From Aurora Harris to anyone who received my parents’ incredibly stupid Christmas letter and believe anything it says about me. In the first place I do not look anything like that picture and did not know they were sending it out. I have never been as embarrassed as when I saw that photograph. Can you just see me sitting under a Christmas tree with a red hat on my head? That was one moment last Christmas Eve and Granddaddy made me let him take the picture. He is extremely rich and is leaving most of his money to me so I have to indulge him when he gets into something like buying a camera. He used to be a four-star general and people still call him General Drake. He is my mother’s father. My father’s father is an intellectual and a college professor and a noted biologist who once worked with Crick. It is sort of hilarious to have them in the same room since they are both egomaniacs and don’t like to share the spotlight. Mother is always thinking they should come and visit at the same time and show solidarity.
Back to me. I have changed my whole outlook on life. I am still planning on going to medical school but I have decided now to be a psychiatrist. I have been talking to this woman psychiatrist and because of her I am not going to have to go off to school next year after all. She went to Johns Hopkins Medical School and has been through two training analyses and is so smart it blows my mind to even think about her much less talk to her about my family and the cheerleading crisis last year and being dragged onto that altar by Charlie Pope and almost initiated into a satanic cult. Dragged, my ass, she might say. You went gladly. Anything to escape the middle-class values my mother is espousing in order to save herself from worrying about the real fear and terror of every living human being, which is death and decay.
You see, there isn’t any reason to spend your life dreading the inevitable. You might as well go on and live very fully in the present moment and get as much done as possible to help your fellow humans and sop up all the good karma you get from being useful and sleep like a baby.
Her name is Diana Voss, this angel of enlightenment, and she is making me into a freak by teaching me all this stuff. Can you imagine talking to her for almost an hour three times a week and then walking into Fort Smith High School and looking around you at the pitiful insanity of most of the teenagers in the United States? Our dopey principal says we are the elite who will run the country one day. Can you just imagine these idiots trying to make the laws?
I don’t think half of them can read the newspaper with any comprehension. Diana thinks I should go on and go to college and just skip high school but we haven’t told my parents yet. I think I’ll tell my grandfather Harris and let him arrange it. I could just go live with him in Fayetteville. It’s only forty miles away and there is a good enough science department there for me to stay interested.
The tree in that photograph you got sent by my mother isn’t even the tree that I remember from last year. The real tree is the one Dad brought home that shed all its needles by December 14 and we had to take it down and drag it out the door and who do you think had the job of vacuuming up the needles? Who do you think had to get blamed and feel guilty when the needles broke the Electrolux and we had to go to Wal-Mart at nine o’clock at night and buy a new vacuum sweeper? The tree in that photograph is a fake Christmas tree we ordered from the florist shop. It cost one hundred and ten dollars, money that could have been used to help Habitat for Humanity or Saint Jude’s. It is made out of the same petrochemicals that are responsible for the mild winters and terrible storms we have been having. If I have to explain that statement, don’t read on.
Now that Christmas is over we are going to have to store that tree in the attic where it takes up all the room. Think of that tree stuffed into our attic with the boxes of Dad’s textbooks from college and the trunk with Mother’s old cheerleading and homecoming queen costumes and the daybed that belonged to my great-grandmother that no one wants but no one can bear to throw away. If you want to think Christmas, think about that tree up there all alone eleven months of the year, a completely useless, frivolous, retrograde symbol of a tribal ritual whose real purpose is to give people an excuse to wear red when the days are short and sunlight is in short supply.
If you want to think about something good think about me, Aurora Harris, walking down the street disguised as a teenager, on my way to talk to the smartest woman I have ever met who is going to see to it that I escape enough of my conditioning to be able to move on out into the future. I’ll probably marry someone like Bill Gates or be someone Bill Gates will come to when he gets in trouble. I’m going to have a happy life and take as many people with me as I can save. Happy New Year.