culture(less)

just passed one of those hole in the wall cheap almost-stores on my way to run an errand. you know, the kind that has gym bags and bandanas and stuffed animals and a hodgepodge of the most unlikely bedfellows hanging from hooks and pulleys and jerry-rigged fold-outs.

front and center was a bouquet of the brightest geometric primary color socks you’ve ever seen. we’re talking a family of polyester harlequins on acid, the kaleidoscope you busted at five years old, a bag of fluorescent fish-gravel at the pet store.

those socks just made me smile. i’ve got such a thing for crazy socks. my sock drawer looks like a box filled with shredded comic books. i wear socks you wouldn’t put on a toddler.

hardly anybody ever gets to see them, camouflaged by my long jeans, my harley boots. but i know they’re there. sometimes i cross my legs like a boy on the subway, ankle-on-thigh, just to peep my knee-highs. let me tell you, orange purple hot-pink argyle is a real mood-changer. beats the hell out of wellbutrin, and you don’t even need a script.

i am a bright-sock addict. my secret little obsession. nice, how those flaming cheap socks at the alley store made me grin all the way home. made me run up the stairs to write this.

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Struggling writers shouldn’t have to buy gifts during the holiday season - only get them. We don’t have the money and it’s too depressing. Our heightened sensitivities and imaginations only add to the pain. There’s no escape because all the bad things are happening in your head.

One relative called another this morning - early - to talk about the gift she’s getting me, and I had to hear it because the other relative lives with me. I was trying to go back to sleep. But there’s no hope. You can’t sleep through the whole month of December. Other people who have responsible things going on in their lives are waiting to give you gifts that cost money, whether you want them or not. Then they sit back to wait and see what you’re getting them. And if you’ve led a blameless life, like I have, you have dozens or hundreds of people who are getting you stuff and you’re supposed to get them presents too, including children. Even at five dollars each it adds up to about a quarter of my entire savings, and $5 won’t cut it either. These people want “real” gifts - like they got you. All I want is to curl up in a ball, listen to music and wait for the danger to pass. The prospect of going into a store and buying junk that nobody even wants - the Salvation Army gets most of the things I buy - is like serious evaluators charging into my life with the bad news. They’re coming in through the window, the telephone, the tv, the internet. Buy buy buy, with a smile on your face. Shop shop shop to show your love. I can’t stand it and you’re not allowed to be supine or on the other hand resist. The rest of the year is punishing enough without this climax of embarrassment.

Here’s the dog. She’ll get a handsome gift. But is she expected to donate? Of course not. How can I make that apply to me?

All of us join together in an Obama-like campaign, refusing to participate, except on the receiving end. You’ll notice that the Obama campaign asks for money. Nobody expects him to give anybody any money or gifts. He’s our leader and a great model of life and morals. We - the writers that nobody wants to read - should emulate him. We should have an internet cell-phone campaign all agreeing not to get anyone anything.

This is the true spirit of the holiday season for people like me for the foreseeable better future. Not giving. Laying low. Being excused. Quietly sitting down at the table and eating a big dinner with everyone else. Contributing charming conversation, more charming and clever than anyone else, but that’s all. And I’m not talking about being a curmudgeon either. Just get out of my face because I don’t have the money.

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frank sinatra singing “let it snow” and ANYBODY singing “it’s beginning to look a lot like christmas”

red & green holiday motif socks

people buying gifts for other people when they’d really rather give them one swift kick in the ass

office parties
being asked why i didn’t go to the office party
watercooler conversations about who got most drunk at the office party
being asked what i thought about the dozens of office party photostreams and did i see the picture of so-and-so making a fool of himself. NO. because i do not look at office party photos. ever.

the $99 “gift-wrapping station” on sale at The Container Store

midnight mass & the colorized version of “miracle on 34th street”

metallic silver scotch tape. ribbon that must be curled with the flat of a scissors. pre-tied bows. giant christmas stockings. fake wreaths adorned with fake toy-soldier-green plastic berries. plastic reindeer, holiday cards, candy cane, mistletoe, santa’s lap.

