Damn You, Mayans!

By Brian McCurdy

In his panic, Ross slammed the hatch to the mailbox without meaning to. He checked his watch and saw that he was just in time for the final mail pickup. Thank God there was mail on Christmas Eve because that’s the only way his mortgage check would make it to the bank by the 27^th.

The car was still running and he shifted to drive and was moving before he even buckled his seatbelt. Tapping the steering wheel, he headed toward the main artery to the mall. Ahead of him he saw the red tail lights blinking irregularly like Christmas tree lights starting to die out.

“I can’t believe I’m one of those people who is doing all his shopping on Christmas Eve,” Ross said to the windshield of his car.

How did he get here? The thing was that they were all out to get him. Just mess him up completely. Ross didn’t even have any food in the house. What was the point of stocking up to last beyond the 21^st? He resisted shopping through Saturday and Sunday so as not to waste money, opting for takeout instead. No sense being left with a fridge full of food at the end of the world.

The Maxima inched up but couldn’t make it through the light at Remington Road before it turned red. Cars turned left but got stuck in the intersection. Another light turned green but Ross could only glare at it and shake his head.

They all had it in for him. He waited a few days after the deadline, as he always had, in case the calendar was a few days off. Each morning, the sun rose – a little earlier each time, but it still rose. Three days of this and then he decided to move. So many deadlines had passed before: Aug. 29, 2007, Sept. 11, 1999, June 6, 2006, April 29, 2007, May 21, 2011 and now Dec. 21, 2012. He was so sure the apocalypse was coming this time. This was a real prophecy rooted in an ancient and exotic culture. Not just some notion by a fallible westerner.

They all were gunning for him. Harold Camping and Marshall Applewhite and Ronald Weinland and now the Mayans. An entire civilization. They were all laughing at him and now it was the 11^th hour and he was another sucker scouring the mall, looking for Christmas presents for his entire family.

The car crawled toward the retail Mecca, the music on the radio setting him on edge rather than soothing him. Ross parked in the first spot he saw, rows and rows away from the entrance, and almost ran in. He walked over to the map of stores and tried to see past the family of five that was looking for their particular niche. The wish list, hastily scrawled as it dawned on him that he needed to shop, indicated a few DVDs and CDs for his mom and brother. Best Buy it was, then.

Best Buy looked like there had been a hurricane and instead of looting for food, everyone decided they couldn’t survive without the Action/Adventure section of the DVDs, as well as Comedy, TV on DVD, Children’s and the R&B and Pop/Rock sections of the CDs. Discs were everywhere. Ross made his way through the sea of late shoppers and headed for his first choice: Season 4 of Frasier for his mom. They had seasons 1, 2 and 6 but no 4. He grumbled. Mom was very specific about what season she wanted. She had a few of the other seasons but he didn’t want to call and ask her what she had because then she’d know he got caught up in another apocalypse prediction. And then he’d have to hear about it until the world really ended.

Over in the Comedy section, it was slim pickins. The only things left were a few Adam Sandler movies and some films that Ross only vaguely remembered being in theaters. Nothing mom would want.

He hated this. It was too warm in the store and his coat was too heavy. The sweat was half stress and half discomfort.

A woman bumped into him without apology while reaching to grab the DVD of Ted off the shelf. It was rude and Ross wanted to say something but caught the stressed, dazed look in her eye. God, was that how he looked to other people? He decided to lay off her.

He flagged down a sales associate in a blue shirt. “Excuse me. I’m wondering if you have any DVDs of Frasier, season 4. There are none on the shelves but do you have any more in the back?”

“I’m afraid not, sir. We don’t really have a back room like a shoe store. Everything we have is on display,” said the sales guy. He looked exhausted and impatient.

“Are you sure?” Ross pleaded. “It’s just that it’s Christmas Eve and I’m at the end of my rope. Like everyone else here, I guess.”

The employee suppressed a sigh. “No, I’m sorry. But we do have a good selection of other DVDs. Maybe you’ll find something else you’ll like.”

The employee left, flagged down by some other frantic person. Ross stared at the ravaged rack of DVDs, feeling empty. He couldn’t just order anything from Amazon because it would be in after Christmas and then his family would know the Mayans kept him from shopping.

Only one thing left to do: He had to trek over to the mall farther down the highway. Maybe they had the DVD.

