Don’t anger the Toyminator.

Give the Gift of Digby.


This from FDL via Steve Gilliard.

By Jane Hamsher @ 1:59 pm

Digby is having a fundraiser over at Hullaballu. Do yourself and the world a favor by keeping the doors open over there and contribute to the support of one of the finest voices in the blogosphere.
Carry on.

Digby’s writing will endure.

Others are good – often very good – but Digby will be mined and cherished years from now in a medium where everything is drawn in pixels, where 86.7% of everything is kitten-based, and 99.999% of it all boogaloos off the end of the blogpage and into digital oblivion as quickly as chocolate whizzing down Lucy's assembly line.

Oh, and Santa loves Digby. Reads Hullabaloo every single fucking day.

I had a drink with him one ghastly night.

Well, more than “a drink”, and he confided this little secret to me.

Seems the Jolly Old One isn’t real God Damned thrilled with the lot he drew in this life.

Beloved, sure, but the price. The horrible price.

Doomed to punching that devilspawned, Sisyphusian clock 364 days a year. No rest. No peace. No little sumpin-sumpin on the side to take the pain away. It’s as pitiless as the reign of the Tick Tock Man up in the trackless wastes of the Polar gulag where he is interred.

It is “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” in a red suit and beard.

And his reward? His one night of sweet freedom?

It’s pulling a jitterbugfuck, nightmare, meth-fueled hellride of an all-nighter once every December 25th just to make sure every anklebiter in Christendom gets his or her PSP.

Why in God’s name do you think his “cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!” or “The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth, And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath” when last seen by human eyes?

“Digby,” he told me that terrible night in the airport bar up at Palwaukee, “is all that keeps me going.”

It was a chance thing.

Unaccompanied and melancholy and toasting imaginary saints, I just happened to be there the same oppressively dreary night Saint Nick (“Just call me Nick.”) declared an emergency and landed to put down a reindeer with a broken canon bone.

I remember watching him as he stood there, all alone on that gray, snow-streaked runway, with his 9 mm.

“No more reindeer games for you, old friend,” he choked out.

I turned away. There was a single shot, and it was over.

So I did what you do. I bought him a drink while the airport johnnies rigged him up with a replacement deer.

An hour later, deep in his seventh nog he confided in me about this one, solitary joy in his life.

“If Digby weren’t there,” he said, “…I…I don’t know what I’d do.”

Then he gave me this look -- this 1,000 elf stare -- and I can tell you right now, there was nothing of this “...little round belly, That shook, when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly” bullshit in those eyes. Nothing in there but the wind and chill of endless winter and soul-murdering sadness of endless toil.

And laying his finger aside of his nose,

And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose;

He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,

And away they all flew like a meth-powered missile.

Then he was gone, leaving me with a sizeable bar tab and one piece of knowledge that has haunted me to this day.

I now know for sure The Claus is out there.

He can't be bargained with.

He can't be reasoned with.

He doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear.

And he absolutely will not stop, ever, until your stockings are stuffed.

And I for one do not want to be there at 2 a.m. when a crank-crazed Kringle is standing in my kitchenette -- 9 mm and "naughty list" in one hand and the Criterion Edition “Time Bandits” and “Brazil” combo I’ve been angling for in the other -- asking why, when Digby needed a little help, I couldn’t be bothered.

But hey, that’s just me.