Nothing is more depressing than when, in this season of socially mandated false cheeriness, people are still po-faced and mopey, looking preoccupied and distracted. I guess I can't say that I blame them seeing as it's been what sociologists call "a shitty-ass couple of years" in a row now. Watching your children malnourish themselves into a good ole fashioned case of rickets makes it tougher to keep the chin up. It also makes it hard not to put your foot through your car stereo when the umpteenth radio commercial set to the tune of Carol of the Bells attacks. But you know, that urge has been there in up years as well. This is not a scientific study.
I thought it would be appropriate to give you something you could use this holiday season in exchange for your time and effort putting up with this barely-there blog as it limps along. I tried to think of the things you would need and, besides a fitting for your children's leg braces, I couldn't really come up with anything that met the criteria I developed.* Well, except one thing. And it's a pretty good thing. The best thing, maybe. The one thing the Christmas season is all about. No, not gluttony. No, not self-perpetuating material acquisition strictly for its own sake. No, not the persecution of the Jews.
It's joy, OK? Joy. Fuck. Why was that hard? Bunch of cynics, man.
I know you need joy. Did 2011 suck balls? You bet your ass it did. Unless a good ball-sucking is something you enjoy, in which case I've confused the metaphor. Replace it with something bad like loneliness or hepatitis C and we'll be on our way. We'll wait.
Good? Good. I thought I would point out what we have to look forward to in 2012 and why it will--must!--be an improvement on 2011.
1) None of you are the dictatorial leaders of Arab countries. I know you're not because I can see where my traffic comes from and none of the originating addresses seem particularly Syrian. Nobody had a worse 2011 than Arab dictators. Well, the Saudi royal family did OK, but they're the good guys, yes? Only the ones we (currently and retroactively) don't like, they got an ass full of grassroots twitterverse democra-fucking, am I right? Did anyone strap you to the hood of a car, drive you into a crowd which then anally violated you with a broom handle before beating you to death and displaying your dead body in a commercial refrigerator? Not everyone can say that. 2011 was better for you than you thought it was.
2) Olympic year! And not the shitty winter ones either where the only things to watch are figures skating and bobsledding, and let's be honest, we only watch either for the crashes. Nope, it's the summer games. In London! It's the magical quadrennial occurrence where the world comes together and pretends to give a shit about pole vaulting. When we find ourselves setting the alarm for 3 am on a workday so we can watch the live feed of the equestrian show-jumping qualifier round, we know things maybe aren't going as well as we'd like away from eventing, but at least we know, for those two weeks over the summer, we have the available option to distract ourselves with jingoism, displaced aggression and some world-class couch time.
3) Election year! Hell, that starts in just a few days. Picking a leader of the free world... what's more heady and engaging than that? Not only are we allowed to stand in awed horror and watch the Menagerie of Shame vie for the Republican nomination but, holy fuck, given the weight of the economy in presidential politics, one of those people is as likely as not going to be the President Elect by this time next year.
OK, the last example was a swing and a miss. Whatever good I might have done in points 1 and 2 was clearly negated by point 3. I clearly didn't think the implications all the way through.
But look, 2011 wasn't great, but we're all still here. Well, not you, Grandpa, but you can't smoke three packs a day forever, can you? Between me, Grandma and the Surgeon General, you can't say you weren't fucking warned. But the rest of us, we're still here. It seemed bad at the time, but in retrospect... yeah, OK, it almost looks a little worse. Bad years happen, but we persist. The trick is to maintain perspective. It's not like it's the end of the world.
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*1) Free; 2) Requiring little to no effort; and 3) Amenable to at least one dick joke in the course of explaining it.
Friday, December 30, 2011
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3 comments:
You never know, the dictatorial leaders of Arab countries could be reading via RSS.
i'm still confused over "sucking balls" as a pejorative. this may only work as a pejorative if spoken by a heterosexual man operating under the assumption that he would be the sucker, not the owner of the sucked, balls.
well, that's a delightfully vulgar way to start off a new year.
i'll be spending this new year's eve the way i have spent them for the last more than a decade: cleaning my house in a futile effort to be organized before the spring semester begins.
Kate: That would be just like them, wouldn't it? They don't get to stay Arab country dictators without being deviant and sly, do they?
KnK: And I will be celebrating mine in the traditional way as well- "Casablanca" on Netflix, Johnny cakes, autoerotic asphyxiation and bed by 9:30.
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