Please Help Me Make a Christmas Party Playlist for the Christmas Party I'm Regretfully Hosting

My neighborhood holds a progressive Christmas party every year across three houses. The host houses change every year and zwoman (in a moment of great drunken weakness) agreed to host the first leg this year. I am dead serious when I say all of you are invited. If I have to open my doors to a bunch of people I don't know and a handful of people I actively dislike, then you can come too. December 16th, be there or be square. I'll make sure there's enough booze for everyone to get plastered.

This party is a bit of a drag for several reasons, not the least of which is the music situation. The first two houses never have any music, and the third house plays Taylor Swift to make all the drunken fools dance. That's not on tap for this year in zhome. I will have a stunningly dominant playlist for my portion of the party and it will be so because all of you will help me.

I want to include cool takes on classics, like "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" by Jimmy Smith. Along those lines, a few jams from "A Christmas Gift to You from Phil Spector" will make the cut because everyone recognizes every song on the album and they're great ... and I roomed with Spector for two years so I owe him some spins. I want to include older groovy stuff like "North Pole Rock" by Cathy Sharpe or "Gee Whiz it's Christmas" by Carla Thomas. I am definitely including some punk rock numbers like "Father Christmas" by The Kinks and "Merry Christmas (I Don't Want to Fight Tonight)" by The Ramones. "Christmas in Hollis" is a given, as is "Back Door Santa" by Clarence Carter because that's what Run-D.M.C. sampled and it's a damn good song.

I absolutely 100% need to include subversive songs that will make my neighbors go "WTF" but I don't want to cross certain lines. I am not including "Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa" by De La Soul because pedophilia is just too inappropriate for a holiday party (Roy Moore is not invited even if he reads this blog). I also am not including "White Palms" by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club even though it's one of my favorite songs and it talks about Jesus because it's too off the Christmas mark--it literally dares Jesus to come back. "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" doesn't even deserve a link simply because it's too bad a song.

If you're feeling too lazy to contribute to my playlist, go to hell. I emailed Rex Doane for some subversive suggestions and he replied! A guy who has no idea who I am replied to my request for playlist help so you can too. Rex generally suggested I check out his playlist archive for gems like last year's Christmas Eve show. He also gave me two of his favorite low brow/no brow Christmas songs:





Please suggest some songs and come to my (god-awful) party to see if your picks made the playlist.

G:TB Special Correspondent: Chronicles of an Aging Gheorghie

When we left @fairbankobx last, he was hearing the world in entirely new ways. Alas, there are more body parts than just ears that we have to pay attention to as we grow older.

The doctor entered the exam room carrying a computer printout and a quizzical look.

“You’re my surprise of the day,” he said.

Not what you want to hear.

My new primary care doc scheduled a physical, so he could have a baseline from which to take care of me. Family history, blood work and an electrocardiogram, to listen to my heart. Results from the blood work aren’t available for a couple days. EKG results are available within minutes. Hence, the doctor’s puzzled take.

It’s called an atrial flutter with a variable AV block. It means my heart is beating arrhythmically, a little like a Thelonious Monk piano riff or Lindsey Graham dance party.

The flutter itself isn’t necessarily a problem, but it increases the risk of heart attack and stroke. Because the heart’s electrical impulses are a mite off, clots may occur within the heart. Should one break loose, it can travel and cause all sorts of non-Shaka Smart havoc.

My doc showed me the EKG printout and went through the list of symptoms. Ever had heart issues? Palpitations? Chest pains? Dizziness? Shortness of breath? Ever fainted? Nope. Are you sure? Yup. Really? Yup.

I’m 57, but I try to keep myself in moderately decent shape. I run a little, work out at the Y. I have the attendant aches and pains and twinges, but nothing out of the ordinary or chronic. I sure as hell didn’t associate them with heart issues. Maybe I should have, since both Mom and Dad had heart problems. Mom had two mild heart attacks several years apart in her 60s, Dad had bypass surgery after a catheterization revealed a significant blockage in a coronary artery.

Anyway, my doc phoned the cardio specialists down the road and passed along the EKG results. They wanted to see me immediately. Terrific. I didn’t know if it was because I was a ticking cardio time bomb, or because I was some sort of research test case – a guy who oughta look and feel a whole lot worse than he does.

When I arrived, I saw the cardio specialist’s assistant, a chatty, amiable fellow who asked all the same questions as my primary care doc. He told me about the increased risk of stroke with atrial flutter and prescribed a blood thinner to reduce the risk. He went over the risks of taking blood thinners – namely, bleeding out.

Word is that Arnold had fun. Lots of fun.

“Don’t get into a car accident or a knife fight,” he advised. Check. Bicycles and slap fights only.

Anyway, he put me on Xarelto, a once-daily pill about the size of a bacon bit, but with a whole hog pricetag – about $400 per month. Fortunately, he gave me a few weeks’ worth of free samples. I’ve taken the stuff for a week and haven’t had nearly as much fun as Arnie, Kevin Nealon and Brian Vickers on the drug’s TV commercials.

He also scheduled me to see the cardio specialist 11 days out. I asked him if, amid all the potentially dire consequences of my arrhythmic heart, should I be encouraged that neither he nor my primary care doc took one look at the EKG results, immediately strapped me to a gurney, shoved a bunch of tubes inside me, and called a priest? That my situation was so perilous that I wasn’t seeing the specialist for 11 days? In so many words, he said, yeah. However, that’s not to say that something couldn’t manifest itself on the ride home. Great. Thanks for the pep talk.

Eleven days later, I saw the heart guru. He said that most people will experience some sort of atrial flutter or fibrillation, if they live long enough. Some folks contract it at age 40, some at 80. Sometimes it corrects itself, other times not. He didn’t know what caused mine, only that it occurred within the past two years, between my last EKG at my former doc’s and now. I attribute it to our recent move to the Outer Banks, where my heart thinks it’s on permanent vacation and has gotten lazy and undisciplined.

The heart guru scheduled a transesophogeal cardiogram at the end of the month. They’ll snake a tube with sensors attached down my throat so that they may get a clearer picture of my heart. They’re looking for clots and for abnormalities within the chambers. If they find no clots, they’ll attempt to electrically shock the heart back into regular rhythm. That procedure works about 50 percent of the time, the doc said. He said that there is virtually no risk in shocking the heart the way they do it, odd as that sounds. No paddles and orderlies calling “Clear!” That’s TV and movie emergency stuff. This is much tamer. I plan to inquire about bundling the shock with my power bill for a discount. 

If they find a clot, they won’t attempt a shock, for fear of dislodging it. If a clot is dislodged, all bets are off.

If they find a clot, or if the shock procedure doesn’t work, the next possible step is something called

cardiac ablation. Catheter ablation involves inserting a tube into an artery through the leg or neck and toward the heart. The doc uses heat, cold or radio energy to treat the area triggering the irregular beat. If it comes to that, I’m requesting WWOZ in New Orleans, or maybe B.B. King’s Bluesville on Sirius XM.

That has to cure arrhythmia, right? Or at least prompt everyone to boogie.

Laissez les bon temps roulez.