Everything’s unwrapped, the champagne’s gone flat, and even the hangovers are over. While my holidays were full of warmth and good cheer and that uniquely Simmermon brand of stressed-out love, I’m glad to be entering that great grey yawn of real winter. Running around outside SUCKS until mid-April and when I have my daily panic that my life is slipping past, I can look out the window and feel fine about having a laptop strapped to my face. In the factory-blended oatmeal that is an East Coast winter, every numbing day that ends like all the rest is at least one day closer to spring.

My New Years’ was spent having cocktails and a home-cooked meal with my girlfriend, best friend, his wife, and their new baby. My New Years’ celebrations in years past have also involved copious amounts of booze, screaming and vomiting, but this years’ was different.

While the first decade or so of David Allen Browne’s life is going to be happy and full of love, he’s going to have no choice but to become grim, selfish and willfully ignorant in order to rebel against his hilarious, brilliant and loving parents once he hits puberty. Hopefully he’ll snap out of it before it’s time to take the SATs.

Christmas was different, too. I brought my girlfriend home, for one thing. It’s a big deal for me to bring somebody home for a number of reasons:

• My sister and I have pretty well inoculated our parents against cultural/racial hangups, accidental profanity, body art and punk-influenced fashion choices … all known causes of heart failure to conservative parents. My mom can even say “fuck” without making a face now. But my family can smell a bullshit heart from a running mile, and the false politeness that ensues is deeply embarrassing. Nobody makes it across the threshold of the Simmermon unless they’re top shelf for real.
• Also, my grandmother kind of hates anyone that me and my uncle have ever dated. She comes around eventually, but I can take no responsibility for any eye-rolling, interrupting, or ignoring until she does. Folks that can’t handle it don’t make the cut.
• The relationship must be about much more than the physical. As I mentioned before, my family can sniff out a bullshit heart. In a small house with two parents, a sister, two lively and curious dogs and a “no ring, no shared bedroom” policy, that physical side is going to have to take a little holiday of its own.

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Behind that adorable black face, behind those sweet mournful eyes lies the soul of an unapologetic shit-eater.

For real.

That is not a metaphor. She’s gone from stealing fruitcake and puking it under the tree last Christmas to full-blown coprophagia, gobbling it right up from between dead leaves on the ground at night. Cold and hard or piping hot and still steaming, she doesn’t care and she does it quick, too, too quick to catch sometimes. She just can’t help herself.

Layla’s my sister Jess’s dog, half-beagle and half lab with incurable separation anxiety. She was taken from her mother too young, and consequently has massive incurable anxiety. Jess has tried training camps, reading dog books, everything. Nothing works. Every time Jess is gone for a little while, Layla overindulges in something she shouldn’t: fruitcake, shoes, a purse, now fecal matter.

All training methods exhausted, my sister now just spoils the dog completely rotten, talking to her in a high, squealing voice, carrying her in her arms like a large infant and allowing the dog to “kiss” her directly on the lips.

A few weeks ago, Layla vomited a five-inch turd onto my parents’ living room carpet. My mom called Jess up immediately to report the news, saying only

“Your dog has vomited a massive turd onto the carpet. Yes, a turd. Go ahead and let her lick your lips again. As a concerned mother, I hope you’ve got good health insurance,”

and hung up.

Such was the climate of the household this Thanksgiving. Everyone was exhausted and frustrated with this new habit, this repugnant fetish for a newly repulsive creature that’s far too cute to kick.

Jess and I spent Thanksgiving day over at my aunt and uncle’s taking care of my grandparents. They moved in sometime last summer for a few weeks while my grandpa recuperated from an operation, and it’s become clear that they’re in no shape to live independently. My grandpa’s 88 years old with congestive heart failure, kidney failure and diabetes. He needs a walker to get around now and can’t lift his legs by himself.

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If the Garment District is low on wire hangers, they need to call me soon. If Smuckers has a jar crisis this week, they need to let me know by Friday. As mentioned previously, I’m a terrible packrat and I’m moving. Everything must go, and it’s a little heartbreaking.

While the bleeding-heart greenie in me, the boy partially reared by the thriftiest woman of the entire Depression era hates to see such useful stuff hit the bin, there’s another kind of heartbreak happening here. A lot of the quirky errata that clots my shelves is soaked in personal, emotional significance, and on some level, letting the item go means chucking the memory out into the road.

In my mind it’s no different than Congolese power figures or Orishas in Santeria - collections of ordinary objects are repositories for powerful feelings and forces beyond human understanding. One man’s wooden figure with nails in it is another man’s prayer for strength, made in a time of duress and filled with sadness and hope.

Or, in my case, an Incredible Hulk pinata:

My sister came to visit me on for my 29th birthday (2005) and gave me this pinata, filled with candy. I was suffering some serious heartbreak at the time — a woman I loved had left 2 weeks before to go home to her side of the planet. I felt numb most of the time, a paper dummy filled with wood shavings. Sometimes termites would invade my wooden body and chew up my guts, making me cry, cry, cry. My work was heading south, and every day at the office felt like stepping into crosshairs.

Jess (my sister) and I had been on the outs for several months. We spoke, but briefly, and mostly at family functions. Every time we talked, we focused on not fighting rather than actually communicating.

We love each other so deeply, me and Jess, that it’s hard sometimes to cut each other a break. She and the lady that had recently left shared a love for me, a naked loathing for each other and a temper like our green paper friend up there. I’d been stuck in the middle and it made me resent everyone.

But then it was my birthday, at one of the lowest points in my life, and Jess came to visit. And instead of saying anything at all about my situation, she came in with a big bag and bigger heart and gave me a big, long hug as soon as she walked in the door.

“You know I love you, Jeff, right? You’re my fucking brother and you always will be. Now check this thing out,” she said, pulling the pinata from the bag. “Open that bad bitch up, ’cause we both need some candy right about now.”

Then she took me out to a Mexican restaurant where we ate, drank margaritas and talked about everything in the world.

Do you think the person that finds that pinata will pick all that up, too? Either they’ll get a sweet blast from the Hulk’s paper skin and feel a lot more at home in the world — or I’ll get to hang onto that a little longer. It’s a win-win either way, really.