Dear Santa,

How are you? I am fine.

I have a list of things that I would like for Christmas. I have been a decent person this year and though I could have done more, I could not have done more and maintained my sanity. The list is long because I thought you could perhaps just pick and choose. They are in no special order; each one would be just as great as the next. So without further ado, here it is.

I want it to snow so I can have a snowball fight with the oldest boy and his friends.
I want to build a snowman as big as my self and watch it be attacked and brought down to a pile small enough to fill sno-cone cups.
I want a morning so cold and the sun shining so brightly that the moisture in my breath sparkles.
I want windows that defrost themselves, and immediate hot air out of the vents in my car.
I want to drink wine that leaves no headache, eat food that leaves no indigestion.
I want to hear laughter, the kind that lasts a long time, makes ones side’s hurt and leaves tears in ones eyes.
I want warm cats on my lap, sleeping and not clawing my legs.
I want good coffee and a sturdy cookie to dunk in it.
I want a president I believe in and a congress that cares.
I want the House of Representatives to do just that: represent.
I want an end to initiatives, as they cause weak politicians and breed assholes like Tim Eyeman.
I want an end to impatience and self-pity and a start to self-reflection.
Oh, and please let the Mariners play the Cubs in the World Series.

Please say hello to Mrs. Clause for me. I know how hard she works for a fraction of the recognition. Hope the reindeer are doing well and the elves are in good health.

Your friend,

Slackjaw

Making Chutney

It rained all weekend. Heavy cold rain that is so typical for this time of year. Sunday when Sweetie got home from work we made tomato chutney from the tomatoes we harvested from our garden at the end of the summer. I had three plants that produced about fifty pounds of the little red buggers most of which I skinned, cored and put into freezer bags for later use.

Sweet tomato chutney is basically sugar, vinegar, garlic and ginger that you simmer on the stove for most of the day until your eye’s water, the lining in your sinuses has been eaten away and your skin has a tacky feel when touched. You cook it down until it makes a thick paste and put it into jars. It takes forever and even when you quadruple the recipe like we did, having to use both soup pots, you wind up with considerably less than your delicate sinus system thinks is fair and equitable considering all the abuse it suffered.

But the end result is spectacular. It’s a taste that just explodes in your mouth, all sweet and vinegary and spicy and just the kind of thing you’d want to eat with an Indian meal or with pork or in a grilled cheese sandwich on cold rainy winter days like we had this weekend. We’re bottling it up and giving it to all our friends for Christmas this year. We did a similar thing two years ago when I last had that kind of tomato output from my garden. The labels on it said “Chubby Baby Chutney” named after our second child, the one who got the new liver.

This morning in the shower I could smell the vinegar in my hair on my skin as it trickled down the drain. Though it took all day and made its way into every crease and cranny we are still only about halfway to our goal. Sweetie said she’d try to get another double batch on today and that should leave us about one double-batch away from being finished. We have until Sunday to get it done.

We’re not sure what the label should say this year. But I don’t think naming it should be all that hard, all I need to do is come up with two or three words that summarizes our entire existence over the past twelve months and put the word “chutney” on the end of it. Should be a piece of cake, right?

Shakabrah Java

Well the Prairie Dogs are playing again this weekend. Seems that we’ve found a nice place to play here in Tacoma called Shakabrah Java, a little coffee house that’s part of 6th Avenues resurrection. Since we’re so close to Christmas we’ve been working on a few holiday songs to put in the set.

Not a lot happening this week. The fog, for the most part, has lifted, leaving in its wake the start of the winter rains. The oldest boy brought home his first report card, which to neither Sweeties nor my surprise, states unequivocally that our boy is not only a genius, but darned nice to boot. Something we’ve thought for years.

Midwest Minnie has been helping me do a redesign of the site and I’m working on getting that up and running. I’ve had this design for a year and a half and the brown is starting to wear me down. Last month was also a new high in readership, so thanks to everybody that’s been coming by lately and spreading the word.

All the trailers in our part of the park did a real bang up job decorating this year. Over the summer, Heather and Earl took down their old monster satellite dish that’s never worked, covered it in concrete and are using it as a pond for their new statue/fountain thingy. I guess Earl’s been working some overtime hauling containers for the port and Heathers been using the extra money to fix up their place. Dug up their front yard and bought a whole lot of that red and white rock gravel to cover in its place.

Not to be to critical of the neighbors, but the little machine that plays the Christmas music in the evening is starting to wear a little thin. But then again, that’s probably just me. I would say that their hearts are in the right place and in a year of political distrust, saber rattling, kidnapping and Justin Timberlake’s solo release, isn’t that all that matters?

Hope to see you all out at the show Saturday.

Preaching in the Fog

The fog stuck around most of the week. By Friday night it rendered the air fairly unbreathable, causing the back of my throat to ache and my eyes to itch. During the week I’d find myself waking up in the middle of the night clearing my throat, coughing, or blowing my nose. By Friday night the unlifting fog started having a claustrophobic weight to it: a damp heavy blanket of choking smog that seemed to hold me pinned down, leaving me lethargic and motionless.

That night I didn’t feel like cooking and neither did Sweetie. We sat in the kitchen looking out into the eerie light of the sodium vapor street lamps, thinking and wondering what might sound good for dinner. Sweetie said Le Le’s and I thought that sounded fine. Le Le’s is a little Vietnamese restaurant that makes a great bowl of Pho’, just the sort of soup to chase away the damp chill of a foggy northwest night.

Sweetie called it in and I went to get it. Though it was only six o’clock, the streets on and around M. L. King Jr. Way were empty, seeming to linger in that space between the day’s shoppers and the night’s partiers. I didn’t hear it until I was leaving with my containers of soup wrapped up in their little plastic bags: until I was standing on the empty street looking for my keys while trying to keep the styrofoam containers upright.

Someone was preaching. Someone who seemed far away in a church or storefront, the sound spilling out into the dense fog and rumbling down the street to where I was standing.

I wanted to find where the sound was coming from. I got in the car and drove slowly east with my window down, head tilted into the night to make sure I didn’t drive past it without knowing. Then right before 15th St. South I saw them. In an abandoned lot, lit only by street lights and the adjoining storefront there stood a preacher and his small congregation. Probably no more than eight of them all together, his parishioners sitting on white plastic lawn chairs and the minister standing, half facing the street half his congregation, speaking into his small, overly taxed, public address system.

I pulled over and watched the scene for a while. In the few minutes I sat there, not one other car passed by, nor did any pedestrians. The preacher continued his sermon nonstop, punctuated by small rounds of “Amen” and “Praise the Lord” from his few heavily bundled parishioners. Steam was coming off his head and shirt, mingling with his breath and the fog so that it looked as if in his religious fervor, he might have inadvertently been the cause of this week’s weather conversion.

There was something inviting in his passion and in the seeming futility of it all. As a musician I have played to fewer people than that, used less important words and sang them less eloquently, but I have never set up in a small vacant lot on a Friday night, damming the cold and fog like torpedoes and full speed ahead. For a moment I almost wanted to believe.

I put the car in gear, turned the corner and in a blink of a fog filled eye they were gone. On a dark still night, I’m left driving down orangey half-lit streets, listening to the low rumble of the 402 and thinking about god, passion and those cheap white law chairs everyone seems to have a stack of these days.