On Caroling Nowadays
I’m thinking of beginning this entry with “when I was a boy…” but I realized you’ll be all over me with jokes about my age. On the other hand, fuck you and fuck your jokes. At thirty-one I’m not old. Indeed, a man in his thirties is exactly that. A man. Anyone below the age of thirty is a kid just trying on the boots for the big people. And anyone below twenty, in my esteem, is a snot-nosed child and should act like it. These days, though, children are playing at being adults like they can’t wait to grow up. On the other hand, I quite enjoy seeing sixteen-year-old chicks wearing clothes that advertise their sweetmeats, which is why my protestations doth ring hollow even in mine own ears. Go ahead and dress up like whores, my children. Never mind that during my teenage years a high school chick who dons the vestments of a whore was actually a whore. Not of the backseat cocksucker of Elm Street category but rather of the money-for-sex variety. Anyway, I digress. Let me start again.
When I was a boy growing up in Los Bastos, caroling wasn’t as haphazardly done like it is by kids nowadays. Back then, kids actually took the time to make crude tambourines out of flattened bottlecaps strung with metal wire. They’d group themselves into caroling gangs of not less than five individuals and go from house to house singing songs with the correct lyrics. And more often than not, you actually knew these kids because they’re from your neighborhood. It’s unthinkable to accost people on the streets.
Nowadays, no one bothers to make tambourines anymore. Kids are just too fucking lazy. The nearest to a musical instrument that I witnessed being used by caroling kids this year is a pair of stones struck together to make out the ghost of a beat. Pathetic. And there are no caroling gangs anymore. Often, it’s just a single kid singing a horrible medley of Christmas songs because he doesn’t have the patience to learn even one whole song. The funereal quality of the singing always tempts me to throw hot coals at the little pirates. And don’t even get me started on the maggots who look suspiciously like brain-addled glue sniffers prowling the streets and waylaying pedestrians to listen to their dirge-like ululations.
However, my wife Janice and I are fortunate. That’s because our apartment is in a compound of houses where the unwritten law is that it is the landlady who’s responsible for giving money to the little vermin trying to share their accursed Yuletide cheer. Not that I’ve ever witnessed the landlady doing such. A sin of omission surely, this refusal to give kids glue-money. The Good Book says it all: suffer the little children. And if paying to listen to these kids’ horrible screeching isn’t suffering of the Ninth Circle of Hell sort, then I do not know what is.
Our neighbor beyond the compound’s wall, though, approaches the problem of caroling kids in a manly way: he tells them to fuck off. Tonight I’ve twice heard him cuss at urchins about it not being Christmas yet, and also twice heard him slam his door on kids’ faces before they were in the third note of their opening salvo. Huzzah, my good man. Old Father Christmas is currently writing your name on the “naughty” list but we both know he’s a cunt, right? Yes, cyberfriends, I think Saint Nick is a cunt. If he wasn’t then I’d have been enjoying awesome superpowers since Christmas Day of 1980.
