As I imagine you know, there’s a protocol for getting into an elevator.

Dear Santa,

Last Christmas, I laid out some (home-made) chocolate chip cookies with a tall glass of (skimmed) milk by the chimney.

I spent the entire day baking them.

Just for you. 

We’re rapidly approaching the end of the year, so I figured it was time to do a little comic collaboration. With my daughter.

Welcome, one and all, the the December 2021 issue of Defenestration: the literary magazine that has been dedicated to humor for so long that we stopped keeping track. (That’s a lie. Eileen has been keeping track. One deep scar on the wall of her living room for every month Defenestration has existed. It looks as if a cat the size of a Volkswagen has been trying to claw its way out of her home.)

As an experiment, a very rich man gave me one hundred million dollars, with the stipulation that I’d let him kill me in ten years, about ten years ago. For some reason it kind of slipped my mind. That’s how I am: taxes catch me by surprise every year; I forget plans until the last second and rush out of the house; once I left my private jet in the Cayman’s because I went back commercial by mistake. The only thing that was on my mind when I got the text reminding me about my agreement was the excruciatingly drawn-out remodeling of the left side of my mansion (when facing the mansion). It was a fairly nice text, as texts about your eventual murder, from your eventual murderer, go.