artificial christmas trees
live christmas trees
factory-made christmas tree ornaments

the rockefeller center tree-lighting ceremony where a tremendous old-growth spruce is sacrified and tarted up and people come from ALL OVER THE COUNTRY to watch somebody plug it in then ooh and aah over the lights that look like any other lights on any other christmas tree you’ve ever seen except bigger and more. tourists stand on lines in the cold for hours in order to see this, crippling all of midtown for an entire day. some can’t get close enough to see it yet still stand there, behind the helpful wooden-horse police barricades, to “watch” the lighting of the tree that is three blocks away behind a 50-story building. then they go back to minnesota and tell everybody how they saw the famous lighting of the famous rock center tree.

men in santa fucking claus suits

men in santa fucking claus suits ringing handbells outside every department store in town like the monty python plague-sweeper tolling “bring out your dead” from his wagon.

the sad, sad waste of it all: paper, electricity, time. the assumed obligations. the enforcedness of it all. no way to opt out, no special socks or hat or decoder ring to wear that says “Hey, i just don’t DO this holiday crap, okay?” count me out. buy me nothing, expect nothing from me, offer me no sympathy for my apparent scrooginess. i ain’t no scrooge — i’m one of the most generous motherfuckers in town. but i do i MY way. in MY time. on MY terms. ain’t no december 25th about it. that’s just another day.

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when a society is ruled by laws, common sense flies out the window. if there is a law dictating that anyone who spits on the sidewalk must go to jail, then a 95 year-old with throat cancer who is no longer able to swallow will be sent to jail for spitting on the sidewalk.

yes, that imagined example is extreme, but its extremity helps to make the point of how the law cannot be fair if it cannot be tempered with common sense.

looks like another teacher is losing her career and about to go to jail for sleeping with a teenager. she is 35 and the student was 16.

i ask you: how many 16-year-old boys wouldn’t jump at the chance to sleep with an attractive older teacher? (lisa glide doesn’t look like much more than a teenager herself in the photo.) those boys wake up every morning dripping with their own semen; estimates on how many sexual thoughts they experience each day range up in to the thousands. the supersized sexual hunger of the average teenage male is so well-known it is beyond cliche — a simple raised eyebrow or rolled eye acknowledges what everyone knows to be true.

do you think the average 16-year-old boy is “damaged” in some way if an older woman sleeps with him? i don’t — i think he’s most likely learning some things he really needs to know and having a cracking good time learning them. he’s going to fall asleep every night for weeks dreaming of exactly what they did together and auditioning for a do-over.

mrs. robinson is a social archetype for a reason.

turn it around: the 35 year old guy and the 16 year old virgin girl, who does not wake up sticky with orgasmic juice and dreams of being loved rather than getting laid. who can easily be made to believe that an older man is offering love when all he is offering is sex. she won’t smile herself off to sleep in a fever of recalled coitus; she’s going home with blood on her panties and will stay up all night weeping because he didn’t say he loved her.

but we have one-size fits all laws.

do i think it’s okay for teachers to sleep with their young students? nah, it’s probably always a bad idea. but the law is not about that, the law is about rape, and it’s the crime of rape — “sexual assault” – that lisa glide is charged with. if you define rape as unwanted sex, i submit that it’s just about impossible to rape a teenage boy. he can barely keep the fucking thing in his pants! he is one big finger looking for a hole in the dyke. and then he finds one! and then…SHE gets locked up.

give me a fucking break.

does this boy feel as if he’d been assaulted? was he damaged in some way by their romps? if so, then there is reason for an investigation. but if he, as a typical teenage hormonemonger, bragged to friends about this conquest and came looking for a repeat, can anyone seriously believe that a crime has been committed?

it’s unspeakably ridiculous. i’m all for protecting young people, but we need to protect them from harm.

i don’t know how the law can be rewritten to account for consensual sex between a minor and a major. that’s the problem with law in general, it has no common sense. everything is black or white and utterly absolute.

does the world look that way to you? right/wrong, black/white, yes/no, and nothing in the middle?

do you think this teacher should be fired and tried for the crime of rape?

