Yuletide Maelstrom: The Storm Thickens!

Friends, how best to address something as inimical and magesterial as a holiday buffet in the workplace? Look yonder, it's a serving bowl filled with lima beans and bacon! Godspeed, it's 4 varieties of fruitcakes and nut-logs! Glance hither, it's a co-worker wearing holiday tree-trimming balls as earrings! Take your eyes south, it's a putrid concoction of marshmellow and beef dribbling red and green food coloring dyes! What festivity! What merriment! What absolute bullshit!!

Yes, my last sentence threw you for a loop because let's get real: I lulled you into a sort of placid objectivity that you didn't see coming. You should know by now that I - your humble blog narrator - has no love for The Man (as represented by the agents and enforcers of all things day job) and that in fact he contrastingly has distate for The Man, particularly when agents of The Man - in this narrative represented by one Ronny Guttensmerch from tech support - sit at buffet tables gobbling down putrid piles of 'food' with a sort of abandon most easily associated with rabid animals mating in the dark forest. Ronny had rivers of gravy splatting onto his shirt because he couldn't seem to stop himself from singing along to "Jingle Bell Rock" as it played weakly over the PA system (note: here 'PA system' is misleading because it was in fact a boom box circa 1990 with a microphone hooked up to a speaker circa 1980), but getting most of the words wrong. I felt a slow gut burn in my belly but it was quickly supplanted when the song selection moved to "Holly Jolly Christmas" and the rapidly chundering food in Ronny's mouth caused it to sound like "Hoggy Joggy Christmas". I wanted to flip the table over and scream "good god Ronny, get a hold of yourself you putrescent animal!!" but I took ten deep breaths with my eyes closed and by then we had move on to "Silver Bells".

That sound you hear is my heavy heart, aching as it wishes for the end of the work day and the end of these holidays. Do you see why I lament? Do you see why the real world - with its foul holiday celebrants - tugs so at my heart and also my heartstrings? Put another way: you are glad you are not me.