Somehow, I'm managing to sleep too much and badly. Epic nightmares, and then I wake at 10:30 when I should be waking at 9. My mind is too restless, whether I'm awake and asleep, worrying at too many things that should be left alone. I can't seem to find my way into "Bainbridge" (the "last" Dancy Flammarion story), and I'm getting behinder and behinder. This can't go on. I have to begin this story. I have to begin editing Daughter of Hounds. Before I'm ready, it'll be time to write the vignettes for Sirenia Digest #2 (Subscribe! Subscribe!). The story has to find its beginning today. I have to find its beginning. Dancy somewhere just south of Bainbridge, Georgia. This is the story which ends five day before the events in "Alabaster." It doesn't help that it's cold as a Republican's tit here. It's easier to write about summer when it's not winter.

Er...so, yeah. Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and John Gibson, three of those Disney animatronic talking-head thingies on Fox News, would have us believe that "war" has been declared against Xmas. No, really. Gibson has even "written" a book about it — The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought (Sentinel, October 2005). To hear them tell it, Xmas is now an endangered holiday. This surely explains why I can't go to the market or the drugstore or the frelling post office without having to listen to Xmas music. This would also explain why I can't watch half an hour of television without having to endure twelve or fifteen minutes of Xmas commercials. It explains those giant inflatable snow men that people are putting on their lawns and the tacky plastic nativity scenes outside the churches. Clearly, the fact that I have to look at gaudy fucking Xmas crap from October until early January is ample evidence of the rapid decline of poor, oppressed Xmas. Too many people saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Xmas." And you just know it's the fault of all those damned secular, liberal, progressive, vegan turkey huggers. Oh, yeah. I blame them. When Santa's out of work and the reindeer have been sold of to the dog-food factory, they're the ones I'll blame. First, white men are pushed to the very edge of extinction. Now Xmas. What's the world coming to? Is nothing sacred? The fag-loving, whale-saving, drug-crazed, baby-aborting masses won't stop until all those heathens who, out of sheer wicked stubbornness, want nothing to do with Xmas actually feel comfortable entering a shopping mall in December. Why can't they just move to Europe or Canada and leave all the good, red-blooded Americans alone to enjoy their gluttonous Messianic consumerist passion play? Sheesh.

Wait! Are those locusts I hear?

Oh. My mistake. It's just the space heater. Whoops.

So...anyway.

Have I mentioned Cephalopodmas? It's the next big thing.

And speaking of tentacles, did everyone get Sirenia Digest #1?