Happy Christmas.

• 2.30-4.00 AM: Gamma on toilet with bucket in her lap, blowing it out both ends simultaneously.

• 6.30: first shopping trip to nearby store.
• 8.00: Gamma to school, where she’s reading etc at the school Christmas thing.
• 8.30-10.30: Mad shopping: groceries, last-minute presents.
• 10-30-12.00: School Christmas thing. Gamma did a great job.
• 12.00-18.00: Some cooking, some video-watching, some hanging out, bunch of working on stuff I’ve forgotten.
• 18.00-19.00: Take Beta to hairdresser for hairdo appraisal for the ball.
• 19.00-22.00: Wrap presents. Drink Guinness. Get cranky, be mean and nasty to wife and Beta (Gamma already in bed). Regret it.
  22.00-24.00: Watch traditional Christmas movie of love and sacrifice: Donnie Darko.

• Next day (today): resolve to be nicer. So far so good.

I did some last-minute shopping on Monday.
[Although I do employ a literary device in this post to convey the gist of the story without embarassing anyone, be advised that it is of an adult nature.]

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I was thinking last night, and then this morning again, about the similarities between Titian, who revolutionized painting with his broken colors, dirtying up his colors, moving away from the pure, clear hues of the Flemish masters, and myself. Cause that’s what I do, man. Mix blue and orange.

Thanks, Novala. This is my favorite thing to do for Christmas, and I had totally forgotten about it. I’ll buy a bunch of cloves and oranges at lunchtime.

And: I drive past this every morning.

Three deer barely visible in a dark field beside a dark forest. Smokestacks here and there dispensing smoke or steam into the sky. Everything is grey and washed-out, nothing is grey, it’s already vibrating with potential color. The black naked trees are already deep brown if you look at them closely.

“So how was the mental hospital? Was it scary?”
“I didn’t think so. Just sad. That one lady screaming all the time because she thought everyone was poisoning her.”
“Not the one who thought she was being anally raped?”
“No, the poisoning one was doing the screaming.”

Beta is writing a paper on familial murder-suicide for school and met with a psychiatrist yesterday.

“The mental hospital seemed sad when your great-grandma was there. We all drove up, but then only dad went in to visit her and the rest of the family waited in the car in the parking lot.”

It was a 1969 (I think) Pontiac station wagon. Blue. We had a 3-pound coffee can in the back seat, empty, for when us kids had to pee on long trips.

“She was in for manic-depression. I don’t know if they sent her in while she was depressed, or manic, or how that works. She got electroshock treatment. I don’t think it did her any good, to put it mildly. They stopped using electroshock for a long time. Now they’re using it again. I hear they’re being more careful with it.”

A friend of mine told me a story about fixing a lamp and touching the wrong wire and being knocked clear off the ladder onto the floor. At first she hoped it had given her new mental powers. When I was little I touched an electric fence and my hand closed around the wire and I couldn’t let go. I was standing in a wading pool at the time. I used to wonder if that was what made me so much smarter than the other kids in my class. Now I just wonder whether my parents had taken out a large life-insurance policy on me around that time.

Yesterday Beta played a new piece on the harp that sounded just like sunlight on water.

Last weekend I played bowing exercises on the cello that made my kids want to learn cello.

The sun’s up. Lately I prefer the dark.