A Festive Misfit
by John Wolf
As far as Thanksgiving goes, I fear that's just a pressure relief valve for workers to relax, eat more than they need, and watch a football game. It's hard to understand it's all about being thankful when your mouth is full of mashed potatoes and gravy is running down your chin. You become a contender for the World’s Biggest Loser by the weekend. You can’t be thankful when your team’s losing the game.
Christmas is different. We’re all thankful when it’s over. I can remember a time when one simple, thoughtful gift made by one's own hands was cherished. Electronic Santas screaming out Hip-Hop songs is not my idea of Christmas. There seems to be a seamless continuum of a festive misfit to what was intended during the holidays and how we actual behave.
During this Holiday Season, which runs from Halloween until New Year's, blurred together as one big commercial selling frenzy, I only hope to enjoy the cool evenings and watch the leaves fall off the trees. I'm so sensitized by Madison Avenue storm troopers telling me I must buy this, buy that, because everyone else is doing it. Well, maybe I could use a few thousand dollars worth of electronic gadgets this year. After all, American consumers float most of the world economies, he says and he fingers the shards of chopped up credit cards destroyed in a moment of sanity.
This is the time of the year when you seek relief from summer heat, drift through autumn in dreamy visions of colored trees, pull a sweater on around your Hawaiian shirt, and give in to the nip in the air. When I go out to walk around the block, I use this docile slack time to think.
I pass various runners, joggers, and fast-paced people with their elbows swinging madly that all have some sort of electronic device stuck in their ears. They can't break their train of thought without causing a train wreck in their mind. They look like zombies going by, not a word, not a hello, or have a nice day, just bolting off into the future dreaming about tight abs and the steel buttocks they are gaining. This should be the time of the year for reflection and be more concerned about brotherhood not whose got the coolest gear in the hood.
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Alas, I cave in to the glossy ads, the TV infomercial's, and the sexy mistresses of sale that adorn screens, jars of peanut butter, and magazines. If I had only known how sexy I was when being sexy had some useful purpose, maybe I would have bought into all the hype. I was too busy trying to earn a living, careful only to buy the essentials, much less the glitzy gizmos of modern X-generation visionaries. I’m a Baby-Boomer, what ever that means. Actually, I pre-date the boomers by one year. I’m on the cusp of being ancient versus hip. I’m a mutant throw-back to times when family values were based on a golden rule not a gold standard. I live in a quiet neighborhood, but still have to carefully look both ways before entering the street, because the cars are moving near mach one. Everywhere is asphalt. I’m zoned into my allotted space by freeways, byways, parkways, and car pool lanes.
So what do we do? Can we survive as a species under such an insult to our intelligence? Will be become recycled like so much packing material at the end of our journey through life? It’s a scary thought that some dizzy-eyed scientist thinks it’s cute to find ways to make us live to the age of 150. Oh, the dirge. I plan to hide out on a Santa farm, locked away in my red suit until selling season, in a cloistered den of other whacked out loonies that have fallen at the feet of cash register god. If you see a guy with his head dunked to the bottom of the eggnog bowl this year, that will be me.
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John is a writer in progress. Word by word the trail of communications gets clearer. Maybe someday the message will be picked up by a distant ear and the effort to be heard will have been reached. Until that day, the keyboard clatters endlessly into the night. |
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