For The People Who Dread The Holidays

[Listen to an audio version of this blog here. There is a point to this, I promise.]

I don’t know anything about anything, and that’s sort of a cool feeling, once I’ve gotten over the desperation of it all. I made French toast the other morning with sourdough bread that just happened to be infiltrated with rosemary, which I didn’t realize until I shoved a soggy glob of egg bread into my mouth. The fact that the egg bread was soggy was insulting enough, but the faint taste of rosemary made me crinkle my nose like a child who expects ice cream but takes a big bite of butter instead. It’s both interesting and funny that a pile of butter looks so much like a pile of ice cream but tastes so different.

One of my friends told me that I can make even the smallest encounter or event into a story, which seemed not so very much like a compliment until I thought about it as one. That’s another funny thing about life: how you interpret the world, and language, and other people, is everything. Have you ever met someone who isn’t insulted by anything? You could literally tell them that they smell like foul trash and that they’re incompetent and a bad driver and selfish and a baboon and they’d find a way to smile and sincerely say, “thank you.”

I had a dream the other night that I was hooked on some sort of powdery drug (aren’t drugs mostly all…