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December 24, 2014

actual happy holidays

Well in the Cox family Christmas Eve means the Long Night of Wrapping.

Actually, it's been great lolling around on Twitter while in line at the Outlet Mall or while waiting for the oven to heat up, and see so many snapshots of so many people's holidays: family quirks (we have a few), those staying home, the inevitable stories of Manhattan trips to Chinatown — sure social media is the Great Satan of our time, but it also makes me feel a whole lot closer to a bunch of strangers that are awesome.

And what better feeling to have during this holiday season, after this year?

So hug your loved ones and, fuck it, maybe a couple people you don't love.  Happy holidays, all of them, to all of you.

Back to wrapping!

Posted by mrbrent at 6:10 PM

December 21, 2014

almost happy holidays

I was gonna spend the weekend writin' and writin' and writin' but come to find out the cable router is dead like Adam Sandler's future at Sony so no Internetting for me.

So I'm at a café (i.e., bar) so I can slip some Amazon purchases under the wire before I hit the road this week, and this is all the writin' I will be doing until I get a free moment with the family.

But lemme just say that yesterday at 3:30p when I saw the story of some insane asshole assassinating two patrolmen, my stomach turned and has not been right since.  Obviously for the awfulness if the entire thing, but even more so that it was the perfectly wrong thing to happen at the perfectly wrong time.

If you envision the relations between cops and protesters in NYC right now as a bucket of oily rags, yesterday was not so much a match thrown on it but rather bucket of oily rags getting hit with a flamethrower.

And I have abiding love and respect for everyone embroiled in this — the cops (doing such a hard job, generally well) and those who love them, the aggrieved, tired of living in a second-class citizen world, the protesters, open-hearted enough to believe they can make a difference...  Well I exclude from that PBA head Pat Lynch, who make Rudy Giuliani look like MLK in terms of demagoguery, but, yeah, it's just sadness everywhere you turn.

And this will get worse before it gets better.  There will be flames at some point, probably.  But I love my city, and I want to come back to my city after the holidays and find it hopefully not much worse than when I left it.

Posted by mrbrent at 2:41 PM