What Can Brown Do For Me?

Well, I just got off the phone with my local post office. Seems as though the package I ordered December 16th and was shipped to me on December 17th and was supposed to arrive to me on December 22nd won't get here until after Christmas. Really? You know, you could have thrown the package on the back of a truck and driven it from Nevada to Durham in that amount of time, but apparently, it hasn't arrived in Raleigh yet. According to them.

Here's the rub: the shipment tracking that I'm using to follow the status of my package? It says the package arrived in Raleigh Monday night. At 9:46 PM. But, you know, that's a fucking lie, according to the postal service. That was auto-generated by the people in California, according to the postal service.

Looks like I'll be doing all of my business through UPS and FedEx from now on. Fuckstains.

Dump on top of this frustration that I went out this morning to buy the food for the Christmas feast. Traffic was ten times worse than the crowds at Target or Kroger. Although, both places were out of fresh thyme. Who the fuck runs out of thyme?

They were probably waiting for a fresh shipment from the USPS. Cockknockers.

You know what? Fuck you, postal service. You are not stealing my fucking Christmas spirit. Where's the fucking eggnog?

So, to make me feel all warm and glowy on the inside, I'm going to talk my wife into some hot, angry sex tell you a story about my favorite time traveling for Christmas.

With my mother- and father-in-law living in South Bend, IN and my parents in the Fort Wayne area, we have, in the past, driven up to Indiana in order to celebrate the holidays. When my thirtieth birthday rolled around, we decided to head up to Indiana so that I could see my family and get drunk enough to pass out on the couch mid-sentence have delightful and intellectual conversations with some of my college buddies.

The bonus prize in all this tomfoolery? There was a six-inch snow pack on the ground in northern Indiana. We were hoping we'd be able to celebrate a white Christmas with the kids. As luck would have it, a massive bubble of warm air traveled up the Mississippi and situated itself over the lower great lakes valley that week, and as we were driving up, the snow was melting.

When we drive up, we go up through a brief slice of Virginia and up through almost the whole of West Virginia and up to Ohio, where we cut across countryside and go through Columbus and then head up 75 to Lima and cut over there to Fort Wayne and then on up to South Bend. It's a long drive. Since the kids were little, we tried to make that drive at night, so they could sleep.

Crossing into West Virginia, there was snow on the ground. By the time we got to the point where we were crossing over the breadth of Ohio, the snow was almost totally melted. It was actually warmer at three in the morning in Ohio than it had been at six o'clock in the evening in North Carolina. All the melted snow plus the rising temperatures caused things to be foggy, but not so much that it completely obscured the roads. It was sort of a heavy haze hanging over the fields and forests of the Buckeye State.

Fortunately, Ohio was one of those places where the glaciers had flattened everything out all nice and dandy. What that meant was that I could look out over the plains and see, literally, for miles, because the highway was raised slightly in relationship to the farmlands stretching out toward the horizon.

Every little farmhouse and every little homestead had their lights on that night. So, I could look out and, through the gloom of the darkest part of the night, see hundreds of twinkling lights in every shade imaginable. It was beautiful. It was magnificent. It was truly magical.

My heart swelled three times that day.

Whenever I need a little pick-me-up--like, if the fucking postal service is dicking me over with a special little gift that I had ordered for my wife to brighten her Christmas--I think about the trip across central Ohio and looking out through the black and blue and gray haze and seeing little spots of colored lights shining through the murk.

Merry Christmas, everybody.

Addendum:

This is fucking brilliant. Go read it.