The animated Grinch made his first appearance on TV this last weekend, Santa hats are stacked with great care at drugstores countrywide, and empty lots across America are being filled with the innumerable victims of the traditional holiday arboreal genocide, all meaning one thing. Yet again, it is THAT time of the year, whether we like it or not. And with this weekend, following the mass ritual sacrifice of the turkey and the consumption thereof, the Holiday Season gains the unstoppable momentum to hurl downward to the last days of December. (I discount New Year's as more a post-traumatic response of getting festive to forget the wads of cash spent on Christmas.) And with this, I find myself ready to share the sheer joy that comes from living through those days focused on the vaguely approximate birthdate of a Jewish carpenter fated to die in horrific and tortuous death to help cleanse all mankind of the dark sinful blemish of descending of God's original couple who couldn't stick to eating oranges.
If my ever-so-subtly acerbic tone has not escaped you, my gentle readers (all 5 of you,) you could come to believe that I am unenthused, even slightly bitter, about Christmas time and to deduce my genuine dislike for the Holidays. Now let me set you straight, I do not dislike Christmas. "Dislike" is clearly the incorrect word. Much too weak. Hate. Now hate is much closer. Still off, really, as I don't simply hate the Holidays, I hate them with the deepest and foulest dark hatred. It's just about the only thing I feel comfortably justified in hating so passionately, not just that usual opinionated detestation, but with spite and malice born in every nerve and fiber of my being. Indeed, I look forward to December in the way one awaits the major recurrance of hemmoroids. By the end of the season, I look forward to the traditional drowning my a pool of my own bile and reaching upward with both arms not to save myself; but to try in my delerium to snap Santa's fat neck.
I could too easily blame my feelings solely on the crass commercialism and sophorific sappiness, but those things are but symptom of the red and green cancer festering in the holiday bowels. The true horror is in knowing there is no escape from Christmas, in all its manifest quasi-religious cheese, and glorious chintz. After nineteen Christmas as a good Jewish boy, and then another thirteen as an avowed heretic, here comes number 34, before which I am helpless to prevent it's stranglehold on my psyche. Again I will realize freshly that I know more carols than I know Hebrew songs. I will ride a tsunami of insincere holiday greetings from faceless people who think they are being nice to me. The doom has come again.
With this be the holiday where I finally snap after being put on hold and subjected to the fiftieth time of having Burl Ives wish me a musical "Holly Jolly Christmas" or after the sight of the manger scene, complete with light-up baby Jesus, on someone's lawn?

I've been scrawling out several rants on paper and muttering about not getting that day shift I wanted, so I've forgotten to mention... and appreciate... a big date that is now four days past. On November 22 of 2003, I arrived in Seattle, Washington. I've been so busy with my philosophical angst and neurotic fristefroppery, that I've not really thought about how far I've gone in just a single year. Just had to mark this in my blog.
Never really listen to me.
Life is good.

As usual, my more colvoluted and abstract philosophizing, on my past relationship with the concept of God, was rudely interrupted by the most mundane of annoyances, actual day-to-day life things. In this case, the interference was from the startling notion that I might regain my weekends and weekday nights, if some shifts slide around and become open at my site. These blocks of time had been long lost and nearly forgotten, like the Mycaenean civilization, and dare I dream that the closed opportunities could open. Not unlike Sir Pellinore and the Questing Beast, my chance is probably no more than a passing fancy, a dream of a new order, but it remains unobtainable in the end. But I asked my boss anyway, and I'm still under the slightly possible category. I felt then a momentary upsurge of hope, which is now still risen as a resonant belch.
Of course, I didn't take that long for my brain to dissect this event and try to cook into a philosophical stirfry, with the speed and grace of a crosseyed Japanese hibachi chef. Least the philosophical rambling of an analysis is on something more substantive, hope, than say, the metaphysical implications of Jell-O, or the spiritual relevations to be found in knowing all the true ingredients of Spam. (These are true examples of where my mind has gone) Even the cereal box can be intellectually dangerous for me.
Anyway, I really do like hope, as I like any concept that is both pragmatically elegant, and patently absurd, simultaneously. We're talking about a near-universal that has sustained humanity for millienia, through the relative and irrational belief that life will get better since bad things don't really happen to good people, and if bad things do, they're supposed to happen. Basically, its a survival tool to handle that out of control event known as life. Hope calls for blind faith that the slightly less absurd thing will happen to or for you, so you won't lose your mind.. or your life... No-one wants to be sunk bu something that makes no sense, so in the face of troubles from alienation to genocide, humans will do the absurd, or really the absurdly sensible, thing to survive ...Most of the time ....every one in awhile .... hopefully?
I know this analysis from something as petty as wanting my weekends off, as compared to someone hoping not to get shot crossing the street to buy food. I guess that reflects on the amazingly broad spectrum potency of hope. More likely, its a reminder on how relative is the word "survival." Whatever the circumstances and gradations it is found in, hope is the most intangibly tangible influence on the multitudinous expressions on everyday chaos, made all the more absurd for its absolute necessity.
Nothing makes this whole hope presence totally absurd to me is how beholden to its bittersweetness.
That I have made it this far, even with a heart full of loneliness and a head full of crossed wires, is due more to blind faith that I am willing to own. Even though I repeatedly fell flat on my face, I was somehow comforted by the belief I was falling forward. I've tried to chalk up my survival to the strength of my will, but that's worked as well as the political doctrine of pre-emptive force. You stand tall but that's so no-one will notice you've blown your own ass off. When I am more negative, I'll counter my survival with sheer cowardice in the face of the mysteries of death. Then again, I didn't have any problem sidestepping into self-destructive tendencies. How about spite, then? At one time, I believed
it was all about spitting at fate and calling yourself victor. That worked as well as putting out a bonfire with a bucket of napalm. So I am left with the discomfort from knowing I'm still around because I simply believed I should be. No matter how scorched I've gotten to get this far, here I am, still careening down the road of life like a drunk driver trying to find his way out of a mall parking lot on a foggy and moonless night who is stupidly happy that at least he's moving. Pretty harsh for a control freak. But I still like it better than the whole giving myself over to oblivion.
So I'm stuck with hope, I guess. But damned if I will ennoble the concept.

