I realized Saturday night that there are maybe fifteen different parts of “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” that someone I know cites as their favorite part. I’ve been thinking on it for a day and a half, and I cannot think of a movie with a greater spread of favorite parts. You have the Full Shitter fans, the Aunt Bethany Arrives demographic, the Clark Explodes bloc, the Come Out And Look At The Lights brigade, the Cat Gets Electrocuted camp, the Fixed The Newel Post faction, the Arrival of the Grandparents team, the Kiss My Ass Kiss His Ass Kiss Your Ass group…as Gregg Easterbrook would say, “This tells us something — I just wish I knew what.”
Having not gotten to cook much for the last year, I decided that this year, in lieu of doctoring Oberweis nog, I would make eggnog. And Saturday night I did. And holy fucking shit.
First of all, it’s a vastly better product without emulsifiers and stabilizers. It does separate, so you have to either drink it quickly or stir it frequently or both. Second, the recipe I used — which was chosen for lack of simplicity, not for alcohol content — is the first drink recipe of any kind wherein the next time I make it, I will consider dialing back the alcohol. Holy cow.
This being an emulsion, and this being the first time I was making this particular emulsion, I did not deviate from the recipe, for fear that the nog would break (curdle or separate, for the noncooks) if I changed the proportions. Well, it did separate. Into egg and nog. Delicious foamy egg cream in the top half of the punchbowl, and serious lethal monstering badass get-sideways nog in the bottom half. Which meant that if you did not stir the stuff in the bowl, and dipped the ladle deep into the delightful Christmasy potion, what you got was milk sugar rum and whisky, in roughly 1-1-1-1 proportions, with a little floater of delightful nutmeggy froth on top. Imagine colorful little flowers growing in quicksand. Rest assured, I will be making that stuff again.
In that vein, I need to adjust my consumption for the fact that my tolerance is way, way down here in Q3 of The Year Without Food. Not my tolerance for alcohol, thank god; my tolerance for sugar. I think I was briefly near a diabetic coma Saturday night. And Sunday’s hangover…yowza. As I have improved on one area of fitness, I have lost ground on another. I have resolved to begin a rigorous training program for Vegas on April 1.
Put up the Christmas tree at my Mom’s on Sunday morning. Went reasonably well. Older younger brother and I have a very solid Mutual Assured Destruction treaty signed now. He will not suggest that my mom help me sort and thin out the Christmas ornaments, and I will not buy his daughter drums and puppies for Christmas. It’s all about diplomacy.
Speaking of nuclear showdowns, I have placed a bounty on Bredemann Toyota. Don’t judge me. A $500 brake job four days before Christmas warrants nothing less than a price on their heads. Twenty crisp new American dollars to anyone who unleashes a small atomic device in the Service Department. I’ll even put it in a briefcase.
Five weeks ago, I listed, as the sole positive on a long scroll of complaint, having two fantasy football teams with a combined record of 16-2. Since then, one team lost in the first round of the playoffs, and the other lost a Super Bowl, the pot of which would have covered both the brake job and the bounty.
That in mind, Luna and I were discussing something a week ago, and it probably merits longer philosophical writing, but the short form is this: You know things are not going your way when two people not given to unswerving belief in an afterlife give serious discussion time to the possibility that their September flight back from Florida crashed into the Everglades, and they are dead, and this is hell. I mean, it’s unnervingly close to being the most plausible explanation for a lot of things. Didn’t it take the cast of No Exit a while to work out what was going on?