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globally, nationally, locally; from the white house to the county courthouse.

it’s like that talking heads song….”and you may ask yourself, well, how did i get here?”

i ask: how the fuck did we get here?

to a place where shopclerks are killed by marauding bargain-seekers.

where the mainstream media conspires with special intereststo knowingly propagate lies about the wages of unionized workers and lies about our trillion dollar bailout project.

where state democrats campaign on a pro-gay platform and, after election, promptly quash the issues they pledged to bring to the table while our religious institutions conspire with one another in order to deprive certain people of the most basic civil rights.

where the executives who make the decisions that cause companies to fail still walk away with multimillion dollar bonuses — while the employees of the workplace they destroyed go off to stand on unemployment lines.

where there is actually a debate about whether or not to bring the masterminds of the US torture project to justice. where there is actually talk of advance pardons.

we torture people. i still can’t quite get my mind around the fact that we have american civil servants trained to torture. authorized to torture. we have become a nation that tortures, and even some of the black-hats themselves are disgusted by what we have done. we are ALL responsible for this.

where new york’s former slutty governor was persecuted for his romps with high-dollar hookers. why do i say persecuted rather than prosecuted? because the persecution came first: spitzer was targeted for political reasons. so our immoral governor is brought to his knees by an equally immoral payback squad, and the US criminal justice system is nothing more than one small element in a vast political toolkit.

imagine: if prostitution were (as it should be, as it is in many civilized nations) legal in this country, none of this crap could have gone down the way it did. I’m no fan of spitzer, but entrapping him with his pants down for reasons completely unrelated to the sex he’s paying for is pretty sickening. don’t you think?

where bloggers lose their low-end dayjobs for the crime of speaking the truth and an entire city is left for dead. for years. where all of your shit can be confiscated at an airport, for no reason, and kept from you forever.

where the supreme court actually has to decide — years after the fact — about a the legality of “indefinite detention” for a person not yet charged with any crime. (and who knows how they’ll rule on it. after all, these are the same people who brought you bush2000.) seems we are expected to be grateful that this question even reached the docket. right.

where homeless people quietly riding public transportation in chicago simply to stay warm are considered criminal, subject to ejection and fines. FOR RIDING TOO LONG. FOR BEING ON THE FUCKING TRAIN TOO LONG.

where our government knowingly allows poisoned food into this country for distribution and regulatory agencies look the other way when the evidence shows that GMO corn impedes fertility. even, perhaps, results in sterility for women.

where running a prison is just another way to make a buck– and where the big-money prison administration behemoths are so brutal and corrupt that the big moneymen behind them, LIKE VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY, are being indicted. what did anybody think would happen when prisons were privatized? or rather, did anybody do any thinking?

where one california town actually resorted to putting “don’t dump babies in here” stickers on public trashbins. you see, people need to be educated about this, otherwise the dumpsters will be brimming with infants.

where there is little or no access to quality care (emphasis on quality) for returning vets, many of whom become, and remain, homeless. shellshocked vets sleeping in the streets. one-legged panhandlers.

where everyday road rage costs a street bicyclist his leg and our president is nothing more than a punchline for the inside jokes of other heads of state.

where the good old NYPD shoots a man dead for threatening one of them with a chair – a fucking FOLDING chair. officers, schwarzenegger himself couldn’t do much damage with a folding chair. are you kidding me here? but it’s par for the course in a city where a subway cop found it acceptable to shove his radio antenna up the ass of one unlucky farebeater, landing said farebeater in the hospital for almost a week. must’ve been some heavy-duty farking radio. or a very heavy-handed cop.

unfortunately, i could go on. this post could be as fat as the bailout, as long as our already maturing recession.

what offends you most about the downward spiral of our culture? what turns your eyeballs red and gets your fist pounding the table on thanksgiving day?

 and how did we get here?

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November 28^th, 2008: the Friday after Thanksgiving, commonly referred to as Black Friday. This year a few financial publications have referred to it as Red Friday, presumably because the retailers didn’t make their numbers.  All this red and black imagery has taken me to quite another place. Like the black hole of endless consumption or the blackness of despair of the lives that absolutely depend on acquiring stuff. Stuff gotten under the illusion of “the deal” is somehow sweeter than regular stuff acquisition.  But enough about black. This is Red Friday and for that I am deeply troubled. Of course we have all lost money in this 2008 Year of The Red Ink.  Bailouts are in our face everyday. Have we learned nothing this year, this decade, this life?

