SEASON OF DREAD: IT BEGINS IN EARNEST

This day at the barbecue joint is moving slower than a tortoise on sedatives, and just when I thought things couldn't get worse, my most hated of annual irritations reared its ugly head.

It's no secret that the Christmas season and its relentless commercialism and fascistic enforcement of phony happiness drives me absolutely fucking batshit, and it's also no secret that one of the things I hate with a fervency usually reserved for white supremacists, fag bashers, child molesters, and Tim Burton is motherfucking Christmas music. During the season it is simply every-goddamned-where, even more insidiously pervasive than the worst of disco during its heyday — yes, even worse then "Born To Be Alive" — and each year when I can finally take no more of it I shell out a couple of bucks for those soft foam earplugs by way of self defense.

Keeping that in mind, be aware that I loathe the majority of the music foisted upon listeners at my job, much of it falling into a category that I have pejoratively dubbed "go-to-sleep" music; there's a lot of that "emo" pussiness, bland, nameless reggae, the Dave Matthews band (who, in a sane society, would have been put to death for the crime of being boring years ago), occasional show tunes (??? It's a barbecue joint, for fuck's sake!!!), some of the worst fake, modern white boy blues that it has ever been my displeasure to endure, and so many overplayings of Led Zepplin's "Houses of the Holy" that I have pretty much been turned against that album for the rest of my life. But the chief offender, which has thankfully fallen off a bit, is the horrendous modern country music performed by a procession of trust fund douchebags whose only claim to the suffering inherent in the best of country music (mostly stuff recorded prior to 1975) is a possibly too-steep price tag on a brand new Stetson cowboy fedora, something none of them have earned the right to wear, what with never having been anywhere near a horse, cattle, or any job more rugged than serving up Slurpees at the local 7/11.

So imagine my chagrin when the stereo shook me out of my focus on my present tasks by vomiting forth an album that gene-splices saccharine yuletide standards with whiny, over-slick modern country music. I swear to the gods that I contemplated committing seppuku with a plastic picnic knife when I heard the hideous countrified version of the accursed "Frosty the Snowman," perhaps my all-time least favorite Christmas tune.

The worst of it will be over in sixteen days, so I must summon up the power of my chi and my totems, the bear and the tiger, and somehow survive the aural onslaught. Repeated helpings of my own homemade "Merry Fucking Christmas" CD will help somewhat by injecting much needed Satanic metal, punk rock, and general sacreligious offensiveness into the ether, negating in a small way some of the treacle that sticks to Scrooges like me in the way that a harshly-hacked bolus of phlegm or a nasty wad of cum fired from close range unwantedly clings to one's hair.