Postcards from the Bleeding Edge
Wednesday, December 24, 2008

  2:30 AM wake up call

It's 2:30AM.

And there is a brass band on the corner.

And a parade.

The advance men set off fireworks on my doorstep. They must have saved up all year for the first one. The KA lifted me off the bed 6 inches and the BOOM plastered me against the wall. My ears are still ringing. As are numerous car alarms.

I am trying to relax and get into a Nicaraguan Christmas. I went to bed immediately after seeing the "Grinch who stole Christmas" with a pair of friends (who made cookies, and a Christmas tree out of a surfboard)

Oh, man, they are shooting rockets off every few blocks! I'm told the whole purpose of this exercise is to wake people up for church (it succeeds with vigor), but the paraders don't look like they've been to bed yet...

Right now, I rather emphasize with the Grinch. His sudden conversion to sainthood at the end was unbelievable. Music make someone's heart 3 times bigger? Hah. Maybe 2 times, max... briefly. I keep reflecting on all the (delightfully) bad things he did earlier in the movie... can't help but think he couldn't reform overnight...

Another string of explosions, more distant, blast out.

I envision the movie:

GRINCH II - The Day After

where the Grinch slogs up to his mountain abode with a brutal hangover from too much egg-nog, and remembers the real reason he hated the noise and confusion and jocularity of Christmas... he comes back down the hill, this time, armed with an AK-47, and only...

... Rambo, home on leave, can stop him.

... Rambo crouches behind a chimney, taking potshots at the Grinch's sleigh while it careens around a snowman... his machine gun bullets explode up the snowman's front, leaving a decapitated white mess behind...

... the Grinch fires back with his AK-47, stitching a line of bullets up someones' Christmas tree, exploding the balls and blasting away the cute gingerbread ornaments in the blink of an eye.

Rambo leaps from one house to another, slipping on a tin roof and dragging down a string of lights as the Grinch's wild firing through a window turns little Annie Who, all of two years old, into fertilizer. Her sister Blu Who, takes a shot through the chest, and she wakes up both screaming and spitting blood. She faints, holding her hands agonizingly between her breasts in supplication...

The town is quiet now... Is Rambo gone? Is the Grinch gone? Will Blu Who survive? Will a Who avenge her splintered sister?

Silence settles in. Even the dogs and chickens are mute. Off in the distance, Howler monkeys resume howling...

[... to be continued... maybe... after the fireworks stop. Maybe I'll go to church. I am, for sure, wide awake now, and have a few sins to confess, starting with this one ]

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Comments:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-santa-shooting26-2008dec26,0,6505439.story
 
Sigh.

What people do in the real world is the stuff of nightmares.
 
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