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My Christmas Dream (I know I promised these recitations would be sporadic; I lied)
I was working manual labor, with a crew of guys' guys I had to get along with. We walked down a long dirt road to the work site. The bosses fed us a kind of "meat roll" of pork and scrambled eggs with pieces of shrimp hanging out of it--not on plates; you picked it up off the ground and ate it with your hands. The job consisted of leveling a vast patch of slushy ice, which had formed ridges and mounds and had to be smoothed out. Its texture was more like ice cream--it came in supercold, viscous clumps. I had to get down on my knees to push the slush off a big central mound; from my vantage point there, I surveyed the work site. In addition to men, my co-workers included giant oxen covered with ice crystals, and "rock demons"--blond colored featureless humanoids resembling something out of a Jack Kirby comic. I looked up and was shocked to see that the work site sat at the base of an immense tube reaching up hundreds of feet, with walls of smoothly polished wood. Instead of sky overhead, there was a ceiling of loose, dripping ice. I couldn't fathom why it didn't fall on us; it was very ominous.
If you're mulling over a last-minute holiday gift, please consider donating to the Washington Youth Garden, a program associated with the National Arboretum. Someone very close to me knows a lot about the program and says every penny is well spent. [begin rant] I realize our economy is dependent on consumer spending at Christmastime, but when you have influential Republicans such as Grover Norquist saying "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub,” someone is obviously going to have to take up the slack. My own beliefs on charitable services are that they should be publicly funded, and if private, that the donee receive the gift without being forced to accept Jesus Christ as his or her personal savior (the so-called "faith-based" plan). Churches should just give and not expect zombie-like allegiance from recipients. Why is that so hard? [end rant]