Christmas in a submarine
My coworkers are huddled around a computer monitor when I come in to work this morning, looking at the latest gaming systems on the internet. This is the great diversion in an endless system of diversions. Which one is best, they want to know, but I have no idea. I don’t play games, I tell them. I don’t do anything, really. My life is more like an endless hustle through a monotonous maze of banality and meaninglessness. I don’t tell them this, but they deduce enough from my mood, I’m sure.

I finished my Christmas shopping last night, with the dexterity which seems to characterize success for me. The main objective, I have gathered, is to make it out of the store before the neon lighting imparts the state of confusion that has you making illogical choices and buying things they sell to you on late night tv. And so I have economized my time spent among the masses, mirthfully wrangling a parking spot from the old guy with a clenched jaw. Ha! I want to shout out at him. You suck.

Getting back to the house, I flop down on the couch and deliver to my roommate what is apparently my sense of holiday cheer. Fuck Christmas, I tell him. It really is so gross. And you always end up getting the wrong things for people, as they in turn give you items evocative of laughing out loud. “Well, what do you want?” he asks me. Oh, dear god, I think to myself. I don’t really know. Intangible things, mostly: a kiss on the mouth, a piece of mind. I try and think of an answer that doesn’t verge on making me look totally pathetic. I can’t really come up with anything. But it occurs to me now that I should ask for a gaming system.