“Everything went absolutely wrong over ‘the holidays’. It was like some bizarre cascade of miniature apocalypses were fighting each other to cram their way through the hallway of the last 15 days of December.

I am not even going to list the disasters. My own teeth began to assault various soft tissues within my mouth at random intervals while I suffered the ten plagues of Egypt in repetitive sequences. I took myself out to an expensive restaurant only to be infected with bubonic plague by the young woman making my salad.

I swear that time actually ran backwards in order that I might re-suffer, retrospectively, disasters of my history in fresh newly-minted hells that assailed me with a passionate remorselessness previously unimaginable to me.

A friend lent me their car, and every single night some new nightmare organism invaded it. Bats. Frogs. Centipedes. Scorpions. Ants. Wasps. Leeches. Bedbugs. Rats. And five things I cannot even name. Also: it threw a ‘coolant leak’ that required I negotiate the five of the 12 circles of hell to resolve.

I cannot believe I survived the tangled, mangling death-grip of the past 16 days. Frankly, most of me wishes I hadn’t, because now I’m going to be having nightmares about them for the rest of my ridiculous life, or rather, the self accelerating dance of my slow and lethal desiccation.”

— Bobby Yingo at the Christmas Room