I’m listening to Charlie Brown Christmas music on the laptop, and watching the minutes whirl by like snowflakes (yes, I’ve seen some at some point in the distant past) while my thoughts settle into drifts. A pure white winter wasteland, devoid of sentience, let alone cognition. I mean the tree is lit, but nobody’s home. But man, this music is cool. The album came out in ’65 – with the TV show – the year I was four.

Back in those days we didn’t listen with our laptops and I-Pods. It took a strong man to to hand crank whatever needed cranking, be it the model-T, the ice cream maker, or the gramophone.

We’d lost our innocence with the fall of Camelot too years and a month earlier, but a sweet jazz piano riff to the tune of O Tannenbaum could still turn heads. We couldn’t have envisioned the soulsucking cynicism of the Patriot Act.

I never thought it was such a bad little tree. … maybe it just needs a little love.

Oh, I’m rambling … here, watch for yourself.