The Bathtub is Full of Feathers and I Can't Find the Christmas Cards

When I got home tonight, there were feathers in the bathtub. Lots of feathers, small gray fluffy ones and some longer gray pin feathers, like quill pens for very small people wearing tiny frock coats and minuscule wigs. There were also little muddy footprints all around the toilet seat, but I know what those are. Those are there because Mr. Bill, when he comes inside with muddy feet, likes to go and wash his paws in the toilet. Seriously. I know it sounds insane, but I watched him do it this morning, which should right there have clued me in to the fact that this was going to be a slightly more than ordinarily surreal day.

There were feathers in the kitchen, too, and feathers in my room. I know what this means. This means that Barbieri has caught another bird. The last time he did this my friend D. had come home with me to fix a kitchen drawer, and thank the gods he was there in all his reassuring maleness, because when I walked into the kitchen it looked like an avian abattoir. It was horrible; 3 inches of feathers all over the floor and an artistically laid out bloody wing complete with entrail portions by the door. D. cleaned this up for me, which is as it should be, because for one thing he owes me like $300 and also I cook vegan meals for him, which is over and above the cause of friendship.

Tonight there seem to be nothing but feathers. This has also happened before, and I'm not sure what it means. I really really hope that the rest of the bird isn't somewhere, dead or maybe dying, but basically I approach this problem by not thinking about it. At all. I decided to leave the feathers where they were. I was mad when I got home anyway because there were no packages on my porch. I have ordered all these Christmas presents online and they should be here by now, but, of course, they aren't. This is a drag, because M. is coming home tomorrow and half these packages are presents for him, and he is totally, completely, incapable of ignoring a package on the porch. At the least he will shake them to smithereens and more probably he will open them; he won't be able to resist. Damn you, Oriental Trading Company, Archie McPhee, and REI! You all suck!

However, because M. is coming home tomorrow, I had to get Christmas presents for his houseparents today. I got them two okay looking if cheap handmade mugs from the Appalachian Craft Center and a pound, well 12 ounces, of organic fair trade coffee, because, well, they are just those sort of people. So after work, I bought the mugs (while I was there I also bought an awesome face mug for Auntie A., the Queen of Bohemia, which is great except it was expensive as shit, like $32, and now I have to get something else for my mom, so that the balance of power doesn't shift too far. If anyone is trying to square all this spending with my oft repeated tales of financial woe, all I can say is, Citibank was dumb enough to give me another credit card, and I was dumb enough to accept it. My current plan is to pay Christmas off with my tax refund in April. Yeah, right. Anyway.) and then I went to the gym, since I'm on a big health/fitness/alcohol free/hardly smoke since it's too damn cold to go outside/use special wrinkle reducing moisturizer every night kick. Then I went to Earthfare, where I enriched the hippies by some 100 of Citibank's dollars, and got some hippie food. Then, of course, I came home. It strikes me that this whole paragraph is stupid and inconsequential to the main point of this post, which is, of course, that I can't find the fucking Christmas cards!

About 10 years ago or so I bought a couple packages of Christmas cards. They have a beautiful moody photo of some wintry trees on them, by some Japanese artist. Very minimal, stark, tasteful - obviously not me. Possibly the me I would like to be, but not, actually, me. So I have never sent any of them. This is due to three main causes: 1) I feel guilty sending anything but homemade cards (after all, I am, theoretically, an artiste). 2) I am not really organized enough to send Christmas cards, let's face it, and 3) I can never, ever find the damn things in the winter. I find them every summer, sure, in July when I'm rooting around for oil pastels and watercolors, I find them behind the art supplies. I look at them, think, wow, those are gorgeous, this Christmas I'm sending those, fuck this handmade shit. Then December rolls around. December 14, to be exact, today, when I need a tasteful Christmas card to tuck into the tastefully wrapped, ecologically friendly, local artisan supportive gift I have just gotten ready for M.'s houseparents. The Japanese cards would be perfect. Can I find them? No, of course not. I found a bunch of last years cards, which were a hideous color xerox of a very scary Christmas drawing I did incorporating collage elements of all the freaks in the Weekly World News (the tattooed wolfman, the reptile king, the world's fattest transvestite) saying Happy Holidays. I sense this would not be the right card for the houseparents. I sense that they already think I'm deeply weird. There was that little contretemps over the Anarchist's Cookbook. . . namely, that I have no problem with M. owning it, since I have total faith that his intrinsic laziness will win out over his fondness for explosives and thus prevent him from ever actually concocting one of the recipes.

So, in my quest for the cards, I have emptied out the junk cabinet, finding 3 polaroid cameras which may or may not work (noone will ever know since the film is so ungodly expensive,) untold envelopes of negatives, a big box of oil pastels, my college sketchbook, more of that glow in the dark paper (that's a good thing, this year's Christmas card is glow in the dark collage), two xeroxes of an article on Arts & Crafts architecture, a xerox from a 16th century Islamic book on astrology, a bunch of faded construction paper, the blank watercolor cards I was looking for last summer, and on and on. It's all on the floor now, in merry little piles, except for the cut out Japanese prints from an old calendar that I've been looking for to glue on the bookcase, which are now on the table, on top of the wrapping paper, on top of the cut paper elements for the new Christmas cards, on top of the pine cone debris from the pinecone wreath I made last weekend in a moment of total madness and on top of the African violet I'm repotting into a high heeled black pump that belongs to my friend J, and which my dog Theo ate the mate of one evening. I think this will be a thoughtful Christmas gift, although she'll probably brain me with it. She was very understanding about the other pump, but it's possible this will revive sore memories. Yet art must out, right?

I called my daughter and said, where are the Japanese Christmas cards? Behind the art supplies, she said. No, I said, they're not. Then they're in that cabinet full of junk, she said. At that point I decided to leave everything on the floor and write this, and so, now it's 40 minutes and one long phone call later, and I still haven't found the Christmas cards. And the bathtub is still full of feathers.