MY FIRST SISTER

My sister-cousin Kelsi, 14, texts me with her Xmas take: “A cool Lumberjack coat and new shoes and a poster of Kat Von D!”
I text her back: “Me and my mans are eating cake and watching bloody Japanese horror movies”
She texts: “Gory ones I hope! I wish I was with you!”
I love her. Hope everyone had a good xmas. The television was showing the burning log program all day, which is the best reality show ever – OG reality show: a fireplace – which I already pointed out in my all-friend xmas text, but am repeating here cause Sasha requested that I put it in print. Manfriend gifted me The Plugz’s 1981 album “Better Luck” – the cool punk en espanol group whose LA soundtrack songs made Repo Man what it was, whose “El Clavo y La Cruz” is the best- it’s all Spanish ska-punk but has some fake banda flava, with that “ay, hai hai hai ahaaaaaa” falsetto man-squall at the beginning – so classic – and guess who plays bass? Gustavo Santaolalla, who also produced and is billed as “Gus” – you may know Gus from being in the first-ever rock en espanol group, Arco Iris (formed in 1967), and from being the charango fanatic that bestowed Brokeback with its emotional mountain doomed-love sounds, not to mention the breezy and beautiful joints for your fave flicks Amores Perros, 21 Grams and The Motorcycle Diaries (no dis to Garcia Bernal Che but mega-word to del Toro Che).
So Annie came over with a lasagna and I baked apples and salmon and the old man sauteed some spinach which he does so well and we gorged ourselves and talked all sorts of Xmas shit. Annie had to work in the morn so we walked her leftovers home a block away, greeting everyone we met on the way – I love holidays because it’s a sanctioned time to talk to strangers, to greet people on the street, rather than all the other times when you are a creep if you try to say hello to someone you don’t already know by sight. A creep or, worse, they turn out to be creepy and your friendliness is rewarded with stalking or public indecency. This is also why I like the Jehovah’s Witnesses – they are always sweet and say hi when I walk by them on my way to the subway, all older ladies in hats and gloves – and they never try to solicit me, even though they are for some reason constantly in my neighborhood.
So after that we lied around in bed and watched Tracy Morgan’s Best-of Saturday Night LIve and I got my manfriend faded on Christmas-issue Hennessey VSOP and made him tell me all his secrets, which actually I may end up regretting. Sometimes you don’t want to know everything, even if you think you do.
I do want to know everything about Tracy Morgan, though. It was really interesting seeing his audition tape on that VHS – did you all know he used to weigh like 4 times what he does now? – and then seeing Conan try to figure him out like 7 years later on his show… white talk show hosts do not know how to deal with Tracy Morgan, by the way, even Conan who seems like he’d be semi-the most down out of any of them. They all act like they have never met anyone from the projects, while still trying to act like they actually get what he is saying to them, while still being funnier than they will ever hope to be. Also, he will like give people a straight answer often, but – and i have seen Conan and Jimmy Kimmel do this – but they will think he is making a joke, and laugh or joke back, so when Tracy realizes they don’t get it, he will just turn it into a joke and take it way out there, so far out there that they are like WTF, like telling Conan his son is going thru puberty and masturbates too much. It’s really intense.
Today I’m going over to the man’s and watching the director’s cut of my favorite movie バトル・ロワイアル on the projection-screen television, which his roommate “borrowed” from his work. I can’t wait to watch teens off each other in people-sized proportions. Nothing gets me in the holiday spirit like wall-scale unadulterated gore. Word to my sister Kelsi.