(Speaker Boehner re-laying the sod in the House yesterday. Photo House of Representatives.)

It is a lot like that old joke about the landscaping crew from Hamtramk. They had been off for the holidays and drinking a lot of distilled potato peelings. The days off meant that some training had to be re-instituted:

“Green Side Up!” shouted the boss as the workers were laying fresh sod. “Green side up!”

The little men are scaling the side of the my wing of Big Pink, grinder going, and it feels like being on the ship again, needle guns grinding endlessly on the rusting steel.

I have been up on and off since 0100 to greet the day. The best dream of the night was of taking photos of all my precious crap, writing the story of what the items are and where they came from and post it all on eBay. The dream made me feel buoyant and light as a feather.

I wanted to know what the House had done on the permanent crisis in the night, and it looks like the immediate catastrophe has been deferred for a month or so.

I was relieved to discover I am no longer a plutocrat. Those bastards not paying their fair share now start with the  “millionaires and billionaires” making $450,000 for dual filers. It is enough of a concession to reason that I will keep my pitchfork and torch in the closet for the moment and not march on the castle.

Of course, the measure does nothing much to address the real problem of revenue and cash outlays from the Treasury, which is still working overtime printing money to meet that evil dwarf Mr. Bernanke’s perpetual Quantitative Easing and Turbo Tax Timmy Geithner’s sweetheart relationship with Wall Street. Somebody ought to remind him which side of the sod should be showing.

My favorite story of the surreal negotiations in Congress this week was a report in Politico of an encounter between the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body. Apparently last Friday, the Cliff looming, and Mr. Boehner saw Senator Harry Reid just outside the Oval Office at the White House. Mr. Reid had publically accused the Speaker of running an undemocratic House. In fact, he called Mr. Boehner “a dictator.”

The encounter was illuminating about the level of discourse over these holidays.

Boehner: “Go F—-yourself.”

Reid, disconcerted: “What are you talking about?”

Boehner: “Go F— yourself.”

My first real tax this morning was a querulous call from a co-worker for a weekly report- and I thought briefly about giving a recap of the Michigan loss to South Carolina while drinking Bloody Mary’s at a kitschy bar in Clarendon.

Instead I threw something together and now find myself behinder than I would like and realized I am scheduled to be in Reston for a ten o’clock meeting with a mild hangover and no desire whatsoever to start the working week after all the travail of the holidays.

It is going to be a screwy and querulous day, I suspect, with more to come on Thursday and Friday as we start the new year with a triple Monday (two Monday Mornings deferred already this week) and the haze of the old year still hanging above everything.

I suppose it is good to know that I am not really a billionaire or a millionaire, but I certainly would have liked to have had the chance, even if it was just a hallucination.

Hey, Congress: “Green side up!”

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra