ArcaMax

Yeah. It was a hell of a Christmas. Elon Musk was in the manger, nursing greedily at Mary's exhausted body. One of the Wise Men was a crooked New York City real estate developer with an impossibly cotton candy combover, and Matt Gaetz was lustily pursuing the sheep who came to see the babe.

By the time the REAL apocalypse gets here, things will be so horrible even the zombies won't want any part of America. The hell with zombies, anyway. Sure, they're nasty and homicidal, and they got body parts falling off of 'em, but at least we didn't elect any of 'em. They're an outside plague, and we're not to blame. If we ever do elect one, look for either Florida or Missouri to produce the first zombie senator.

A zombie would be the best candidate for Florida because, by the time the zombie got elected, all the parts that make you buy 17-year-old girls would have fallen off the zombie. Gerrymandering in the pants may be our best hope for moral legislators.

As for Missouri, when I was growing up there, it was a place where people grew corn and took baths in sausage gravy. We lived in white frame houses with three bedrooms and a garage. Dad's name was initials; J.R., R.T., something like that, or else everyone called him "Junior," and Mom's name was Opal. It was the apex of American civilization in terms of really big cars and living room furniture upholstered in green velvet. Currently, Missouri is a vicious, heavily armed backwater led by greasy illiterates who are terrified of two men kissing.

Against this backdrop of third-rate people producing first-rate disaster, my wife, Deborah, bought me a flannel shirt and blue fleece-lined house slippers for Christmas, which is a good way to say, "Next Christmas, you get the walker."

OK. So, she also got me a round electronic ball, an Echo Dot. You talk to it, it plays music, and that's what I understand about the thing. She'll set it up for me, and I'll get it to play hard country music from the '60s. Think George Jones. Think the kind of drinkin' and cheatin' songs you used to hear in a cinderblock bar called "Rusty's Hangout."

There's a pocket between Christmas and New Year's Eve, a hammock of bloated laziness when there's nothing left to buy but liquor. I believe the pocket is when the veil between who you are and who you thought you were going to be is thinnest, and so you can't stop thinking about how you never got to play professional soccer or why you didn't marry your first boyfriend, the one who finished junior college and doesn't trim his toenails in the living room.

Christmas picks you up gently and raises you until you can see the little white church in the snow-covered Valley of the Pines. New Year's drops you back down in the suicide swamp between mortgage and work. All your addictions are active, and all your reactions are passive, and you don't even like working remotely as much as you thought you would.

If what you really want is gasoline at $1 a gallon, and you sold your country to get it, and you still didn't get it, I'll meet you back here in the pocket next year. We'll get drunk and play cheatin' songs on my Echo Dot and wait for the zombies together.

To find out more about Marc Dion, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.