Vadim Temkin’s digital art on Facebook for Christmas 2023, (Gregorian-calendar) New Year 2024, and lunar New Year 2024:
[Vadim’s greeting:] Merry Xmas and Happy New Year of Dragon!
Since this is Vadim’s composition, Santa Claus is a shirtless muscle-hunk: not only jolly, but also an object of gay desire — not to mention the rider of a fearsome dragon, the tamer of a demonic monster, the vehicle of all-conquering love. This Santa is playfully silly, smoking hot, and truly noble, all at once.
The lunar New Year 2/10/24 begins a year of the dragon; I am in fact a dragon, born in the dragon year 1940. In my last double dragon year, 2012, I frankly had no expectation of seeing another, since I viewed my somehow surviving multiple brushes with death to make it to the age of 71 as something of a miracle. So, should I make it through to February 10th, at the age of 83, I will be very pleasantly surprised.
In the meantime, I view every new day as a gift. Even when, as yesterday, I awake in great pain, barely able to walk and not able to use my right arm. (Largely a side effect of one of the drugs I’m taking, whose dosage was just doubled, but a dreadful beginning to Christmas Eve.) But then things got better, and I was able to take part in a very pleasant motss-zoom, before things got much worse again and I had to sleep for several hours, after which I was able to order in a Christmas Eve pizza and do a tiny posting, just to show that I was still alive.
I move through all of this in solitude, which I have taken advantage of by failing to shave or make my bed (and then feeling vaguely guilty about Not Having Kept Things Up, but then I tell myself that these are tasks I do for visitors, not for myself, and visitors are rare, and even then they’re almost all caregivers). On the other hand, I’m scrupulous about washing my hands, because I’m offended by sticky and smelly fingers, and my privates, because I’m offended by Crotch Pong. I live mostly in t-shirts and briefs, but they’re reasonably fresh and clean (clean in the hygienic sense; my GAY AS FUCK and FAGGOT shirts are of course linguistically dirty), and I put on gym shorts when I have to interact with the world outside my door, even just to bring the newspaper in. My social life these days is on-line, not irl.
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