Pushing through the perforated wall of humanity, he made his way back to the car. He saw dozens of faces like his: Panicked and a little guilty and embarrassed that they let it go this long.

Ross was distracted, pulling out into the stream of traffic, and a woman darted in front of him without looking. She looked vaguely Mexican, he thought. It was her ancestors who did this. Her ancestors counted all the days, centuries and millennia of them, and finally stopped for reasons he will never know. And now he’s going from mall to mall, like a retail Ahab searching for his white whale.

Ross rolled down the window and stuck his head and his fist out. “Damn you, Mayans!” he screamed at the Mexican-looking woman. “Damn you all to hell!”

The woman stopped and gaped at him. “Merry Christmas to you, too, buddy.”

I thought that 'Weekend' would never end

We Netflixed the movie Weekend and did not care for it. It was disappointing because I had read rave reviews and it got very high marks on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. It is part of the Criterion Collection of DVDs, which gave me high hopes because that company usually chooses to preserve time-tested movies with high reputations.

Weekend is a British indie-type movie about these guys who meet at a club, have a one-night stand and over the course of a weekend, start having feelings for one another just before one of the guys has to move to America for two years. It was affecting on the level that the two were taking tentative steps toward a relationship when one drops the bomb that he’s leaving the country Sunday afternoon. Then it was poignant to see the two express their feelings, with the shy guy finally able to be gay in public.

It was mostly just an annoying movie. They were not only mumbling but mumbling with British accents, which makes it worse. Most of the movie was two guys having a conversation late into the night, with the monotony thankfully broken up by as hardcore sex scenes as an unrated non-porn movie could get away with. For me, the effect of all this talking was like being sober at a party where very drunk and/or high people are having a lengthy chat about their childhoods and relationships and the one never knew his parents and the other’s boyfriend cheated on him and ZZZZZZZ. You see these people at parties and from your vantage point of sobriety, you think, “My God, these people couldn’t be any more annoying.” It was long stretches of this.

I couldn’t really identify with these characters at all. First off, they spent a Saturday night inhaling mounds of cocaine, which I certainly never did, even in my young and single days. I just hope people don’t see this carousing and stuff in Weekend as “the real gay experience.” Sometimes I wonder if people don’t care for the gays because they think we lead these debauched lifestyles. Not all of us. Steve and I watched these coke-snorting people while sitting on the couch sober on a Friday night, trying not to fall asleep at 11 p.m. and with cats napping on and around us as the Christmas tree lights blinked. How debauched.

I keep striking out with Netflix movies and maybe I should just leave the picks to Steve. I just keep not liking a lot of these critically acclaimed movies. We watched The French Connection, which has a very good reputation and I just didn’t care for it. I just got nothing from it beyond the fact that it had a beginning, middle and end. A few years ago, we saw Repulsion, which people love, and I thought it was godawful. Catherine Deneuve’s character was such a sad sack that I couldn’t have cared less whether she went mad or what happened to her.

Maybe I should just leave the Netflix decisions to Steve. I’m tired of apologizing for the preceding movie once the credits roll.

It’s Christmas present wrapping night!

Oh, yay! Tonight is the big night! I wait all year for this! It’s Christmas present wrapping night! Last night I could barely sleep! Visions of red and green wrapping paper were dancing through my head! I’m so psyched! I’m so excited!

I’m so … weird.

Yeah, I’m that odd duck who actually loves wrapping presents. I normally like to wrap solitary presents through the year but then when Christmas comes, it’s like that times 30 because I have so many more presents to wrap. I have wrapping night every year and get most of it done in one shot. I put Christmas music on and hum along like one of Santa’s elves. I even wrap a lot of Steve’s presents, just for fun.

I’m not sure why I like wrapping so much because I really don’t care for shopping. I like to be generous and give but when it comes to trekking to store after store to find something and standing in line with half of New Castle County, it’s a circle of hell. The fun really starts once I get everything home and can organize it and wrap it. There’s nothing more satisfying then seeing piles of rectangles wrapped in paper with Santas and gingerbread men and Christmas trees on them. It’s just part of my sense of anal retentiveness. I was always that way. As a kid, I would get a kick out of spending Christmas Eve meticulously arranging my presents under the tree until I found an arrangement I liked.

