Monday, Monday, was an Eeyore day, a dreary slog of stone-gray sky, puddles, and wind that didn’t blow hard enough to be any sort of thrill but just hard enough to keep pushing back the hood of my sodden down parka as I dragged the dog through the cold rain, leaving me with wet hair and blurred eyeglasses. Teddy and I have been down for the count with influenza and by Monday had reached the Very Boring Stage of convalescence. We have had fevers and are coughing things up that you cannot describe in family newspapers.
The most interesting event to occur during the last six days was that the pediatrician confirmed, with a swab, that what Teddy and I have is influenza A(H1N1)pdm09. It’s a humdrum strain, nothing special, the predominant flu in the Mid-Atlantic this gloomy December, but it was still gratifying to have a scientific diagnosis to tuck into the back pocket (like a damp Kleenex) in case anyone should suggest we only have head colds and ought to stop complaining.
Here comes Santa Claus!
It seemed like a good idea to make the best of our mucous-y incarceration in this runup week to Yuletide by putting on cozy socks and watching a holiday movie, so we poured melted butter on the popcorn, pushed the protesting cat and dog aside to make room under a three-foot-thick pile of duvets, and — coughing, hacking, and lacking even the appetite to eat the hot popcorn — queued up “Red One,” the Christmas-themed action movie starring Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson as Callum Drift, commander of North Pole security.
I guess it sort of makes sense that a group of knuckleheads making movie-producer decisions around a boardroom table in Culver City, Calif., would greenlight a major Hollywood motion picture in which the Santa’s gingerbread-and-gumdrop village covered in royal-icing snow gets reimagined as a futuristic cityscape in an apocalyptic palette of black, scarlet, and violet for an action-adventure featuring a militarized elf force in which The Rock fights Krampus to the death. But did no one notice how depressing “Red One” was turning out?
All you need to know about “Red One” is that Santa is a macho dude who works out with free weights on his office floor and talks to his right-hand man, The Rock, in world-weary clichés from a thousand patriotic war-buddy flicks. The North Pole looks like Las Vegas, and the armed members of ELF — the Enforcement, Logistics, and Fortification force — travel through its neon streets in the arctic dark astride turbo-jet-powered snowmobiles, zapping bad guys with taser-like weapons that knock the bad guys unconscious but leave them standing up, nodding there like so many junkies on Turk Street in the Tenderloin.
Someone on the screenwriting team also decided to have the cast of Santaland characters — such as a heavily armed, seven-foot-tall talking polar bear called Agent Garcia — use a lot of four-letter words, though, I guess, really, the bad language doesn’t matter much because by the time you get to The Rock calling someone a “d@$%head” while angrily driving a Corvette Stingray, small children will have run from the room crying and inconsolable. The New York Post called “Red One” a “$250-million turd.” This is the first time I’ve ever agreed with The New York Post about anything.
Never mind! It’s time to make the Christmas cookies!
It’s time to make the chocolate springerle from the Gingerhaus baking blog, the Neapolitan cookies (cherry, chocolate, and vanilla stripes), and the gingerbread cheesecake cookies from The New York Times.
Last night I asked ChatGPT, my new best friend in quarantine, why it is that my brain isn’t working properly while I have influenza A(H1N1)pdm09, and ChatGPT says it is because of something called “cytokines,” which “can cross the blood-brain barrier and disrupt normal brain function, causing inflammation that contributes to fatigue, confusion, and brain fog.” Teddy and I are still operating on only about 50 percent battery power, thought-wise and energy-wise, but the boredom stage is so critical that we can no longer tolerate watching television and have decided to bake. We bumble around the kitchen like a pair of drunks.
The Times instructs us to pack the center of a chewy, spiced-sugar-rolled ginger cookie with a thick, soft lump of vanilla cheesecake, employing a technique that the online reviewers call finicky and frustrating, so each bite delivers both cookie and cheesecake. It so happens that I found a kitchen gadget called the Banana Loca Banana Stuffer and Corer among the thrift shelves at the Bargain Box back in the era before we got the flu, and after I’m done trying to write this column I intend to wrap myself in my thickest leopard-spotted cardigan, put a woolly hat on my head, roll up my sleeves, wash my hands thoroughly with a surgical scrub, and inject the cheesecake straight into the dough. The Banana Loca looks like a yellow space ray gun. Stand back, Christmas d@$%heads, Krampuses, and Grinches! I am the commander of the ELF force.