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Curse the boy and that blast of warm, germy breath he blasted onto me while I slept last week.

I’ve tried to get out the heartwarming Christmas tale today, believe me, I have, but I am weak and ill, flopping around the house, moaning and suffering mightily.  Curse the boy and that blast of warm, germy breath he blasted onto me while I slept last week.  Curse him and all his kind - they will be the undoing of us, these contagious kids and their incubation dens known as schools.

And worse!  I have to go shopping tonight for a pair of black pants and a white shirt for the boy, so that he looks symphonic enough for tomorrow night’s concert.  He’ll be the one jamming on the bass, although I’m told he will be bowless.  “We haven’t gotten that far yet,” he says, which leaves a person to guess what kind of concert this is going to be.  I, of course, am imagining one of those Charlie Brown jam sessions, with kids dancing around the piano and the whole bit.

Almost three!  To the school, so that my germs can come around full circle, returning to the petri dish just in time for the holidays!

I bet not far down the road we’ll be able to have credit card chips surgically implanted.

Christmas is the perfect time to say you’re busy.  Better yet, too busy.  It’s a great excuse, accepted in just about as many places as the American Express card, unless of course you’re talking about mine, which times being as they are these days, seems to have lost all of its magical buying power.  I may even take it out of my wallet, or maybe I already have, I can’t remember.

You know, I bet not far down the road we’ll be able to have credit card chips surgically implanted.  They already have those tiny little cards you can clip onto your key ring, but come on, who wants to lose their keys and their credit cards all at the same time?  I suspect the implanted cards will be attached somehow to the lower intestines, so that when things go sour the company can deactivate it and the thing will just flush right out of your system.  There’ll be phone calls first, naturally, warning you that you are at risk of being financially embarrassed.

“Mr. Ecklund, not only will your credit rating be adversely affected, but your charging privileges will be revoked.”

“Yes, I understand.”

“And are you aware of the flushing process that will occur?”

“No, not exactly.”

“It happens right there in the store, while you’re standing at the register.  It can be very embarrassing.  Have you ever lost control of your bowels in public before?”

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”

“Well, if you’d take the time to read over the credit agreement that . . .”

“I don’t shop much.”

“Well, according to my records here, it appears that you once did.”

“I’ll just have to take my chances.”

“I’ll also remind you that all registers are card-sensitive, meaning that they detect the presence of a bad card, even without attempting to use it.  Even using cash won’t save you from potential embarrassment this year, I’m afraid.  Have you completed your Christmas shopping yet this year?  Perhaps you’d like to make a payment now, over the phone.  The funds can be withdrawn from your Life Force account, you know.”

“What’s the current exchange rate?”

“30.2 days per $1000.  That rate is expected to drop, so you may want to act now.”

“I don’t know . . .”

“You’re young, Mr. Ecklund.  Only 44.  Plenty of exchange years left in you.

So much for the future, what about the present?  Well, right here in Salem the other day, a man attacked a car with a samurai sword.  Felipe T., 19, told police that he noticed a man following him closely, and that after becoming scared, he decided to run a stop sign in order to escape the man.  The man, 48 year old Vernon S., also ran the stop sign, at which time the two cars crashed into each other.  Witnesses report that Vernon S. then got out of his car with a three-foot long samurai sword and began attacking the window of Felipe’s car, quitting only after the sword broke into two pieces.  The car window was not broken.

“I kept trying to pass him,” Vernon S. later told police.  “I was flashing my high beams at him and kept following because I wanted to ask him why he wouldn’t let me pass.”

Vernon refused to explain about his sword.

So it seems another Snake Oil Monday rolled into view while I was sleeping last night, which I guess is no big surprise.  Good for what ails me, right?

I need to roll that boy out of bed here in a minute or two and poke him around the house a little.  Seems the older he gets the slower he moves, which is of course true for all of us, I guess.  I’m certainly no exception, although I still continue to pop out of bed rather early, no matter what time I go to sleep at night.  Fear of missing something, I guess.

Later today perhaps I’ll tell the story of what may or may not become of my Costa Rican brothers - those little brown bambinos whom I’ve never seen and, ashamedly, whose names I can never seem to remember - who may be packing their suitcases this very minute.  My dad sent my brother over this weekend as official family emissary to plead the case.  “Dad says to answer your phone,” my brother the diplomat told me.

I won’t spoil the story now with brevity, because I see that it’s time to rouse the boy from his slumber.

In other news, I’m having fun running my radio station, even if there are no apparent listeners.  It makes perfect sense to me, playing music that falls on no ears.  It’s just like writing.  Anyway, I thought it’d be fun to give Scrinecast its own site, so that’s what I started working on yesterday.  It’s not quite finished.

I never finish anything.

The minute after you start broadcasting music twelve hours or more a day is just about when you realize the size and variety of your music library leaves something to be desired.  You’ve got all these grand ideas floating around inside your head just looking for something to grab hold of, which more and more these days, seems to be some sort of software related greased ghost of a thing.  But the Scrinecast is underway (with many thanks to my good friend Other Keith for all his help with the testing), and hopefully I’ll be able to figure out the software enough to actually get around to doing some of the things I had in mind in the first place.  Like Scrine members reading their own sentences, with those sound files being incorporated into the playlist.  And me, combining music with my own fiction somehow to create something I see in my mind, but don’t quite know how to explain, or create.

Some days are so clear, aren’t they?  Others so vague that it hurts.