Image: Insomnia Cured Here via Flickr

“I can’t figure out how to finish my novel. What should the ending be? Happy or sad?” —Nicky the Novelist

As with roller coasters, no one remembers how novels end. Sooner or later they just run out of gas. And pages. If it’s a mystery, they catch the killer. Or did they? Is anyone ever really caught? Until the next episode, maybe. Books are generally too long and too full of bullshit. And endings are usually cheap and too-cute. There are very few epiphanies in real life. No one in real life lives happily ever after. And love is never really the answer to all of anyone’s problems. It is, generally, an introduction to a bunch of new problems. But these days you have to be a novel, a graphic novel or a video game to be a movie. And everyone likes movies, even crappy movies.

Where ever you are in the writing of your latest book, even if you are on page 1, you are closer to the end than you think. Did I need seven 900-page books to tell me what I already know? That Arya Stark will sit on the Iron Throne as Queen of the World at the end of Game of Thrones? I didn’t. Even though I like reading George R. R. Martin books, they were definitely 900 pages I didn’t necessarily need to read. And could use if I ever got back. Do I really need a red herring plot about another Targaryen heir to the throne? I do not.

Weren’t we just here? Wasn’t it moments ago that we were waking up to a new week, full of dread and barely able to drag ourselves to the starting line? Didn’t we just complain about how exhausted we were and wonder how much more we could take? I guess the good news is I can copy and paste this exact block of text over and over again until it finally all comes down, because we live in a world where it’s always like this now. Here’s some music. Enjoy.

★★ Morning was ordinary, dark and grim. Wind nudged the leaves around without really sending them anywhere. The light and dark blotches on the gray gradually developed into blue and white, if only for a while. The night air was too humid for wearing a warm coat but humid enough to put a raw chill on the skin. The six-year-old insisted on eating his ramen with his coat on rather than moving to a seat sheltered from the draft of the restaurant door. An airplane passed through the low clouds, its lights splaying out into a solid, glowing alien cone.

Image: Mark Baylor via Flickr, art by Silvia

JARED is watching as GENERAL MATTIS secures a standing desk onto JARED’s regular desk. The New York Times and the Washington Post both reported earlier this week that JARED’s influence is waning. And it’s true. He does so little at the office, sitting for such long stretches of time, that his back has begun twitching. The standing desk was his DAUGHTER’s idea. She had read somewhere that sitting is worse for you than even sugar and because she’s never eaten sugar in her entire life, she could only presume sitting was very, very bad. Like, whatever STEVE BANNON does to his body, bad. GENERAL MATTIS happily agreed to assist, as manual labor always relaxes him, and war mongering had been stressing him. IVANKA is refreshing her Twitter feed, waiting for her tax cut to roll in. JARED’s phone rings and he answers it. 

JARED [into his phone]: I sleep on my side, why?

[KUSHNER DAUGHTER mouths, “Who is that?” to JARED. GENERAL MATTIS looks nervous for the first time in his life.]

JARED [definitely lying]: A buddy from college. [JARED turns away from his colleagues and speaks into his phone again. He whispers something, and then raises his voice like he’s acting in a school play.] A graphic t-shirt company. Like, we take images of popular gifs or whatever, maybe Christmas ones, and print them on—

[KELLYANNE CONWAY and GARY COHN waltz in. They’re on edge because MICHAEL FLYNN has entered a guilty plea for making false statements and they both make false statements all the time. KELLYANNE CONWAY is not so edgy that she can’t also celebrate Christmas. She discreetly places an Elf on the Shelf toy atop JARED’s standing desk.]

KELLYANNE CONWAY [to KUSHNER DAUGHTER]: Who the fuck is he talking to?

JARED [lying]: A buddy from school. I’m on a conference call with some buddies from school.

GARY COHN [taking JARED at his word]: Jared, don’t say “buddies.” It sounds like you’re reverse-commuting to Greenwich.

 Lot 1: Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice

Courtesy of Bonhams

This fabulous mask is a screen-used prop from Tim Burton’s 1988 cult comedy, Beetlejuice, starring Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis. When Adam Maitland (Baldwin) and his wife Barbara (Davis) realize they’ve died in a car accident, they decide to haunt the new owners of their house. During a scene in which they are practicing how to frighten people, Barbara flicks out her eyes and transforms her mouth into an enormous, toothy, beak-like structure capable of crunching skulls. It’s the kind of talent every woman wishes for, at one time or another.

Part of a London auction of “Entertainment Memorabilia” on December 13, the custom-made mask of latex and resin is estimated by the auctioneer to reach about $2,000, but this film’s rabid fan base might easily bid it higher. A 2012 auction of the movie’s “Handbook for the Recently Deceased,” issued to the Maitlands soon after their untimely demise, realized $6,875. And that popularity extends to reproductions and “officially-licensed” merch too; see ThinkGeek’s 15-inch figurine of Betelgeuse, the titular graveyard ghoul played by Michael Keaton, or Target’s dog costume of the same.

What I am about to say will alarm and surprise you so I want you to take a deep breath before reading any further and perhaps sit down if you aren’t already so doing. Okay, are you prepared? Good. Now listen to this: Thanksgiving was just last week. Seven days ago you were listening to people tell stories about how crowded it was at the mall. And yet it seems like it was in a whole other century, right? I don’t even know anymore. Anyway, here’s music. Enjoy.

★★★★ The six-year-old put on his longest shorts and his highest socks, making the most he could of the promise in the forecast. A child wept in the slow, crowded elevator because her layers were too hot. People took to their balconies. Yellow leaves and a beverage lid flipped and flashed high up against the blue; pigeons joined the kaleidoscope aloft. The warmth might have been sinister in principle but it felt kind and wholesome, and by nighttime the air had recovered its natural bite.

Me, eating the first of many a Schokoapfel, Munich Christkindlmarkt, December 2008. Photo: Waldemar Rohloff. Ed note: yes, it’s a beret.

Over Thanksgiving, as I fielded irate messages from Germans about cilantro (they do hate it, but they object to me telling them so), I said a little prayer of un-Thanks for Christian Lindner, leader of the German Free Democratic Party and my now EX-boyfriend, who took his gold-plated Alexa-enabled smartball and absconded home from his country’s interminable coalition talks, celebrating in true Ayn Rand fanboy fashion with the literal smuggest Tweet in the world.

So, everyone’s favorite mom, Angela Merkel, wanted a new government by Christmas and she’s not gonna get one; all signs point to a resigned, grumbling renewal of the GroKo, or Grand Coalition, between Mutti and the Social Democrats. Except this week, their talks have stalled thanks to a kerfuffle over the EU’s continued use of Glyphosate, a possibly toxic (ed note: ehhhh) weed killer, because did I or did I not tell you that Germans really cared about their lawns?

 And so, with extra-German-style ineffectuality the new Reason for the Season, the German-speaking world is gearing up for another set of Festtage (FEST-tah-guh), literally “party days,” and let me tell you when it comes to Christmas, or Weihnachten (VIE-nocht-un, literally “consecration night”) and New Year’s Eve (Silvester, pronounced just like the cat), these people do not fuck around.