"Don't ask," I say, not wanting to humiliate myself again.
He misunderstands me. "Well, don't sweat it: if you make too many resolutions, you're trying, and that's what counts."
"Yuh-huh." It feels good to be overestimated for a change.
Tony used to work in the customer-service dept at Eatons-Walmart, the big one at Dundas and Yonge where the Eaton Centre used to be. They kept offering him promotions and he kept turning them down. He wanted to stay there, acting as a guide through the maze of bureaucracy you had to navigate to get a refund when you bought the dangerous, overpriced shit they sold. It shows.
It's like he spent thirty years waiting for an opportunity to grab a megaphone and organise a disaster-relief.
The neighbours' is not recognisable as a house anymore. Some people are singing carols. Then it gets silly and they start singing dirty words, and I join in when they launch into Jingle Bells, translated into Process-speak.
I turn back into the fire and lose myself in the flickers, and I don't scream at all.
Fuck you, Dad.
#
Someone scrounged a big foam minikeg of whiskey, and someone else has come up with some chewable vitamin C soaked in something *up*, and the house gets going. Those with working comms — who pays for their subscriptions, I wonder — micropay for some tuneage, and we split between the kitchen and the big old parlour, dancing and Merry Xmassing late.