In Valley Stream NY a man is trampled to death by a mad crowd fighting to get into Walmart for the cheap TVs.  In Palm Desert California two people shot and killed in a crowded Toys-R-Us as they fight over Black Friday bargains. At yet another Walmart in Illinois woman is reduced to tears because someone absconded with her shopping cart and all the really good stuff she had gathered.  At least no one was killed this time. Finally, a woman in yet another Walmart in Farmingdale NY (what is it about Long Island?) heroically completes all her shopping with a badly cut leg. Another victim of stampeding crowds.

Have we all lost our minds? In 2008 the chickens have come home to roost as our over-consuming lifestyles have left us financially bankrupt at all levels of society. My hope was that this could have been a year of great awakening. A spiritual purification where all the financial losses would help people sober up and once again focus on what is important.  That clearly has not happened if we’re killing each other over good deals on flat-screen TVs. 

This reality is sinking in and I’m having my own personal Black Weekend - black in the despair sense. The reason I am so black is that we are just in the beginning of this great change occurring in our society. If we kill a few over TVs, what will happen when there are food and fuel shortages? I can only hold the apocalyptic visions of assault weapons and massive starvation for so long before I have to go eat something to settle myself.  Our survival depends on a level of sacrifice and cooperation that we have not yet achieved — and the evidence suggests we’re going in the opposite direction. Maybe it is still early and the next several waves of loss will wake enough of us up so that the tide turns. I have hope even on this black day.

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if, good netroots activist that you are, you observed buy nothing day this friday, you probably didn’t find yourself involved in a murder. thank you and congratulations!

but if you were one of several hundred shoppers mobbing up at the valley stream wal-mart before its 5am opening bell, maybe you did help kill somebody. could your foot on the neck or chest of Jdimytai Damour have been part of the straw that broke his 34-year old back? you may never know. or maybe you will, as police are now reviewing the surveillance tapes (hard to call them security tapes, since they ain’t seemed to make a fucking thing any more secure) in an attempt to identify the people who walked over — WALKED OVER — Damour after knocking him to the ground. criminal charges may result if any positive IDs can be made. unlikely, but i’m glad they’re trying.

i remember the first time fans were crushed to death at a rock show, almost thirty years ago, when 11 people suffocated in ohio when all they wanted was to see The Who live. since then, dozens more – from denmark to venezuela and london to indonesia – have died this way at concerts.

though the surface details of these killings are the same (too many too-eager people in a too-small, too-poorly-supervised space) there are stark differences at their core.

at a live show passions run high for two reasons: the love that the audience has for their artist, and the prospect of that artist taking unexpected risks to push that night’s performance over the top and into brilliance. it’s the anticipation of shared magic in a dark theater before thousands of sympathetic witnesses. there is a breathless pre-show exhilaration in the air, among the crowd, that is unlike anything else. i understand this feeling well, having spent countless hours on line in the freezing cold hoping to get belly-to-stage for patti smith, driving all the way to albany to see amanda palmer, sleeping overnight outside now-defunct tower records on 8th street in hopes of snagging a pair of tickets for mj’s Thriller tour. (what can i tell you? starting something was my twenty-something soundtrack.) so, while concert crushings are insane and utterly unjustifiable, the causes of the headlong fan rush are not incomprehensible for anyone who has been deeply touched by the work of an artist.

now consider what is at the core of something like yesterday’s wal-mart stampede. i must have that wii for johnny. i must save that ten dollars on the food processor. i must stretch those xmas shopping dollars far and farther and farther so that the kids can have more.

then consider what generates this bottomless need, what has turned us into a nation of eternally unsatisfied must-haves, where even houses with two dozen closets can’t contain one family’s shit, all the single-season wonders that simply must be had. that one must trample the part-time store clerk to get one’s holiday-shopping hands upon. people weren’t always like this, and it’s no accident: this eternally insatiable thing has been quite consciously and intentionally generated by the multibillion dollar advertising economy. it was not rockstar love pushing those black friday hordes forward; it was the glitz and seduction of nonstop, often subliminal, advertising campaigns. it was the neon sneakers in times square and dancing dinosaurs on the back of cereal boxes. that sweet recorded voice crooning over canned music at the mall.

