Mrs. Dalloway's Coffee Break

I made a Christmas pact with myself this year: no Gilmore Girls until after I return to work before New Year’s. I was discussing it with my friend J. on the phone just the other day, how I had ordered a whole bunch of movies I missed last year or the year before that on a bulk sale online, just to keep me happy and fat during the holidays. I swore I wouldn’t touch Netflix with a stick, since it belongs to the day-to-day routine of mine, and if I did touch it, it would involve going into the one room I did not Christmas clean, just for this exact purpose, to keep me out of it; the one room in my house that isn’t decorated for the holiday at hand, and yes, it would involve caving in the face of an overwhelming enticement: Gilmore Girls. You know I don’t need to watch it. I have seen it. A lot. So this year, since I am experimenting spending Christmas all by my lonesome, I will not surrender to my normal after-work routine, not even when there is no one there to tell on me if I did. ...

This idea came to me at the premiere this week, when one of the legendary lines from his film The Wild Bunch was referenced in WARNING CONTAINS SPOILERS!!! The Last Jedi. So, let’s play a game. A Christmas game, if you will. If Sam Peckinpah had directed The Last Jedi, they all would have died in the end, at the shootout, space horses and the whole bunch, with red blood I mean salt spraying all over the bodies and the surface of the Planet Crait, with a group of small children observing the action in the background, and at the very end, a lone vulptex, or crystal critter as the Rebels refer to them, would have been seen galloping through the scene of the bloodbath, sniffing at some of the bodies, then heading off towards the empty cave. If John Dante had directed The Last Jedi, the vulptice themselves would have morphed into savage, bloodthirsty Crystal Gremlins who would have ruined the whole Dark Side/Rebels showdown with their crazy, anarchistic antics, but because it w...

During a blizzard, such as this week’s, I always think about Anna Karenina’s train journeys between Saint Petersburg and Moscow. my sister’s old Little House on the Prairie costume I was allowed to play in during the Christmas week, when the yard was covered in snow and I would bounce in the heaps, wearing the flannel dress on top of my padded pants and winter coat, pretending the wagon had broken down and I needed to travel on foot to the nearby village to seek help for my ailing brother who had lost a foot, and food for my starving family. how Scrooge was as giddy as a school boy after his night of revelation and torment when he woke up in his own bed and realized he hadn’t died, after all. the time I was studying Creative Writing in the Southeastern nook of the country, and it was winter and a snowstorm, and a group of us watched Little Women in the common room, the Winona version, and there were some who had never seen it before, and it was snowing and dark, and ev...

Dear God I mean Santa, Well, here we are again. Not much to look at, is it, now that the snow is once more melting. Why you have to daunt us with fresh, lovely, white snow like this every time at the beginning of our relationship and not follow through when the hour is at hand is beyond me, but here it is. I checked my little blue notebook today and realized I haven’t written down many wishes this year. I have been, lately, in the habit of just buying what I need or want, and this seems to lead to nothing to wish for when the Christmas Wish List is in the making. I do not like this trait about myself, and come New Year’s Eve, perhaps there is a resolution right there. Peace on Earth is such a lousy wish and it has been done to death this year and last year and every year, so I won’t bother you with the impossible. White supremacists still a-swimming, Trump still a-laying, and the right-wing extremists in a pear tree. But thank you for granting us, so far, the major wish of...

I’m gonna count to hundred and then I’m gonna find you! How much is milk? I don’t know, a hundred euros. This is a genuine conversation I’ve had when I was broke. Let’s all just calm down and count to hundred. I have already told you a hundred times! I’ll give you a hundred dollars if you take the next customer/add some slushee into the machine/go tip the popcorn kettle/let me take a quick nap in the back/solve the energy crisis. I once ate what seemed to be a hundred meatballs, with mashed potatoes, on a cruise. I was eleven. One hundred stories. Not yet, but soon. This is the ninety-ninth, today. Winter in Finland. One hundred days of cold and sleet and wind and darkness, and if you are lucky, snow. Lots of snow. A hundred years of sleep, for Sleeping Beauty. A hundred points, the highest score. I have watched Friends, all the episodes, I’m thinking a hundred times over, in my life. Ditto The X-Files. Ditto Gilmore Girls. Ditto some movies. Over...

This is a line from The Smashing Pumpkins’ song Porcelina of the Vast Oceans . A huge favorite of mine as a teenager and as a young adult, I don’t think I ever got over how sad the undoing of the band was, and how badly Mr. Corgan tarnished his own career in the midst of all that undoing. This has been quite a year for me. Thinking back to when I was about to post my very first story, it now feels surreal remembering how scared I was. Scared of sucking ass unbeknownst to myself, scared of the suckiness being addressed in the comments section in the most vicious and malevolent tones imaginable. Scared of attracting a bunch of trolls on my tails who would have surely made me stop dead in my tracks back then. Scared of people reading my stuff. Scared that no one would read anything. Scared shitless. I, like my pal Mr. King, am afraid of everything. I used to think it was a major hindrance, for most of my life, until, after posting my very first story and surviving it, I managed t...