christmas cheer

Brunch with the old crew yesterday. Then Sarah and I went to Main Street Eye care in Hellertown to look at the owner’s collection of old glasses. Every time I tried on a pair, he said, “Now those look really good.”

In the evening I went to Ben’s house for a Christmas party. Ben’s mom said I could try her homemade beer or hard cider and I gladly accepted both. Middle-aged people trickled in and neither Ben nor I knew any of them. Then later on Cliff Sunflower the Quaker bee keeper approached me and started talking to me about a discouraged film student he knows who, Cliff felt, might enjoy talking to me and might feel encouraged anew by a conversation about film with a fellow student. I suggested that I myself was a little discouraged, but Cliff insisted that I was thinking on the wrong level. Cliff is a very forceful man, garrulous at times. He seemed drunk, but apparently he wasn’t. It occurred to me after talking to him for a while that he looks and sounds like a mix between Nick Nolte and Sydney Pollack. Once I shoveled shit out of the bottom of his mother in law’s pool.

Anna came by later and we watched youtube videos on Ben’s computer that was connected to the stereo, and then we walked to a gas station to buy cigarettes. Anna kept slipping and falling on the ice and I didn’t know what to say. When we came back the crowd had thinned out and those left over seemed drunk. In particular a tall, tough looking woman named Allison seemed thoroughly soused, she was sitting next to Ben’s mom, complaining about her love life from what I could gather, and squeezing a rubber chicken that made a loud screeching noise. She joked about hitting on Ben’s mom’s boyfriend, and the dog, Langston. When I first saw her earlier in the evening, I had thought, “she looks pissed about something.”

Allison kept referring to the “hipsters” in the room, which I took to mean this guy wearing plastic glasses sitting near her, and Ben, Anna and I. Anna was talking about being pro-cynicism and Allison overheard and said we weren’t allowed to be cynical because we were too young. Then she started wrestling another woman. That lasted for a while. She offered to wrestle me, too, but I declined. Someone was squeezing the rubber chicken the whole time. Someone else started talking about long underwear, and Allison took off her pants to prove that she was wearing them. Then she started referring to us as hipsters again, we were sitting at the other end of the room, and said that she could be one if she had my sweater. She chased me around the house for a while and finally I ran upstairs and hid in Ben’s room. When I came back down we made amends and shook hands.

After that Ben and I took Anna home, she had had a lot to drink too, and on the way back we called our friend Katja from Alaska and pretended to be Mr. and Mrs. Santa-Clause. At Ben’s house everyone had left except his family. I asked about Allison and Ben’s mom told me that she’s a guidance counselor at an elementary school. Interesting, I thought.