Christmas in November and Hell on Earth

I went up to Squamish BC this weekend to see the fam - it's hard for us to find a time in December that works for everyone so we this year we're doing Christmas the weekend of US thanksgiving.  Really nice hotel room on the local golf course, portable pre-lit tree, brunch in the hotel in the morning, a trip to my sister's construction job site in the afternoon, and fish and chips takeout for dinner.  Then we opened presents.  What could be more traditional?

Really it has been delightful.  It snowed fairly heavily this week, and the entire Sea to Sky corridor, on which Squamish is one of several possible way stations, is set right inside a mountain range.  The sight of Santa himself driving his sleigh across the alpenglow couldn't make this more seasonal and festive. 

Last night I dreamt I was on a boarding school university campus.  I was married to a man; my husband and I were taking different degrees so I'd see him between classes.  He was in the dorm for early risers.  As I was on my way back from a really late night film class, I ran across him in a narrow bed waking from sleep.  He took off his trunks under the covers and tossed them at me.  "Is that an invitation?" I asked.   He replied sarcastically but in the affirmative.

I went to get ready and ran across an old girlfriend.  She showed me her six-pack from recent workouts and at the graze of my hand across her bare stomach I felt like I was melting and drowning.  We made out; it was hot and very risky, right in the middle of the morning in a building full of my colleagues.  Creeping back to my dorm I spotted my old boss seated in an open air lecture within line of sight of where I had just been.  We made eye contact and even though I couldn't tell if she had seen me, I flushed with guilt.  She leaned over to someone else in my department and whispered.

Of course when I got back to my husband's dorm room he was already up and gone.  I wondered whether I should try to explain where I'd been.

Next door was the fiction library building.  I walked in through the glass door, which streamed with condensation from the exhalations of all the people already inside meeting the winter cold outside, and pulled a book off the shelf at random.  It turned out to be a handwritten account of the end of the world, illustrated by pictures of tunnels going to hell.

"The entrances were set in pairs and threes across a great wall, under a fiery sunset.  There was an enormous communal wailing and the rank smell and bitter taste of sulfur as we drew closer to the rippled mouths of earth.  People hung back, afraid, but each in turn in the vast line of humanity, pushed forward by the frightened masses behind them, was sucked through one of these holes like a straw, feet-first, so that we could see the horror on their faces as they left us."

Next to this book was a first edition copy of The Cat in The Hat.