After the Holidays in Park Slope

From his early 20s, Devlin had a complicated view of Christmas. In his first apartment on PPW (aka, “the Parkside”), $175 a month for a one bedroom, he bought his first own Christmas tree but somehow never got around to taking it down until around Washington’s birthday. For weeks and weeks, his friends would drop by, convinced that, in his depth and creativity (if not depravity), Devlin had created some kind of Fluxus-style art work. Others thought it was a statement on Christmas and commercialism. His girlfriend played with his cat, Nova (so named because he found her the weekend of the Nova Convention, celebrating William S. Burroughs), and just shook her head in bewilderment. But in fact, it was largely sloth. The way inaction has a way of piling up on itself until, despite all good intentions, if you haven’t done it already, by the time you realize it, it is by then just Too Damn Late. As a result, being new to the building, Devlin was just so self-conscious about leaving a trail of fir needles and tinsel from his apartment, down the stairs, through the lobby, to the street, that he quickly realized that a plan was necessary. Therefore, in the dead of night, Devlin sawed the 6 foot tree apart with a serrated steak knife, like Raymond Burr did with his victim in REAR WINDOW, while fir needles scattered all about him like green-gray snowflakes, before putting it in a few black garbage bags and dumping it on the street on garbage day. He never bought a Christmas tree again after that.

--Brooklyn Beat