Christmas. I get a warm feeling just from saying it, in the area of my groin. The warm feeling then seeps down my pants and leaves an uncomfortable odor. Christmas. It comes on like a friend with promises of shiny objects and musty paper and sweets, and it leaves me with that feeling you get after someone has driven over a puddle and sprayed you. Some got in your mouth.

My brother put on Van Morrisson today. We were sitting in the living room and discussing the relative virtues of each brilliant song while my grandfather (we call him "Papu" as a joke) mimiced his high crying tone on "Who Was That Masked Man?" and laughed with the insidiousness of trans fat. "He soun's like he's cryin'," he said with a sailor's accent and a shit-eating grin on his face. The kind of grin that could wilt roses. "You're right," I said, "that's what he's going for, actually." He responded, if you want to call it a response, "The music's good. I got no problem wit da music. Guy don't know howta sing, doh." "Well, he's not Frank Sinatra, but maybe that's a good thing. And he wrote the music, you know." "Guy don't know how to sing. 'Eeeh-eeh-eeeh.' Like he's cryin' or sometin'. Heh-heh-heh," he croaked.

I really don't go for it when people say, as this ghoul's second daughter did over dessert, with the heaviest Bronx accent there is, "Van Morrisson is a little better than Bob Dylan, but I just don't like his vo-wace. Other people sing his sowngs and they're gowd, but when he sings . . . I don't really like it," she said ironically, with a huge shit-eating grin (runs in the family) as if the person she was talking to would agree. "Who do you like?" I asked. I should have refrained. "Barbara Streisand, or Celine Dion, Frank Sinatra, they have real voices." I won't go on. My heart died today, as a little bit dies every day. Soon it will be gone, and then the world will be sorry, let me tell you. Or, alternately, the world will go on just as it does.