You are Scrooge and it is Christmas 2023. You’re at home, which is a one-bedroom apartment in the city that costs 3K$ per month. You are alone with your Uber Eats, playing a video game that rewards the killing of elves, and as you rack up a record score you imagine that you might be visited later that night by a ghost who may warn that video games and Uber Eats will stunt your growth. Just desserts, the ghost will imply. Tomorrow, Christmas is a day off—your one day off per year, more or less enforced by the absence of anyone else, co-workers or customers. Actually, you don’t have co-workers per se, just a couple of subordinates at the start-up you own, one local, the other in Katmandu, which is in India, or is it Nepal? You don’t really care. The local employee, Bob, has been asking for a benefits package recently, now that’s he’s working over thirty hours a week. He’s got a disabled son—cerebral palsy, muscular diaspora, or something—and he needs benefits, has got rising medical costs. You’re tempted to say he should move overseas, work remote, like the guy in Katmandu. Does he know about medicine there? The guy was traveling recently, went hiking near the Everest base camp. Not exactly a metropolis. Anyway, next day he’s feeling a pain in his lower stomach, one that worsens over three hours. He realizes he needs help, takes a cab to a hospital, gets diagnosed with a kidney stone, spends the next few days on an IV, taking painkillers, feeling nothing and watching Netflix. Best few days of his trip, he later says, and the bill? $2500! If that was here, with the drugs, the MRIs, and everything, the bill would’ve been more like 50K$. Benefits? Nah, too expensive here. But you’ll pay. You’ll pay because otherwise your local guy, Bob, will leave. He’ll leave like your partner Jacob left.
Okay, you just killed another Elf. Thinking of Jacob juiced you up a bit, spiked your hate and sharpened your reflexes at just the right moment. Jacob’s down south now, in LA working as a software engineer, designing new product that will rival yours. Making good money. Taking days off. He’ll be off tomorrow, swimming in the ocean in the dead of winter. Scuba diving, maybe. Jacob has dreams, wants different things, isn’t focused enough for a start-up. Wants to act. Hah! You think he’s crazy, guy thinks he’ll be famous. He won’t even get parts. I mean, right now he’s likely auditioning for a role as an extra in something that won’t get streamed—a part a robot could do, or a woman, or a transgendered woman, or any person of color. Anyone other than a white guy who works in tech and scuba dives on the weekend. But hey, maybe he’ll catch a break. You hear they’re re-making JAWS down there, with an all-female cast, including Meryl Streep, who’s playing Quint and will likely get another Oscar. Jacob might get a part as a diver that gets munched in the opening scene, ending up as a part, literally. Serves him right, you think. At least he won’t need benefits. With the day job he’s got and shouldn’t give up, he’ll have that covered.
Your niece is doing well, you think. Yeah, you have no kids. Just the kids of your sister Fan to think of at this time of year. Kids to send cards to, shoot a text to. Zooey, the niece, is an EMT living in Colorado, also spends half the year in Yellowstone, rescuing incompetent hikers that get lost in the wild. Recently she had an ordeal, was out in the woods on a call when she came across a grizzly. Cocaine bear. It was the only film you saw last year. It filled you up, sated a bloodthirsty streak in you not dealt with by elf-killing video games. But it made you worry about Zooey, being chased in a forest. On that last occasion she was rescued—actually, inadvertently—when her partner Fred got stuck in a redwood tree only to get knocked off by a low flying eagle that clipped his ear. He would have fallen to his death had the fall not been broken by the crazed bear that was stalking Zooey and about to make its kill when impact occurred, causing concussion. The bear was out, will have to retire from his game, maybe. There’s no telling where and when miracles will happen, in the city or in the wild. Anyway, it’s enough to make you believe in things like God and Christmas. Well, it almost makes you believe in God and Christmas.
You wish you could skip this holiday and head straight for New Year’s. How come no one queries your famous ancestor’s mood on that night? Given that it’s just a week later, at the climax of the year, a new page to be turned, you’d think posterity would take notice. After all, if the story is about redemption, making new resolutions and sticking to them, wouldn’t we want to know about the new leaf on January 1st and how long it will last. Couldn’t that have been the sequel, the reboot, or even the video game? Humbug. Back to New Year’s 2023. You can’t wait for the show that Ticketmaster ripped you off for. Deep Purple is replacing a Pink Floyd cover band at Red Rocks in Colorado because the latter band’s members all got Yellow Fever ahead of a benefit concert for Incels that have blue balls. It’s all a joke, of course. Someone from Dickens’ homeland is taking the piss, as they’d say, hiding where the profits are really going. Can’t trust any of these people, but you don’t care so long as it’s a good show and DP plays “Smoke on the Water”.
It’s a good thing it’s a joke for another reason. You don’t like charity gigs, mostly because you don’t like charity. That’s why you’ve begged off a show happening the following week, also in Colorado. It’s an anniversary bash for a “friends of” January 6th group that’s been put on by one of your investors and a former employer, Mr. Fezziwig. You think the emphasis should be on the word bash. Fezziwigg wasn’t a right-wing nutjob when you first met him. He was just a hound-dog who liked to make as much money as possible and then spend it on strippers in his free time. Then, during the lock-down, all the strip-joints closed down and Fezziwig was lost. He couldn’t even get a handjob at the local rub and tug. If only he played video games, you could’ve lent a helping hand, helped him get through the loneliness and the boredom. No, not that kind of helping hand! You’d have helped him count his money, assuming he’d get some kind of kick out of that. But Fezziwig went another way, wanted someone to blame, someone to take revenge upon. Not that you mind a little bad attitude and grumbling, but starting wars or claiming that coups d’etats have happened in the nation’s capital isn’t quite your cup of tea or figgy pudding. Humbug, you say to him, wanting no part of his ugly social vision. In fact, as you think of it, you’re sick of the game you’re playing, the elf thing. You’ve broken the record. The little people are strewn over digital asphalt. You suddenly want a power failure, and for Alexa to answer every one of your questions wrong. You’ve placed too much faith in the inanimate, the material.
Your phone pings at midnight. The girl who once broke up with you found your neglected, much swiped-past profile on Tinder. “What’s up?” writes Belle in a text, plus “Merry Christmas!”. “What’s up with you profile? You don’t like long hikes”, she chides. “You like money, and you like video games”.
“I’m learning to like elves,” you reply.
Graeme Daniels Psychewriter 