How To Do The Wrong Thing Right
Well, she did it, my Christmas revelers! Let’s give her a big draught of eggnog and a slice of limited-edition fruitcake, too—Devil’s food flavored! Miz Rona, within less than a single year upon her arrival here on the shores of Freedom’s Land, has now emerged triumphant as the number 1 killer in the entire United States—surpassing even heart disease and cancer (each of which only claims, respectively, 1,800 victims and 1,700 victims, per day). Coronavirus now snatches 3,000 souls every 24 hours, and rising. Yes, my pets, the bitch is back . . . and with a demonic vengeance, as a matter of fact.
“Official” winter begins this week—capping-off all of spring, summer and fall’s unofficial frostbite: 2020, The Year Without A Summer. The year that “Rona”—our black-cloaked/sickle-wielding Chinese dominatrix, that Whore of Wuhan—bound the world mercilessly in chains and a sensory-deprivation hood! Real starvation has now stormed the former land of plenty that was America.
When I was growing up, the catchphrase to lure a tot to eat, say, sweet potatoes, was, “You’d be wise to remember, young man, children in Africa are starving.” All the more miserable a commentary on our Oracle L’Orange’s past four years in office—realizing that kids today in, say, Somalia are now sharing equally in our bountiful food inequality as those here where freedom rings; meanwhile, in just the past week alone, a million more Americans applied for unemployment benefits.
And yet the band plays on, with the new holiday “stimulus” deal nary one scintilla closer—thank you, Mitch, for absolutely nothing. You old frog-faced, Trumpian roadkill toadie . . . yes, oh, she can bitch, she can bitch better than you. And with January looming suddenly but two weeks away, too! As another of yesteryear’s anthems laments (for those with a showtunes’ flair), “Things have reached a pretty pass/When someone pretty lower-class/Graceless and vulgar, uninspired/Can be so respected and admired: Trumpita!”
I mean, what gives with these crypt-keeper weasels in Washington? Honestly! Why is it such anathema for them to place country first? Virus victims are overwhelming our hospitals nationwide. Every hospital’s besieged! There are practically no more intensive care beds remaining. Especially not in Texas. Just ask Abilene. Or El Paso. By Christmas day, there will simply be nowhere left for the sick to go. Not unless they’re planning to convert Dallas Cowboy Stadium into a field hospital. Already, rumors run roughshod that Texas—taking a freshly humbled cue from California’s COVID playbook—will be barricading into total lockdown again come January 1, New Year’s Day—yet with a new, Lonestar twist being incorporated this time: Even private gatherings shall be banned — such is the stuff one hears now through the grapevine, rather. What . . . what’s that you say, Mr. President? Come again, L’Orange? “Let them eat urinal cake?”
My fellow Americans, on a lighter harbinger of things to come, take a gander here at my favorite fake news headline of the past week, complements of worldnewsdailyreport.com: “Belgium Health Minister Maggie de Block Has Put A Ban on All Nonessential Sexual Activities on Persons Indoors of 3 Or Greater.” Yes, Belgium, the beer-drinking and group sex capital of the world just announced, effective immediately, that all “nonessential” activities involving the reproductive organs of a threesome or more are now banned in indoor areas. You gotta love it! You can’t make this stuff up; oh, wait, but someone just did. I wonder if even the phantasmagorical year 1918—peak of The Spanish flu pandemic—ended on such a sci-fi cliffhanger: Every hospital in the country overflowing with hacking, delirium-ridden patients, from a disease that nobody one year previously had even heard of, amidst a miasma of distant wars stalled in mud pits? Let’s insert our rectal probes and just get right to it:
If it’s any consolation to you, kids, this holiday season’s gloom-&-doom is already quite dispiriting enough, without my adding yet another unwanted two cent’s worth of year’s-end commentary review; hence, in what has become a regular Christmas tradition here regarding my column’s annual year-end issue, let’s instead toast our warm mugs of cognac-spiked cocoa to an uplifting Christmas carol homage featuring Dear Howard’s high-rise menagerie of mollycoddled, little minxes of mayhem—the Sky Ark Aristocats!
