It's that time of the year, Christmas I mean, but I'm not nearly ready yet. I feel as if I've just awoken for a test, ten minutes late. Now I sit before the essay questions with two erasers on my pencil and a mind that won't snap out of it. No, no... that's not it. Its more that it seems as though the days forbode Christmas cheer tomorrow, but small clues abound that it's all a farce and tomorrow we'll wake up to discover the date is really January 9th. See, there's Christmas decorations everywhere; Santas abound; "Happy Holidays" is the new "How are you" and at every glance there's an ad for Christmas. But in the mall today I saw a boy's shirt, on a chubby, young kid who couldn't find his mother, and it startled me. It said "You don't know me." The boy glared when I stared too long; "And don't try to figure me out," he seemed to say. His shirt was characteristic of the "seasonal" dress. Other than employees, I didn't see anyone dressing Christmasey. Everyone stayed in their stereotypical dress: thugs in Fubu, miniskirts in Uggs, dads in alma mater sweatshirts, and a gender-confused pre-teen bore a shirt that said, "Pretend I'm not here." Real Christmasey. The shops and TV and radio are all decked in Christmas, but the people, the ones who don't stand to profit from Christmas, are stuck in January. They still battle the same problems they do every day: this year Christmas hasn't made the shit go away. The diseases of the world have built a resistance to the Christmas antibiotic. There'll be no reprieve from the sickness any more, no chance to catch our breath, no time to enjoy the season, no snow, no cheer, no hope. Christmas has lost its touch: don't count on the cancer to regress this year. It's time to find a stonger medicine.
So, for what it's worth, Merry Christmas.
...and to think 5 minutes ago I felt fabulous. Of course the shit doesn't go away. It never did, as Christmas never was much good at being a shit-sweeper. Rather, Christmas is an appeal of the collective heart to look to the solution. To think perhaps, just maybe, it's all a little trivial and not worth being angry, not important enough to be confused over.
ReplyDelete...Christmas was never a home remedy...
...It was a herald to the arrival of a solution (and those aren't much good unless applied).