Jessica ~ The Sandman comics

April ~ Alice in Wonderland Wallet

Mom ~ The adorable heels and the cashmere lined leather gloves

The kids ~ Alice in Wonderland charms for my charm bracelet

Ed ~ Harley Davidson shiny skull baseball cap
Perfume Vanilla Musk that I asked for and Givenchy Hot Couture
He told me to go to the Harley-Davidsonfootwear.com website and pick my self out some boots
And my favorite gift that has made this my best Christmas ever; he gave me a card that told me he loved me.

[index] Saturday, December 26, 2009 - Sci Foo Slacker

After a sudden wardrobe malfuntion, I have achived pants. Now I need the cheat code to unlock the matching belt.

Happy birthday to Amanda, my baby sister and favorite brat!

I got what I asked for. And I got the one thing I wanted with all my heart and wished for silently. I love and I am loved. This has been my best Christmas ever.

Merry Christmas!!!

Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,
designing futures where nothing will occur:
cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning she
will still predict no perils left to conquer.
Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knight
finds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheard
of, while blasé princesses indict
tilts at terror as downright absurd.

The beast in Jamesian grove will never jump,
compelling hero’s dull career to crisis;
and when insouciant angels play God’s trump,
while bored arena crowds for once look eager,
hoping toward havoc, neither pleas nor prizes
shall coax from doom’s blank door lady or tiger.
[Ennui, by Sylvia Plath]

The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow ;
But a tyrant spell has bound me,
And I cannot, cannot go.

The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow ;
The storm is fast descending,
And yet I cannot go.

Clouds beyond clouds above me,
Wastes beyond wastes below ;
But nothing drear can move me :
I will not, cannot go.
[The Night Is Darkening Round Me, by Emily Bronte]

An hour until kickoff for the Dallas Cowboys vs. New Orleans Saints game, and I’m starting to get a nice buzz going from my Irish (Bailey’s & Bushmill) Coffee…

For Janine’s 45th birthday last night, we went out to O’Charley’s and had a nice dinner. I had to work until 7pm, which limited what we could do and where we could go. Usually, we go to the Italian restaurant, Provino’s, for our birthday celebrations to take advantage of their birthday entre specials. O’Charley’s is only a mile and half away, while Provino’s is in Douglasville. Still, with coupons, she was able to get her filet mignon with no cost to us at all.

Started dreaming about PhDs again. Its probably a symptom of working in Retail during the height of its most intense season, the economy, and what is probably the early onset of an early midlife crisis. Already? Yeah, already. Janine and I have talked about it, and I’ve let my imagination off the leash with only barely a few (pragmatic?) boundaries to obey. Anthropology or History? I could either way. I could stay close to home, or find a cheap place to stay in some other state. I could do something else altogether. Or, it could just be the whiskey talkin’ out loud…

Dulce et Decorum est…I thought I saw the ghost of Tom Strickland, today. A customer, tall and wiry, walked by me with a child riding on his shoulders. His stride was long, and as he quickly passed by, I thought of a hiker’s gait, one used to uphill climbs. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught the blur, and did a double-take. Tom? I knew it wasn’t you, but…

On a day like today, with grey skies, and a melancholy overcast to everything, I let my age creep upon me, filling me with a sadness and dejection that Coleridge might have described as “a grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear…A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, which finds no natural outlet, no relief, in word, or sigh, or tear.” And as I moved through crowds of shoppers and mall-loitering kids, I was overcome with how ephemeral, fleeting and temporary our lives are, pursuing this and that, frantically moving to and fro from one thing to the other, as if we might awaken from a dream if we stopped moving…

Everywhere I turned, I saw the youth of today, in the middle of their teens, preening and posing, being the teenagers that they are. How young they seemed, and when I helped a young man obviously fresh out of Army Basic Training, it struck me that nineteen years old, just a few years older than those kids in their slovenly, yet cosmetically cool clothes, seemed so young...too young to be asked to die for their country. With that on my mind, it is only natural that a latent image of Tom, now colored more by imagination than memory, would come striding by, tall and lanky, with a child straddled across his shoulders.

Later, a hand rested on my shoulder, and I heard a gruff voice say, “What’s the Third Article of the United States Marine Corps Code of Conduct?” Which stiffened my spine, brought up another quagmire of memories, and gave me that sinking feeling in my gut. It was almost as if the ghost of some Drill Instructor that once tormented me had discovered where I had been hiding all these years…I fought down the urge to stand at attention.

I turned around, and to my surprise, looking hard and ready “to get some,” stood a former employee, now a newly forged Marine Private First Class. He was once a good kid on the verge of manhood, now, after his rites of passage, could claim that title and more. Now on leave, he was visiting home and his girlfriend-soon-to-be-wife, eating his favorite foods, seeing his favorite places, and trying to make sense of civilians. We talked and laughed, but, there was something different between us, and we both knew it. And without resentment, I can honestly say that I respect that.

What makes a soldier? What makes a warrior? And in the pursuit of those titles and ways of life, can one ever recover a sense of honor, rebuild their shattered psyche and persona and live a fulfilling life, knowing that they failed to live up to those ideals? I don’t know. But, whatever it does take, I am content to know that there are those that can take on those mantles, become more than they are, and succeed where I had once failed.