Merry Christmas from GWAR. I SAID MERRY CHRISTMAS YOU ASSHOLES!!! YOU THINK I WEAR THIS SANTA HAT FOR MY HEALTH???
I mean, you can KEEP your fucking Scrooge, bitches (even the Bill Murray and Alastair Sim ones), if there’s one entity I’d like to be serenaded by on Christmas Day, it would be the multifarious organism known to terrestrials as GWAR. So here is video through which we can all live vicariously, as GWAR descends upon an unsuspecting suburban neighborhood, successively terrorizing a harmless family, an inflatable Santa, a grandmotherly type, and a soccer mom.
Everybody hates those fucking inflatables. Smug bastards, they are.
And I was thinking of them both today, when I went out in this podunk town for a two-hour walk and, of all the people I passed, including the church group that was loudly praying to the empty downtown sidewalks, not one said, “Merry Christmas.”
Not one.
Now, I may live in a pretty ratfuck part of the big city, but we always hear that small towns are frendlier. It’s a certain fact I couldn’t walk around the Downtown Eastside for two hours without hearing Merry Christmas repeatedly, and sometimes even from sober persons. Whichever PR firm small towns are hiring to spread this myth around, they’ve earned their money, cuz not one word of that claim is true. Hell, the only one who even looked me in the eye was the chocolate lab whose owner yanked him roughly away because for a second I looked like I might pet the doggy. Oh, perish the thought.
So, the following pair of videos and the following classic Christmas story (which I post every year, and you should read every time I post it, you’ll thank me) go out to those three men I saw sitting on the bar stools at the pub, staring into space with one carefully calibrated empty seat between each of them, presumably for Clarence. Or Harvey.
This is simply the finest, most moving and remarkable Christmas story I have ever encountered, and I have, as I happened to have remarked recently, well over two dozen books of Christmas stories. Moving as it does from England to Saudi Arabia to the far eastern tip of Russia, it qualifies as multiculti, too! It is a unique jewel by an author who emerged from nowhere, left this small masterpiece for us, and vanished again into a swirling blizzard of obscurity. I’ll post it using the MORE tag, so that if you enjoy it you can read the rest. If you don’t enjoy it, I suggest you seek medical assistance promptly, for your brain matter must be leaking out your ears or something. Merry Christmas!
which is a reference to a noirish Robert Bloch Christmas story you probably haven’t read, but when you realize he’s the guy who wrote Psycho, you’ll sort of get the idea.
[Update: I have been informed that the segue between Bloch, raincoaster, and Cthulhu is too abrupt: I would have thought it a continuum, rather, but here we go with the explication: Bloch was a pal of HP Lovecraft’s. HP Lovecraft wrote the Cthulhu Mythos stories, and Bloch wrote a couple himself, inspired by the master. raincoaster is…well, raincoaster.]
So, what did raincoaster do today?
Had lunch with a pal and got a nice tour of the Naramata Bench or portions thereof, narrated. What is the point of a drive without a story, I ask yez?
Spent several so-far-fruitless hours trying to get the new Jesus Phone activated (The Sister is paying, The Sister is in Ottawa, the Fido company insists on her being physically present with the credit card. ALTHOUGH they accept internet orders, but then she’d have to mail me the SIM card. Fortunately, I’m up in PTown and the standards of service here are nothing short of consistently amazing, and I say that as a jaded city dweller, so the Fido store manager at Cherry Lane is working it out with the store manager at Bayshore so my sister can go in, present her card, and Cherry Lane will instantly get the phone up and running and call me to come pick it up, which is more than I’d expect of any shop in Vangroover over the Christmas holidays and that’s for sure and certain, but where was I? Oh yes, closing the parenthesis).
And did you know that in PTown the most desirable real estate is in the zone called “Between the malls?” Yes, just downhill from the industrial flats. Just what I’m looking for in a home: waddling distance to Zellers and the food court.
Then, came home, made a dinner of tortellini and what I thought was leftover pasta sauce with sliced mushrooms but turned out, once I’d stirred it a few times, to be tomato sauce with greyish noodles shaped like chubby fish, but what the hell. Add some basil and it’s just like Ragu, right?
Then attempted to get some decorations up around the place (which I am only house-sitting, so it’s not exactly my style) to make it look homey. Think I’m doing pretty well, don’t you?
A Christmas classic which gets heavy airplay around the ol’ raincoaster blog is that beloved oldie, Christmas on Acid by the Vestibules. Not only is the tune catchy and the lyrics accurate (um, from what I hear) but the video is a winter wonderland of the wonky and weird. But don’t take my word for it: check it out for yourself:
And now, may we present for the first time on this website, an authentic, original tale of Christmas Eve on Acid or At Least Giving Every Appearance of Being Under The Influence of Something Hallucinogenicish?
Well, it was the Drive. For those of you who don’t know, the Drive is Commerical Drive, or rather a section of it extending from about Venables to maybe 2nd or at a stretch Broadway, although that really IS stretching it. It has many nifty shops forartsies and hippies old and new, particularly those with a fondness for plants and produce. And yeah, they’re big on altered states there, whether you alter your consciousness by reading Sartre or by ingesting something.
The audACIDy of Dope
So my conclusion that the young man in the following story may have been under the influence of influencers is not without foundation, however shaky, particularly after the fifth eggnog. NEVER let your foundation get into the eggnog ahead of you, or you don’t know where you’ll end up.
Where he and his overcoated companion ended up one snowy Christmas Eve was directly in front of a butcher store window.
Now, the Drive, I should explain, is the old Italian part of town, or used to be before the dirty hippies moved in. Now it’s full of old, stubborn Italians (do I repeat myself?) and dirty old hippies, dirty young hippies and a fair sprinkling of hipsters, who have begun going over the wall of their reservation along Main and infecting the rest of the city, wherever they can buy clove cigarettes and ironic tees.
Now these two? They were none of the above. One was a sturdy-looking, dark-haired (and possibly Italianate) twentysomething in, as explained above, an overcoat. A really quite snazzy overcoat of camel, though that’s probably just a euphemism for beige, as camels are not known for cold resistance now that I think of it.
The other, our befuddled protagonist, was equally twentysomething, and clad equally in an overcoat, although this was of the navy rather than camel persuasion and now that I think of it, it probably contained no fibres that had ever served in a military capacity at all.
And he was freaked out. Deeply, deeply freaked out. Like, screaming in the street, grabbing his head and running in circles Freaked The Fuck Right Out.
He’d probably have been running in a straight line, away from The Drive and back to Kerrisdale or the West End or whatever strange land from whence he came, but Camel Coat had a hold of his naval elbow and wasn’t letting go, cooing, “it’s okay, it’s okay, it can’t hurt you,” and causing his friend to zoom around in circles like a Jack Russell on speed.
And what Merry Christmas sight had caused a hitherto passing for sober young man to lose it right there on the Drive on a snowy Christmas Eve? Only a simple, homey, Old World holiday tradition, sitting right there in the window of the old-timey Italian butcher shop. Just this: click on if you DARE!
Merry Fucking Christmas and it is my goal to DOMINATE the google searches for this term, so LINK ME! LINK ME!
Welcome to Copenhagen a video my friend made of her boyfriend’s photos of protester clashes with police at the Copenhagen summit. Pretty heavy stuff, and you won’t hear about this on the news.
Olympic Mural Rises Again The IOC tried to push around a Vancouver art gallery for their satirical art, got its ass kicked!
Missed 604 in which NBC steals an entire post from a Vancouver blogger and, when she calls them out on it, removes her name but keeps the content.
Christmas story you probably haven’t read, but when you realize he’s the guy who wrote 
raincoaster 