Thursday, December 14, 2006
(9:35 AM) | Brad:
Lunchtime Adventures
I wanted only a pizza, a greasy lunch during a boring shift. I got instead a Christmas tree whose xylophonic renditions of holiday favorites consisted of the eternally recurrent looping of their first lines, and their first lines alone. Its lights, I think, were supposed to blink in time to the festive dinging, but their dance throughout the plastic tree seemed arbitrary to me. It did not help that my pizza order was forgotten, and that I had to wait an extra fifteen minutes. Fifteen more minutes to ignore the book I'd brought with me, to stew over how loud an otherwise empty pizzeria had become because of a Christmas tree, and finally to slip into a catatonic state from which only sausage and pepperoni could rescue me. By hour's end, I was more disheveled than normal; no longer hungry, but disoriented, dull ache in the back of the head and shirt stained with drool. What happened, I wondered. And then, thanks to a dwarfish four-foot-tall Santa, complete with motion detector, I remembered -- while at the very same moment he announced, loudly enough for me to think he was being a little gratuitous, "Merry Christmas," and then crooned a disturbing lounge-singer version of "Little Drummer Boy."
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(Brad has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)
