1. I like the lights of Christmas. I remember being ten years old. We lived in a log house in the real north. We cut our own tree like real bushwhackers. Our log-house had a really high ceiling, so the tree that we chose was probably twenty-feet high. We lived in a sea of timber, so it didn't feel so wrong then to grab and kill a tree just so your presents can have a sylvan reflection. In fact, across from our house was a mass of rotting logs. I think my dad fell in it once, and scraped up his sides from the many broken and sharp limbs that protruded from the logs. So wood was neither holy nor precious.
We spent days stringing popcorn and lights around the tree. These days of stringing and tree-decorating were really nice times, time spent with my parents and my brothers.
Why were they so nice? Because we lived in the country and my only friend was a Neo-Nazi. I never told my parents this at the time, because I didn't know what it all really meant, but looking back, my only friend definitely was a Neo-Nazi. At least his parents were. They were Germans. They had Swastikas.
I was old enough to know that this was a really bad symbol, but not so old that I was ready to cut ties with my only friend. And I was only at their house once. They fed me butter fried hot-dogs, and I puked. I still can't eat fried hot-dogs, because they remind me of fried hot-dogs. And they remind me of Nazis.
He showed me his brother's room. His brother had guns in his room. Hand-guns. And racks and racks of cassette tapes with toxic names like "stormtrooperz 4 death" and "Blitzkreig 2: the gathering" and other names that now in retrospect sound like Highlander movies. And when he came home from whatever he filled his days with he gave me a look that was like a robotic scan for racial purity. He had a shaved head, he was lean, and he was full of toxic anger. My skin shrieked and shrank under this gaze.
Years later I learned that a real skinhead group was discovered on the edge of our Northern town. They were operating some kind of race war bullshit training ground, with automatic weapons, in this town that we lived in. I thought of my friend with real fucking sadness. What a piece-of-shit way to start your life, in a mobile trailer on the edge of an ugly Northern town in a Nazi house, surrounded by Nazi parents and a robotic shit-kicker of a brother. My friend was an amazing artist, even then, and it sometimes occurs to me that art for him, even though it was expressed in highly detailed drawings of m-16s and bazookas, was as valid an escape as anything I've ever put together in my adult life. I remember later, after our friendship had organically dissolved, seeing the swastika on a t.v. show and telling my parents that his parents hung that shit all over their house. My parents were really really upset.
Anyways: a twenty-foot high tree is fun to string. And if you are young, and the house lights are out, you can sit under it and let the coloured lights cascade into your sub-consciousness, and rock yourself into a feeling that is not dissimilar to tremolo. As if your body is one big metal sheet, slowly flapping and bending. This was my first and best psychedelic experience.
2. One year for Christmas my parents bought me Harvard Moccasins. I think that's what they were called. They were shoes made from suede, and to keep them from spoiling in the winter slush, I'd tie plastic bags around my feet. And then I'd be terrorized by the bangers when I slushed through the smoke pit. I was at a weird stage, where I hadn't yet realized that a certain tact and grace was required in order to make it through the world un-charlie-horsed or whatever. My parents were really poor, and even though everyone made fun of my slush-proof get-up (and by "made fun" I do mean punching me and throwing lit cigarettes at my plastic bag shoes), I was proud of my shoes, and I was proud of the fact that my parents would go out of their way to help me look like a prep. So my love for my parents got displaced into a love for my moccasins.
-Anyways, that X-mas day we all went out for breakfast. It was the first Christmas where my brother and I asked for clothes instead of Electronic Battleship or cross-country skies, so I think we just wanted to strut our duds out in a public situation. So we drove into town. All the restaurants were closed, except Bino's. Bino's, for those who don't know, was like Denny's. But, because of our society's latent anti-immigration bias, a chain called Bino's fell by the wayside in the grease-rush to capture that quintessential familiarity that seems to be so important in choosing a breakfast restaurant. I don't actually know if it was the quiet racism that killed Bino's, or if there were other factors.
Actually, Melanie just pointed out the aural connection between Bino's and Bean-o, an anti-fart pill.
-The actual meal was kind of depressing. We were the only family there. The gravy brown booths were occupied by solitary drunks and travelers. We were rubbing it in. And, in our new aqua-velva cable-knits and suede boat-shoes, we were brutally over-dressed. I used the pay-phone to call my friend Reg and tell him about my shoes.
He asked, "where the fuck are you?" I said, "Oh. At Bino's." He was probably stretched out in front of his fire-place, his golden retriever lapping cracked chestnut jewels out of his palm, a steaming eggnog on the rug and a plate of homemade blueberry griddlecakes coming his way. Stretched out in front of a crackler in a new cashmere house-coat. I was at Bino's.
So every year my dad asks us if we remember Bino's, as a way of honouring Zeus, who mixes our lives from the jars of happiness and sadness that sits at his feet.
