My Christmas Letter

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As I said, having a sense of humor will get you in trouble nowadays, and this whole thing would be funny if I wasn’t in leg-irons.

Dear friends and family:

I’m writing this Christmas missive while my court-appointed lawyer trades cryptocurrencies on his phone. He was recently laid off by an investment bank and since he’s never been in court and has zero criminal justice experience, I expect my future missives will be postmarked Alligator Alcatraz.

I’m in a bit of a pickle at the moment, as I was arrested near the Canadian border while attempting to beat the high tariff fees by sneaking a load of lumber across the border via an old logging road. Apparently a drone spotted me. Since it was still dark, maybe they have infrared cameras on the drones now, who knows.

I might have skated through that bust except they ran some kind of scan on me and concluded I was a domestic terrorist. I know having a sense of humor will get you in trouble nowadays, but does my “Yoda for President” bumper sticker make me a terrorist?

They seemed to take an uncommon interest in the Grateful Dead logo on my rear window, and since the Dead have fallen out of the culture’s meme-scape, maybe they reckoned that was some secret membership sign or something.

I guess I didn’t do myself any favors when the interrogation started, because after a while I said, “If I had a wooden leg, would that make me a table?”

Apparently my lack of online activity raised a red flag, and my explanation that I’d been banned from every Big Tech platform only stoked their suspicion. I always joked that I should watch more videos of puppies and kittens to blend in some, and I guess that’s not far off the mark. If I’d viewed more videos of puppies and kittens, I might be a free man right now instead of a suspected terrorist heading for Alligator Alcatraz.

After I told the interrogator to put it where the sun doesn’t shine, they rigged up some AI interrogation gizmo. The male voice asked me questions, and I spun out a tall tale that yes, I was intent on bringing down the status quo with my truck and a load of lumber, and maybe the AI chatbot would like to guess how this fit into my compadres’ grand plan.

It did its sympathetic therapist number on me but I didn’t bite, and I threw all sorts of wacky clues about the real plan at it. When it started asking me about the connection between Hannah Arendt, The Little Prince and Sugar Frosted Flakes, I reckoned it was either hallucinating or working on some mirror-universe thing that was way above my pay grade.

As you know, I am often my own worst enemy, and my last clue to the AI chatbot interrogator was to mention that the whole terrorist plot was based on protecting our precious bodily fluids, and investigators should ask to speak with Colonel Batguano.

As I said, having a sense of humor will get you in trouble nowadays, and this whole thing would be funny if I wasn’t in leg-irons. Anyway, put a Grateful Dead skull or a Dancing Bears bumper sticker on your vehicle, if you dare.

Because yes, if you have a wooden leg, you will be taken for a table.

This post is a parody.

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Source: http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2025/12/my-christmas-letter.html