I still hope I get my weekends and weeknights.

(me)Alcrty1: okay so the comments are rude.. but least you leave them on my blog. And by the way, fuck you. I'm in a very metaphysical space.
tenebras23: lol
tenebras23: you know how I am
Alcrty1: yep.
tenebras23: and you don't comment on mine
tenebras23: beotch
Alcrty1: heh. I feel bowed and awed before your minimalism.
tenebras23: hm?
tenebras23: in my comments or blog posts?
Alcrty1: in your posts.
tenebras23: my life is a series of brief fragments
tenebras23: just a thin spiderweb linking them
Alcrty1: Mine is a long dull ramble on philosophy marked by manic surrealism.
tenebras23: yes

Read his blog at: http://www.tenebras.tk

I watched this drunk crazy lady who regularly sits in the bus shelter where I pick up my bus to work Friday. She opened a ratty bible, the kind that is held together only by faith and the truly ugly vinyl cover, on her lap. She tossed four pennies onto the open pages, as if throwing the bones. It was a good deduction made on how she looked all around as she tossed those coins and murmured some debate with herself. Still, it was all guessing, and I was just getting more curious. Was this some schizophrenic pastime? Was it some folksy variance on bibliomancy? Was it just a nice way to see the copper discs fall prettily? Did the verse and the chapter the bible was open to matter?
I knew I could simply ask her what she was doing with the coins and the bible and why she was doing it. She'd talked to me before, and I knew she was relatively coherent. But I didn't ask. I couldn't ask. Well, I could, but that would ruin the mystery, wouldn't it? As a city dweller and pedestrian, I've seen many many odd things that have remained wholly remarkable because they have stayed unexplained. In the city, even the most mundane oddity gains this surreal majesty as perception disconnected from "reality." How strange would strange experiences be if they were understandable? How well would we savor the inherent absurdity in human relativity if we knew why exactly a drunk crazy lady three four pennies on a bible.

I was sorting through some papers and I stumbled on a folded sheet I had jotted some metaphysical ponderings on a day sometime last week when I forgot to carry my small notebook..

Nothing endures but change. This is not mine. It belongs to the amazing Heraclitus of Ephesus. I just like reflecting on it alot.

Nowhere is a direction is time moves.

The definition of life is relative to its motion through time, and therefore space.

God: Go-d is the past imperfect celestial conjunction of the verb Go.

Life is the pull of the metaphysical gravity.

"Ah, but here's the rub: Idleness is not just a psychological necessity, requisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space necessary to the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press. How does it do this? By allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us the time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it. By giving the inner life (in whose precincts we are most ourselves) its due. Which is precisely what makes idleness dangerous. All manner of things can grow out of that fallow soil. Not for nothing did our mothers grow suspicious when we had "too much time on our hands." They knew we might be up to something. And not for nothing did we whisper to each other, when we were up to something. "Quick, look busy."
Mother knew instinctively what the keepers of the castles have always known: that trouble - the kind that might threaten the symmetry of a well-ordered garden - needs time to take root. Take away the time, therefore, and you choke off the problem before it begins. Obedience reigns, the plow stays in the furrow; things proceed as they must. Which raises an uncomfortable question: Could the Church of Work - which today has Americans aspiring to sleep deprivation the way they once aspired to a personal knowledge of God - be, at base, an anti-democratic force? Well, yes. James Russell Lowell, that nineteenth century workhorse, summed it all up quite neatly: "There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and saving it from all risk of crankiness, than business."
Quite so. The mind, however, particularly the mind of a citizen in a democratic society, is not a boat. Ballast is not what it needs, and steadiness, alas, can be a synonym for stupidity, as our current administration has so amply demonstrated. No, what the democratic mind requires, above all, is time; time to consider its options. Time to develop the democratic virtues of independence, orneriness, objectivity, and fairness. Time, perhaps (to sail along with Lowell's leaky metaphor for a moment,) to ponder the course our unelected captains have so generously set for us, and to consider mutiny when the iceberg looms.
Which is precisely why we need to kept busy. If we have no time to think, to mull, if we have no time to think, to mull, if we have no time to piece together the sudden associations and unexpected, mid-shower insights that are the stuff of independent opinion, then we are less citizens than cursors, easily manipulated. vunerable to the currents of power."

from "Quitting The Paint Factory" by Mark Slouka in the November 2004 issue of Harper's Magazine