Christmas Eve 2015.

Tonight was odd. I blame the full moon.

My mother picked me up from work after making tamales all night at one of our friends' house and then going to a party. We went back to the party and it was some kinda near movie-ish gathering of family and friends except with booze and terrible gifts. We used the excuse of "We have to go back to our friends' house to pick up the tamales now that they're done steaming all damn day" (literally, all they did was MAKE them and drink) to go back and actually pick up the tamales (see above). So we head back there and a friend of mine calls me, says that he's got something for me so I run home, pick up a pack of cigarettes, head to our friends' house, grab the tamales and mom drops me off at the other friend.

As an aside: I totally have this bad-ass scarf hat neckwarmer thingy. It's almost like a ski mask with a hat - lookie.

http://www.amazon.com/Ski-Snowboard-Face-Mask-Visor/dp/B008GYZI3Q/ref=pd_sim_193_5/189-6056222-4386662?ie=UTF8&dpID=514XmAmJ3gL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL200_SR160%2C200_&refRID=06X74WTDSNKHMB5W5XVP

I headed home and found myself listening to "So This Is Christmas (Happy Christmas/War Is Over)" by John Lennon and realizing how sentimental I was currently feeling. That's when shit got weird because I changed the song to the next one in the "Recently Added" list and it was "Snow Came Down" by Trans-Siberian Orchestra. My brain was like "Okay, this is enough sentimental bullshit, imma think" and started to analyze the lyrics and going all intellectual about songs. I have no idea why I was feeling sentinmental but I have a pretty good THEORY.

About five and a half years ago, I started playing Second Life and I'd ultimately ended up renting half a sim (which, at the time, costed L$21230, or about $84 a week), and I discovered two things.

It was easy because of one of the reasons I mentioned above - this one: One, I make an excellent digital pimp/manwhore. Two, I like to learn and create things when I'm in pain. I was in pain because I was a manwhore - I'd get emotionally invested. To distract myself from the pain, I set my mind at work learning how to build in Second Life. To that end, I'd decorate the half-sim. To give you an idea of the sim, a very "luxurious" house was a 16th of the sim and I had a god damn castle, a forest and a city on it. (Medieval village, but still, it had god damn docks on it.)

On one extreme side, I had a forest. I called it the Grotto 'cause there were lots of little hidden things. Bordering the edge of the sim (and into the water) was a literal Arabian palace that I modified the shit out of and turned it into a video game castle. Inside the grotto were gazebos and shit (insert D&D story here). In the middle of the sim was a motherfucking castle with towers and a dungeon and those catwalks like in Castlevania and secret rooms and all sorts of bad-ass shit, including furniture I spent hours building (even sex beds). Then the village with the docks, which was bad ass because the ship in the harbor was "The Neverest" - the ship that took Dashade to Venomheart. Also, docks, which means pirates. The village itself just had some shops (I had to try to sell my shit), but it also had the ruins of a monastery that seemed to glow (because I was a god damn wizard (no, not really)). All of it, I built stick by stick (literally, it's flexi-shapy, wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff) and all of it, I built because I'd get attached to clients because I was the best manwhore EVAR and they'd throw money and I thought they loved me for me. I didn't even mention the Skyclub, which is Exactly What It Says On The Tin - a club in the sky. I threw parties 'n' shit ("DJ'd" by way of Shoutcast servers streamed into the sim and sent through the Second Life clients) and hung out on the wall that overlooked the sky above the half-sim (which I called "The Villa" because melodrama and reasons). I looked like a pirate.

Anyway, I decorated the shit out of the half-sim for every holiday, and I ultimately outdid myself every year during Christmas. When I was walking home, I was listening to TSO and looking at decorations, and was thinking about Second Life. Mostly because this is the first year I was walking home on Christmas Eve listening to TSO and it looked (and almost felt) like Second Life, where I used to decorate the sim for Christmas while listening to that song by TSO (not to mention, Second Life was where I'd first heard the song)...

Hence - full moon and the start of this whole thing.

Merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, happy Kwanza, merry Yule, happy holidays, season greetings and fuck you if you're offended because I missed your holiday. Go listen to some John Lennon and shut up.