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| Gaia always sleeps with her back to the city... the humans built it, the humans can care for it. |
Yup… here in the
good ‘ole US of A it’s another Thanksgiving holiday. Today is when, if you honor the tradition,
you’re supposed to find something to be thankful for. I had a bit of trouble with that thought this
morning, kind of struggled with the idea.
Not that I don’t have a great many things in my life to be thankful for,
I really do, but finding the sentiment to match the status just wasn’t
happening. And Thanksgiving just means
Christmas is on the horizon, oh yea, you can hear ‘em bringing the Mighty
Merchandising Machine screaming outa’ the hole in yet another totally trite full
throttle launch, for those with ears to hear it’s rather deafening. Before the day was very old at all I was
hearing Howard Keel in the background, whisper soft for the time being but
sadly certain to get louder and louder for the next month or so.
…You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch…
The holiday blahs,
the secret bummed out depressions, nothing in those that hasn’t been spoken of
a bazillion times in different places, by different people. The facades and the fakes and the 100 proof
punch that greases the wheels, nothing new, not at all. So common place in fact they’re well
understood as being just part and parcel of the culture. Flipping this fact around though actually
made me feel a great deal better, I found what I’d been looking for.
I’ve been calling
myself contra-social for quite some time now, and for the most part it is a
fair description that hasn’t treated me badly, not at all. I make it a habit to commonly reveal this
fact about myself in part as fair warning for those I meet, but mostly just to
remind myself that being contra-social demands a fair amount of very deliberate
care and compassion and empathy for those whose lives are anchored in the
social as a safety mechanism for your own soul and sanity lest frustration
empower the pathological. To be
contra-social is not to hate your fellow man, far from it. It is actually to understand the inevitable consequences
of what the law of averages compels society to compel on your fellow man, have
something to offer him in defense of those discomforts. What I realized is that the holiday blahs are
actually just a fine, fine marker for those who are host and home to some
degree of contra-social thought, and allowing for how common the holiday blahs
really are that means I’m not nearly as alone as I thought I was, and
that? That, contradictory as it might
sound, is actually something to be very thankful for.
End and upshot of
it all is that I’m gonna kick back and enjoy the day, tell Howard I’d much rather
hear him sing Stranger in Paradise, and continue my own tradition of giving
someone something they really need in perhaps July, saying Merry Christmas, and
meaning it. C’mon world, cut all us
contra-social grinches some slack, quit the whole psycho-sham faux pity thing. And the same goes for all my fellow grinches
out there, cut the crap and live up to your life not down to their expectations. Maybe Santa only works out in public
one day a year, but I’m pretty sure Jesus was the 24/7/365 kind, and after a
century of what Madison Avenue has been hustling on his name? That makes which
one has my loyalty a no brainer indeed.
Yup, I’m contra-social,
and the best part of this particular holiday is realizing I don’t need to apologize
for it.
Contra-social. Yeah, me too. And just because I don't buy into the Madison Avenue China-made buying spree, I'm sometimes counted a Scrooge. But if we love our brother and sister humans, we must absolutely give them some contra-social survival tools. Our race may well depend on them soon enough.
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