I don’t do anything fancy when I wrap. I never use bows or ribbons because then you can’t stack the presents. I just get cheap paper because you’re just going to rip it anyway. There’s a secret to wrapping efficiently: Wrap the bigger packages first and then use the leftover scraps of paper to wrap smaller packages. That way, you can save some paper for next Christmas!

Now you know.

Every present must be wrapped. I won’t leave anything in an Amazon box and present it to the recipient; the gift must be in wrapping paper. I bought some little boxes for gift cards but even though the boxes have Christmas designs on them, I still wrap them. That way, I can stick the gift tag on the paper and not the box so the recipient can use the box. If I ever had enough money to give someone a car for present, I would not stop at putting a big red bow on the roof. I would insist on buying $300 worth of paper and covering the whole car. I’m sure if I could afford a car for someone, I would be able to spring for wrapping paper.

I am galled by the existence of gift bags. I don’t use them unless I’m buying booze or something that you can’t easily wrap. If I were to use gift bags, I wouldn’t be able to wrap the present, and where’s the fun in that? Plus, it would be much more expensive to buy gift bags for everything for Christmas, rather than just some dollar store paper. Yes, I’m the odd duck who goes out of his way not to use a convenience that most people appreciate.

You know what? I just had a sad thought. Tomorrow, wrapping night will be over and I won’t be able to wrap en masse until next Christmas.

Sigh. No wonder people get so depressed around the holidays.

A Half-Assed Christmas

Every year, there’s that certain someone on your Christmas list for whom you feel an obligation to buy but for whom you don’t really want to go to trouble. You don’t want to think too hard about what this person wants but just want to pick up something that screams “gift.” Well, good news. Here is a comprehensive list of some … unique … gifts that are sure to please anyone. *

Pizza Hut Perfume
Guiding Light: The Complete Series (all 18,000 episodes ever produced for TV and radio, from 1937 to 2009, in a DVD/CD box set)
Membership to the Mayo of the Month Club
Prolapse: A Pictorial Guide
Eagles season tickets
A Christmas turkey seasoned with mistletoe, candycane dust and cinnamon
A new iPad Macro (32-inch screen)
Parker Brothers’ new board game The Blame Game
An autobiography of Honey Boo Boo, written without a ghostwriter
$10 gift card to Louis Vuitton
New iPad app Shit Pickers to examine your excrement to diagnose your health
A truckload of Romney for Amercia T-shirts
PSY’s Greatest Hit collection
Stolen ultrasound of Kate Middleton’s baby
Heil, Honey, I’m Home: The Complete Series
Tickets to a Nikka Costa concert
Velvet painting of Paul Ryan on a weight bench
Blank cassette tapes
Autographed script of Liz and Dick
100% wool bra
A date with Taylor Swift (followed by a catty song about you by Taylor Swift)
Mayan wall calendar

* I am never wrong.

Apropos of Nothing

Here’s an unfortunate use of hyphens: “No one is having champagne-and-caviar-ice-sculpture parties anymore,” Winston says. “Those days are long gone.” I would hope those days are over because you just described an ice sculpture made of champagne and caviar, which would probably look like really dirty snow. It should be “champagne and caviar ice-sculpture parties.” Your hyphen privileges are revoked.

I don’t understand the appeal of Ryan Gosling and I don’t know why there’s an outcry for him to be named People’s sexiest man alive. He’s not unattractive but I think he looks like … just a person. He’s beige.

I saw the most heartwarmingly horrific commercial for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. Jennifer Anniston is talking to two bald children about what they want for Christmas. “My hair back,” said one bald girl. “And no more cancer,” said the other bald girl. And I collapsed in a quivering pile of jelly and threw a blank check at the TV. Now there’s another commercial that will make me run out of the room?! This is as bad as Sarah MacLachlan and the abused animals.   

I recently saw the British spelling “faeces.” Those people can even make shit infinitely classier.

I only recent realized what a Dutch oven is. I had just been calling it what it is: a pot with a lid. Why does it need some special name? It’s just a container, like every other pot.

I have a sinking feeling the Eagles will keep Andy Reid on next season. I wonder if they’re firing all the rest of the staff so Jeff Lurie can say, “Andy didn’t have the right coaching staff but with new people in place, we’re confident he can win next year.” If this happens, I expect to look toward Philadelphia and see the horizon burning.