Santa’s bailout

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, but only if you are sneaky, greedy, unregulated and you don’t actually produce anything tangible. The rest of you get clean coal in your stockings.

The first item on my personal Christmas list this year is a bailout. I’d like the government to forgive all my well-intentioned mistakes—like those credit cards I used when I thought the future was rosy and I was fighting terrorism by buying things at Bloomingdale’s. Hey, we all need a little cashmere, don’t we? And while the government is at it, could they pick up the tab on my home equity loan? I mean, what’s a kitchen without a granite countertop? Those pricey Toto toilets save water, you know. It’s all about saving the environment.

The second item on my list is protective clothing. In the last year I have had a bike accident resulting in a head injury and two falls resulting in sprains, bruises and contusions. I want protection and I want it now. I’m thinking Kevlar for the head and some kind of fiberglass leg gear.

My doctor says I walk with a locked gait, so I want a key to unlock my gait. Otherwise I am considering drinking heavily. I hear liquor unlocks a lot of gaits.

Maybe I just need to get a giant hamster ball to get around in. It could roll me downstairs and I could get lots of healthy exercise without falling down, by scrambling up the hill to town. They would have to find a way to make the material for my hamster ball clear so I could see where I was going. Then again, I expect most people would get out of the way of a woman in a giant hamster ball moving down Main Street with a mini-Schnauzer yapping behind her. I think Wall Street should invest in my giant hamster ball technology instead of those creepy credit swaps.

But I could forgo all this if I could just get my memory cache cleared. Last week my computer forgot who I was. It woke up one morning and said it had “no known users.” What if that happened to me, I feared? It wouldn’t be as easy as taking me into the Apple Store and letting a genius have at me for an hour, would it? But if I could get a clean sweep of all the useless information—such as how to ride a bike now that I have the giant hamster ball technology—I could store many more poems and computer passwords in my frontal lobes.

It would be great if the memory clearing procedure could be synchronized with my husband. Only one of us would need to know certain things, saving trillions of bytes of data between the two of us. That way, when he forgot a name, I would know it and when I needed to know our bank code, he would ante up. Come to think of it, I want the bank codes; he can have the address list. This is beginning to take on some urgency. At the rate we are going, we won’t have room in our memory banks to remember our grandchildren’s names, if we ever have grandchildren.

There is just one last thing. I ask for it every year and I never get it, but that won’ t stop me from asking. I’d like some world peace. If the only way to get it was by being sneaky, greedy and unregulated, I’d gladly sign up. In the meantime, I’ll try being good to my neighbors, kind to my family and a nuisance to my legislators. Stranger things than world peace have happened since last Christmas and it never hurts to ask.

But, please Santa, no clean coal!

- Cass Collins