Yes, sweet readers, Roo, my 15-year-old Abyssinian-airhead returns again this holly-&-mistletoe season, 2020, by popular demand; albeit, jingling and jangling with major feline troupe changes since last December . . . his elder statesman sidekick, big brother Boo, 20, passed away peacefully in his sleep this past September. Roo, who worshipped the very air Boo breathed, immediately sank into a catatonic funk. Depressed, he became Velcro at my side. A born loner Roo is not; rather, Winnie-the-Pooh is more his natural domain: “His top is made out of rubber/His bottom is made out of springs/He’s bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy/Fun, fun, fun, fun, fun!”—Roo’s malaise from a happy-go-lucky, bouncy Tigger cat was swift and heartbreaking.
Prayers were answered in the appearance of Siamese Luna (aka, HRH Miz Priss) courtesy of kitty play dates arranged via my neighbor, Tash, across the hall: Tasha’s Siam sourpuss of terror (alias, Empress Tazmania De Vil) was followed within a few weeks by the gorgeous, but demurely shy SPCA adoptee, Peppermint—a British Blue/Tortoiseshell mix, flashing starry, onyx-green eyes! Mighty happy, too, is Roo—despite Luna and Peppermint’s 24/7, polar-opposite estrogen dramatics: A bargain at any cost, they are, in this winter of our housebound hell—an embarrassment of excitement-filled riches—kitty, kitty, kitties, welcome home!
A typical daily snapshot of our quarantined environs here usually has poor little Peppermint (aka, ‘Pineapple’) cowering atop my bedroom’s Japanese tan-su all day long—trembling and cornered behind a pair of antique leather giraffes—as Luna, that ill-willed Indochine herself, hisses up at her in siege-mode from below—more sinuous than a moat filled of cobras as, all the while, Roo arcanely goes about his mundane retinue of snacking, napping and swatting his neon-green rubber ball through an enfilade of echoing caverns. Officiously, he feels duty-bound to deliver fresh writing pens to me in whichever room I happen to be, blithely oblivious to our sky ark’s contentiously ionized estrogen ricocheting throughout. Come nightfall, Peppermint (whom I’ve bizarrely begun calling ‘Pineapple’ for no logical reason I can fathom) sleeps cuddled up under my chin closely as she can; ultimately, Roo joins us in bed, too—my own body serving as Hadrian’s Wall between them, an impenetrable bulwark against Luna’s dreaded tread.
All 3 of us practically sleep with one eye forever open—warily on the lookout for Luna of Babylon’s stealthy creep; moreover, compounding Miss Peppermint Pineapple’s epileptic scares of Luna (alias, The Queen of Hissy-Snark) is the fact that Princess Pineapple is deaf. As a dinosaur fossil, she is: Throughout the night, downtown Dallas’s variously changing skyline colors reflect off my ceilings, illuminating the continuousness, eternal, of Pineapple’s blue-furred ears bobbling around, dizzily, like a dashboard dog’s the whole evening long through: Imagine your own life as if trapped inside a kaleidoscope . . . with a Siamese, soul-sucking dementor on the loose—a creature one can neither hear, nor barely even see, but lurks everywhere: Well, welcome to Chez Howard!
My advice? Just haul out your old toybox from under the bed yet one more time again, bois. Put a fresh pot of dildoes on the boil, and keep those family jewels safely zipped away inside your pants for but a little while longer now: The vaccine’s a comin’, kidz, I promise, it is. For those we lost this year, she’ll be comin’ round the mountain when she comes! You, me, we’ll surely all meet again here next year, same time: Roo, Luna and Miss Peppermint Pineapple, too — all at our red-nosed brightest! Remember, my pets, isolation is consolation . . . simply wear your masks, is all!
It ain’t much longer. It ain’t even hard. The vaccine will be here . . . “She’ll be comin’ round the mountain when she comes! She’ll be drivin’ six white horses when she comes/She’ll be swagged in pearls and rubies, a wearin’ red pajamas and comin’ round the mountain when she comes!”
Merry, merry Christmas, bois and girlz!
Again now, one more euphoric time: “She’ll be comin’ round the mountain when she comes . . . !“
—Howard Lewis Russell
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