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Four middle aged white guys, some in suits, standing together with their arms around each other

It's about me and Hillary, mostly, and how she blows off steam after a major disappointment in life by flying secretly into Columbus, then takes a special Ultra-Secret Uber to my pad where she works off her angst kama sutra kamikaze-style.

On me. It's wild. Unreal.

We met at a fund-raiser in Lima years ago, at the tank plant."Save the tank and let's get spanked," I wittily broke the ice with her at the hor d'oeuvres where she was sucking up the sushi with a hose from her purse. We got to talking about love and war. We clicked like a crazed gigolo Goober of Mayberry and a frisky Aunt Bee. We began our body work later that night. She got really limber after a few sessions. But that was long ago and many primaries away. Sigh.

Nowaday's it ain't purdy, as we used to say in Texas, in one of my many unpublished daydream novels, this energy-work she and I do.

In fact it is worthy of the old Penthouse Letters section..."I'm a professor of women's literature in a small private women's college for young rich saplings in New England. On occasion a moneyed mother shows up and well, things happen unforseen--with great unintended consequences for the entirety of mankind. Especially when great wealth, even greater power and world-devouring appetites are involved. Never mine of course..."

Like, for instance, just recently I was her designated Chippendale Chew Toy of Rippling Tumescent Sinew and Bone and, man, it was one for the books. She was screaming at me during the act per usual, blaming everybody and everything for whatever was her problem that day (I never pay attention to her babble).

But apparently this one was major, really catastrophic. No amount of subservient supplication on my part rolled with her. Nothing softened her brutalizing anger. She was beyond scorned. No matter. Whatever the personal upheaval was--and this one was her Great Tectonic Inner Plates Collision of an upheaval that had her loin-grinding me into dust--her sutra energy was tsunamic, as we say in the biz. Yet as long as she collapses in exhaustion, laying atop my gym-bought pecs, panting, I know I've done my job.

Not this time, though. Uh-fucking-oh.

This one was the Mount Krakatoa of upset. She was spasmodic violent fountains of deep core molten lava emotion mixed with creative destruction. I was tossed around like a pic-a-nic basket in a 8000 lb. mama grizzly's maw. I saw my Goober life flashing before my eyes. She was going to leave a but a few bones by the time she was done. I endured the pain. I am a loyal chew toy. I love powerful women. Rock me, female Amadeus, just leave me breathing.

Normally, time and again during sessions past she undergoes a dramatic, James-Brown-born-again-resurrection coda and the show grinds on. This time, an unbelievable false finish. This nightmare was writing itself.

Just like an undead monster in the movies, she bolted upright back to life, and the titanic struggle between her good and my surrogate evil began anew. It was '"~!@#$ Florida" and "*&^%$#@ them deplorables" and on and on. It lasted 15 hours. Her previous worst I was a stand-in for a guy at whom she kept screaming "You're no #$%*&!?#" Colonel Sanders!!." But this session, she was pissed at everybody and everything--EVERYTHING. I was once Germaine Greer and Whoopie Goldberg's chew toys and they had some anger. But nothing like this.

Anyway, like I say, it's a work in progress, this 50 Shades of Christmas. I hope to have it Kindle-ready for the East Coast elites in a couple weeks, the Mid-West deplorables version shortly after and the West Coast limousine liberal version three days before Christmas. Each version Al-Gore-rhythmically customized per red-state-blue-state-mental-state market. That'll take a little bit of doing. Each gets a different ending. None of them end well. People need to get back to studying the Greek tragedies. My Christmas wish is that each and everyone of you sees yourself in this tragic passion play. I and a cabal of writers spanning history have been afraid of this current epoch, the Seinfeld Era we call it: everything in our culture is a shallow joke--entertainment, education, politics, everything, up to and including ourselves.

50 Shades of Christmas. Ask for it. Demand it. Devour, digest and discuss. Because right now we're electing ourselves.

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I do have a few other Christmas wishes.

One: EVERYBODY goes to see Rick Collura's blues-based band Rick and the Blue Cats. And within that wish I have a second wish: his fine lady pal Teresa Monaco told me she bought him a fine leather Andy Capp cap and he won't wear it onstage. Rick! Why not? But then she lovingly chided him and the whole band for dressing like--how shall we say?--we shall put it delicately, Ricky and the Kitties attire themselves in a fashion opposite their black musical heroes who dressed to kill. These guys look like their bound for paupers' graves. Downstyle, I guess you could call it. So, one gig, that's all we're saying, gentlemen, dress like you're at Curtis Mayfield's wake. No Hawaiian shirts allowed, dig? Go Chicago '30s gangster, like how the Alligators sometimes sartorially displayed. You guys are in my opinion the best little band in Columbus. Make us feel special. Give us some plumage.

Another Christmas wish: every single person who has compared our new regime to Germany's worst nightmare inflicted upon civilization, read every goddam page of William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It should be a crime to trivialize the Holocaust.

Christmas wish #3: Everybody listen to the Stones new album, "Blue and Lonesome," a total blues romp. And realize, our special relationship with the British includes them listening, loving and lovingly repackaging our absolutely fantastic Afro-American and country roots. The Brits achieve the near-impossible as they play back the music's soul somehow miraculously mostly intact. But in their own English-cized way. An amazing trans-Atlantic cultural feat. When I saw a mostly white crowd at the Shoe last year giving a standing ovation to Lisa Fischer as she sang the high-flying powerhouse gospel vocal line in the Stones 'Gimme Shelter,' and indeed the mixed-race band playing Afro-Anglo blues-soul-rock'n'roll, I thought, this goddam American experiment has really worked. Think about that. Oh sure, it was a rough hoe, what with real Gold Coast slave ships two centuries ago, and we've got much work to do. But we've created an ever-improving working ship of equality-achieving enlightenment. My wish is that even the haters acknowledge this. Colin Kaepernick is after all a millionaire.

Merry Christmas, Americans, and all the ships at sea.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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