consider the fact that even your bailout tax dollars are being used to fund corporate branding expenses. consider that some schools even sell ad space on their closed-circuit TVs and classroom walls.

we live in a culture so consumed and subsumbed by flashing ads lunging at us and over us and into our ears and onto our t-shirts and being sent home in brilliant four-color slicks with our kids from school and arriving in your mailbox and your email and on just about every single fucking page you visit on the web. 24/7/365, created by marketers with psychology degrees and billions of dollars of research at their disposal.

by all means, let’s hold the tramplers accountable if they can be found. by all means, let’s hold wal-mart accountable for irresponsible marketing practices like pairing “while supplies last” with a 5am opening time that guarantees a cold and impatient mob gathering for hours at their flimsy doors.

but let’s not forget the masterminds behind the monster of american consumerism and all its associated ugliness (not least of which is the environmental destruction caused by mindless mass consumption). we need to cut this kind of evil down at the root, and the root is on madison avenue. it’s time to regulate the where, when, how and how much of advertising in our lives. it’s time to take the public commons out of the hands of the advertisers who presently control it, and who do it, and us, absolutely no good.

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on this holiday morning, i offer you a rerun of the infamous sarah palin butchered turkey interview:

enjoy your dinner! but remember — the indians were here first.

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shop. that’s right. we ain’t gonna shop on black friday, the busiest mindless consumption day of the year, when millions of americans descend on the malls like so many mastercard-wielding locusts, scooping up disposable crap to wrap in disposable paper and fling underneath their disposable xmas trees. all in honor of their lord jesus christ.

but in this, our year of ultimate economic defilement, we will turn it all around by embracing adbuster’s brilliant buy nothing day program, amen. citizen actions are planned in all fifty states (well, maybe not wasilla) and you can either join a scheduled protest or create one of your own.

don’t just sit home all ajitter with shopping withdrawal, use your imagination! people carry out some great guerilla actions at the malls. my favorite, a couple years ago, was where some guys took a hundred bucks in one-dollar bills, went to the third tier of a mall and dropped the bills one by one down into the shopping mob, which (sadly and predictably) went nuts, people falling all over one another in a high-speed cash grab. for DOLLAR BILLS. you can’t even mail three letters for a buck, can’t get the smallest coffee starbucks sells. they taped the dollarbill feeding frenzy, but i can’t put my hands on that video right now.

instead of wreaking havoc at the mall, you might want to build your own very special lawn ornament:

if you’re lucky enough to be in nyc on black friday, you can dance your debt away in union square with rev billy and his church of stop shopping. on regular working days the good rev is busy doing cash-register exorcisms and orchestrating synchronized cellphone havoc at the disney shops.

certain people in your life just gotta get something? then give something real. mow your cousin’s lawn, shovel your grandmother’s driveway, hand-write a five-page letter to your friend who lives across the street. take your sister to the movies. trim the claws of your mother’s unruly cat. and so forth. if giving charitably “in honor of” is more your thing, check out the heifer project.

angelo verga, a brilliant nyc poet, wrote this in honor of BND eight years ago, and it’s never gotten stale:

A Checklist for Not Buying Things

Ask yourself: where was this made?
Could I borrow this, and save?
What will happen if it breaks?
Ask yourself: can I get along without it?
If I wait a day will my need to have this fade?
Ask yourself: how well is this thing made?
And if it turns out to be shit,
Ask yourself: can I get it fixed, replaced?
If I buy this now, will I need to buy a mate
to go with it? Is it complete?
Are they coming out with an upgrade,
or variation next week, even cheaper?
Wouldn’t something more dear convey cachet?
Ask yourself: how many of these do I already possess?
Have any made me happy?
Will one more make me less angry?
Less fat? Less ugly? Less lonely?
 
Angelo Verga
originally published on poetz.com, 11/00 

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