Twas the night before Christmas break, when all through the web.
Not a tweeter was tweeting, not even your Aunt Deb.
The blog posts were scheduled to autopost with care
In hopes that the readership soon would be there.
The college kids were passed out all drunk in their beds,
while visions of potential high school hook ups danced in their heads.
And mama implores them to help her with chores,
but they’d rather sit around the whole month and be bored.
The news cycle trickles out with hardly a clatter
And we habitually check Facebook to see what really matters.
But everyone posts the same holiday status
of seasonal greetings and some New Years gladness.
The impending threat of the first-fallen snow
gives a nostalgic glimmer to objects below.
And then once it snows, what instead should be appear
But wet muddy roads that make it hard to steer
For every drunk driver, so lively and thick –
that you know you deserved a DUI, you dick.
How rapid you spun when to black ice you came
but you’ll come out unscathed and find someone to blame.
“Well yeah but so maybe I had a few beers.
I was just fine to drive, there was nothing to fear.
I was typing a text to see who else was home
when I don’t know, man, I just swerved on the road.”
And the mornings you spend with your family feel quaint
but by mid-afternoon, it’s clear that they ain’t.
Your parents have so many answers to seek
when they don’t realize that you were just hoping to sleep.
But you’re still looking forward to seeing old friends —
forgetting, of course, their own holiday plans.
So you look back to Facebook, where nothing is new,
and then you check twitter to find something to do.
But your parents have cable, so hey, that’s still cool!
With eight thousand channels, and you feel like a fool
for watching some network crap you don’t like
but that’s better than just surfing channels all night.
Then you see an old ex on the way to the store,
And she’s fat, or he’s married to that old high school whore.
And the comfort is fleeting, but at least now you’ve seen
that your life didn’t peak when you’d just turned eighteen.
So you get drunk with your dad and discuss politics
and you finally see that he’s not such a prick,
and that wine works much faster than cheap, shitty beer
so you start to rethink your plans for New Years.
Then you remember your goals for that productive week,
and the things that you wanted to watch, write, and read.
But instead you fall down another Wiki-hole
and learn about the agricultural benefit of voles.
And you watch with your parents an old childhood great
which washes over you with a sentimental wave
and those annual plans that you made with your friends
are now just spent at home with more emails to send,
checking twitter, and updates on Facebook for news;
you find nothing, so open a new bottle of booze.
And when the time comes to leave, you drive off with a grin
because you can’t wait ’til next year to do it again.
