That... Blasted Furnace... Nottafinga!

I got a tree. And that bad-boy has lights, some bead-string-thingies, and an Ole St. Nick topper. Yup. No Grinch up in this bitch, fo sho. I REALLY hope my lady likes it. I picked it out by my lonesome, but she was my inspiration. She has the most kickass ornaments too. Mine look real tired, trite, and dude-ish in comparison. So, I am excited for her to put the finishing touches on the thing when she gets back this weekend. Word.

Home Depot was littered with real winners for trees. I mean, some of those things just needed a good shake to be needle-free. Good thing there’s no smoking allowed in the garden section, or I might have burned that piece to the ground (with the aid of some xmas-tree kindling, and the common indecency of a smoker to always treat the world as his/her ashtray). I also noticed that many of this year’s trees are remarkably fat instead of whispy-thin as they have been in years past. Are these “Houston-fatass” trees? Round-bottomed merry-bushes designed and trimmed to match the rotund wrecking-ball proportions of their holiday-making owners? Regardless, it better not be a trend because “Decking the Christmas Bush” not only sounds really uninviting, but also could be grounds for treason under the current administration.

Moving on. My allergies, while breaking me into little snotty pieces, are being made worse by my own hand. I went running yesterday, around the (apparently) cedar-lined lake (freezing my jiggling ass off) and then went drinking with V-dog. Of course, drinking invited its best friend: smoking, and when those two get together – good lord, the pack of smokes combined with all that cedar pollen to completely destroy any chance of decent sleep. Plus, it was hovering around 20 goddamn degrees last night, and my heater decided that it was a lost cause to try and battle the icicles forming on my snotty nose. So I could see my breath when I got up this morning. I cursed it like Ralphie’s dad in A Christmas Story. “It’s aaaaa cliiiinnnnkkkerrrrr-er!” Mundang-noodle furnace. Killing me over here.

So, a pound of cedar pollen + pack o’ smokes + more booze than a Tuesday warrants + frozen tundra for bedsheets = Craig sleeps in two hour intervals, broken by shivering fits and peppered with marathon coughing extravaganzas.

I have survived worse though. One night, in Toronto for New Year’s Eve, while staying at a Youth Hostile (kinda hostile, really, and there weren’t many “youths” about the place) I ended up blasting some dumbass Austrian douche bags who decided that it was okay to turn on the lights and begin chattering their most awful-sounding language at roughly six in the morning. The room was approximately as big as the four bunk beds that were in it, and those crazy third-reichers might as well have been using bull-horns to discuss WHATEVER they were discussing. I had just put my head-cold to bed a couple of drunken hours earlier, and thanks to the bottle of Nyquil, was happily coughing myself through dreamland when Heinrich and Adolf decided to hit the lights and begin barking without using their “inside voices”. Pricks. So, I apparently sat up in my multi-drugged condition and told them to “shut the fucking hell up or I am going to suffocate you both with a dirty sock full of my own warm feces” or some such tasteless phrase. Well, maybe not the sock part, but it was something along those lines. One of my traveling buddies told me of this the next morning, as I was obliterated and did not realize what I had said. It was all very knee-jerk, and completely appropriate.

Ending note, related to above story: All you “early-risers” out there need to understand something: if you insist on getting up before a reasonable hour (before 9am), then go ahead and do so. Get up, and go out into the world where the rest of the “early rising” population is. DO NOT hang around the sleeping quarters of the rest of us while doing “awake” things such as: practicing your drumming techniques, playing with fireworks, or yelling at other early-risers in a language that was obviously invented by human-hating robots. We night-owls do not go into your sleeping spaces after midnight and do those things to you. And that is why you are threatened with death when you act like such an insensitive dick at six in the AM.

I am soooooo glad we got that out of the way, aren’t you? I knew you would be. Now go to sleep, or I will be forced to fill a sock…

Damn you dry cough!

Does anyone care that I have not posted a Drink Story in a while? If not, I will continue my break from them. Word to words.