-Wildlife-

Foxes have run through the patio twice this holiday season. Farflung relations have run through many more times, but with much less purpose and much more awkwardness. As a result, the appearance of the foxes pleases me in ways annual family meetings never could. When this neighborhood was only part of a master estate that controlled unspoiled forests and fields from the creek to the country road, such foxes would have been hunted nearly to extinction. In a reversal of fortune, the fox hunting club that outlived the estate is the foxes' greatest proponent. They still hunt today, chasing fox simulacrums - drags for the dog to scent, and horsemen to follow.

-Post-Holiday Funk? People of the world, Relax.. A New Year is Coming-

I'm so disappointed that part two of my sleep deprivation story has been slow to reveal itself. It probably has something to do with the extraordinary amount of reading I've been doing lately, catching up on the all the books I received over the holidays but couldn't peruse for fear of missing a visit from some cousins twice removed and their ADHD offspring.

ADHD is the least of their worries, I'd say. Perhaps it is just the holidays that bring all of my young relatives before me in a shaky parade of psychological maladies, but I'm beginning to worry about the mental state of today's youth. I may not be the first to point out that kids today are frickin' nuts, but I also didn't have time to familiarize myself with the last twenty years of articles compiled in the PsychInfo database. So maybe I am the first.

Anyway, I'll skip the expected avenue of discussion. Why seek first causes for pint-sized tyranny, which may include the dairy industry's use of growth hormones, inadequately spaced cell phone towers, and spineless little league coach-punching parents? Normally, I'd love discussing first causes, but after today's visit by two of my cousins, someone has to come up with the measures to manage their decline NOW.

Attention Deficit Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Oppositional-defiant disorder.. Every horror story told is quickly bested by another. Holidays have become a nonhypothetical version of the "what's worse" game.

"What's worse... a seven-year-old who brandishes steak knives whenever his aunts and uncles come over, or a sixteen-year-old blackbelt who has begun demanding protection money?"

My sister and brother-in-law are presently childless, but certainly have parenting on their minds. Armed with educational toys and scholarly patience, they gamely tried to capture the interests of a pair of miniature dervish cousins on Christmas Eve. Though they are too diplomatic to say so, I imagine it must have been a relief to return to the business of educating adults, driven or not.

So it is with me. Truly, we should all fear for our lives if the children grow larger without growing wiser. Remarkably, it's taken years to admit a fear that should have been clear that night at the shelter, when the young teenager who had just lost his lead in the boardgame "Sorry" came a hairsbreadth away from driving a colored pencil into my eye.

I can't imagine how I shrugged it off back then. Nor can I remember what color the pencil was.

-The New Plan-

New Plan
Originally uploaded by benedict monk.

We lived near a shopping center that died a slow death as we grew older. We were not complicit, the only shops left in the Elder Village Center by the time I and my siblings were "consumers of age" sold artistic frames, upscale furniture, and designer dog food.
We, by contrast, lacked valuable art, tended toward merely "scale" furniture, and lived in constant fear of our parent's allergies.

Even before I left the area for my scale-furnished southern University, something happened to hasten Elder Village's decline.

High Point Plaza rose from the adjacent lot that had once hosted an outdoor cineplex. It was not noticeably larger, but it was new.

It was brassy, it was bold, and the owners successfully petitioned the government to rezone in their favor, against that of Elder Village.

Elder Village's final three shops of the original fourteen closed less than a year later. Five years passed. The buildings faded. I had graduated from the University, knocked around for a year, entered graduate school.

And then I returned to an incredible sight: New construction. Big promotion. New investors. Same name.
Elder Village would be reborn.

High Point Plaza was only five years old, but it quailed before a collection of caterpillars and hard hats on the muddy field that had once been their defeated enemy. The promise of new competition alone pockmarked the upstart so much that its weaker businesses folded before construction on the new Elder Village Shoppes had completed. Those retail spaces remain vacant to this day.

If High Point Plaza is to survive - and it might - it will have to tightly clutch the chiropractor's office, the stable Haircuttery, and the organic grocery, which has no local rival. To thrive, it would have to die, decay and rise under the banner of "new."

-Bonds with Cats-

Little Ears Originally uploaded by thisisyourbrain.

The first time she brought me home, I met and charmed her cat with a few silly gestures, including lying prone on the floor so Kampuchine and I were the same height. It obviously amused him; by the time his mistress returned from the bathroom looking stunning in a new 10,000 Villages dream-catcher/hair clip, he had settled on my lap the way all cats who have figured out the food-for-cute equation must do.
"He never does that for strangers-" She marveled. "He rarely does that for me."
At this I internally exulted, still rubbing Kampuchine's ears as coolly as I could manage. Hearing such admiration in her voice lead me to think that she believed in destiny, as I did, and that our destinies were inextricable, as I did also.

She had to love me with equal fervor - her cat had sanctioned us.

-Good News: I'm getting younger-

Yesterday, three different strangers independently estimated my age as "recent college grad," "in college," and "so, are you in high school, college?" in that order.

-Cheaper than Therapy..-

And better than chocolate. I feel an incredible high during and hours after a writers' group discussion. They have to tackle my work last - it was my privilege for submitting the longest, densest, deepest story.

Critique the poets first, yes, gush encouragement for the novices. Let the tension build for the main act, my epic opus coup de grace. We all know that our literary doyenne is saving the most durable work for last.

Work it, y'all. Ponder the professional nurse's thinly-veiled autobiography. Fret over the adolescent's X-mas Snuff Limerick.

Break for trips to the bathroom. Break for punch. I can wait.

What? You can't - there's still one more to study before mine! Seriously, babe, you don't wanna go before I do, it would be anti-climactic.

You'll pay for this, all of you. You wanna finish with the baseball story? It doesn't matter! You know you'll just be thinking of mine when you walk out of here. Every last one of you is going to put on your favorite flannel pajamas - 'cept the snuff bird, who I'm peggin for a nickel-plated choker - curl up with that special someone tonight an' look up at glowing stars the previous couple pasted that you can't be bothered to take down even though it pisses you off every night.

Penultimate. You even know what that means?

So you're looking up until the stars put you off and you turn on your side, sure to make an orthopedic surgeon a very nice patient some day. Your partner has never looked fatter, and your mind logically connects your history of amorous clusterfucking with your great, dirty failure ranking stories.

No, don't think compliments help. I'm not here to warm up the crowd.

Frickin' baseball.

Our time is up! Sorry we couldn't get to your story, guess mine was last after all. Yeah, so I won on a technicality.

It counts.