The Spirit of Angst-Giving (Future)

There's always something about the Holiday Season that saddens me. I realize that I'm a mutant for feeling this way, but I am filled with melancholy, ennui, and a number of other foreign words that mean roughly the same thing. By January I will be thousands of dollars poorer than I am today, my five children will be scattered to four different states, and my professional life will go back to being an infinite procession of Excel spreadsheets punctuated by the occasional PowerPoint presentation. Is that all there is?

But wait, there's also the life-affirming breath of angst. My ex-wife has decided that my two youngest kids won't be spending Thanksgiving with us this year and there isn't a damned thing I can do about it.

Well, there is haiku. Here's a hint: when you read a haiku of mine and it mentions a greedy scavenging rodent, it's not exactly a nature poem:

late November —
chasing a fat squirrel
away from the pumpkin