goddamn CitiFinancialAuto another payment. Oh well. I'm not looking forward to opening our latest electric bill from PSE&G. It was $60 last month. We couldn't pay it. Wonder what it is this month, what with that "security deposit" racket they tack on to every delinquent bill. Or wait: no, I don't wonder. I'll deal with it after the holidays. I want to be merry for at least a few goddamn days, or at least as merry as two hours of sleep a night will allow.

*In those happier, simpler times before electronic strobes were built into cheap consumer cameras, people inserted these crystalline cube-shaped devices into their 126-format Kodak Instamatic or clone. Each face of the cube contained a one-shot flash bulb of the old-fashioned kind, filled wih a tuft of combustible magnesium wool that would burn when you tripped the shutter; the whole cube rotated when you advanced the film, so you had a total of four flashes before you had to pull that nonbiodegradable cube out and toss it for a fresh one. (With some, you could even set them off by jamming a key into the slots in the bottom of the cube.) You didn't pop off three dozen lousy photos in a row of your friends making stupid faces in those days. Most of my family's photos were taken with cameras and accessories like those just mentioned. Illuminating my cute little mug probably accounts for at least a few cubic feet of earth filled with spent flashcubes, products of a long-gone, laughably ignorant age.