Happy Holidays and a Healthy New Year to each and every one of you! When I began writing this column, in the early Spring of 2006, I never would have imagined that I would make it this far – consistently writing one column a week for forty-two out of forty-three weeks straight. But for the New Year, I will again be taking another week off next week, so I hope this issue tides you over until then, and if it doesn’t, well you can re-read back issues on my web page. Right now it is Christmas Eve Day and I’m sitting in my local coffee shop, trying to cram out another issue before my flight back to the Bay. In trying to figure out what to write about this week, I have elected not to ridicule all that encompasses the American celebration of the day Jesus was born; In order to stretch myself, as a writer, I’m going to take the high road this week, and leave Xmas alone.
Last Spring, I began this column by writing a mini rant that I thought was pretty clever, and after I emailed the rant to my closest ten friends and family members, most of them seemed to enjoy it. The next week, I emailed another rant, which my list seemed to like even more. By week three, I had gotten into the idea of trying to write a column, and I even had named it, “It Sucks To Be You.” At this point, I expanded my recipient list to about forty people. Among these forty people was a professor from college who has been telling me since the first day that I met him that I should concentrate my life efforts on becoming a writer. Since week four, there have been a few weeks in which I wanted to quit writing this column, but Tobias, my former professor, continued to email me a response to each and every one of my columns, and always told me to keep writing.
After about two months of column critiques, Tobias began to resume an old habit of his, namely harping on me to complete a fiction novel. He told me to continue writing the column as a practice tool, but to concentrate my ‘real’ efforts on a novel. I told him I didn’t know how to begin a novel, nor how to write the middle of one, I only knew how I wanted to end all of my novels. He sent me back an email that was succinct, and per usual, hilarious. It read: ‘“I have not had an erection in ten years…’ Okay Mike, go from there. – Tobias.”
Suffice it to say that this 81-year-old man has a great sense of humor. He fought in World War II and saw a lot of friends die. So he wasn’t shy about saying that President Bush is an idiot for sending so many people to wage a war when he’d never seen a second of real combat, but to his credit, he also never tried to convince his students that war was a bad thing, he just said that it was absolute hell, and no matter what the cause is that you are fighting for, killing and dying is never fun. He told a lot of great stories about government propaganda during World War II, and about historical revisionism, but more than any of those topics, he loved to discuss English Literature and Poetry.
Tobias got me to appreciate poetry, a task I once thought impossible, and he also turned me on to some great authors, many of who have influenced me as a writer. He also taught me that if I have the right attitude about it, growing old will be fun, so long as I remember to laugh and smile and even to cry whenever the emotion hits me. He taught me to embrace the vague ambiguity that is life for a modern American male, and he continually encouraged me to write the truth, to speak the truth, and to let people laugh at my ideas and perception of the truth, and so I dedicate this column to Tobias.
In September, because of Tobias, I entered “The International Three Day Novel Contest,” and successfully completed my first full-length work of fiction, entitled “Dysfunction,” over the span of three days. The book actually begins with the line “I have not had an erection in more than then years…” and I was planning on printing out a special copy of the book and sending it to Tobias as a surprise for Christmas this year. Unfortunately, Tobias got to surprise me first, by suddenly taking ill and dying about two months ago. I knew for quite some time that something was wrong with the old man, because he had stopped responding to my columns, and then his emails began to bounce back with a message that read, “the following recipient is not a valid recipient.” But I was too scared to investigate the truth, until about two weeks ago, when I finally ‘bothered to’, and I found out, for sure, that my incredible role model and friend, Tobias, is no longer with us.
Now, if Tobias were still alive, and he knew that I just wrote almost a full page of tributary mush in his honor, he would scold me, tell me to spend my time on something better, and that I should be making people laugh, not think about aging and dying, but I can’t help it, because if it weren’t for this man, I would not be writing these words, nor focusing my creative energy and efforts in the manner that I currently do. So be it. But because Tobias is a funny man who liked my comedy more than my drama, I’ll offer him this, in honor of all of the friendly, caring Christmas spirit that seems to appear in mankind for about two days each year, so that everyone can treat everyone else like shit and not feel so bad about it for the other 363 days of the year, I’m going to do the same, and attempt to leave Christmas alone, despite my true perception of the holiday spirit.
Yep, that’s right, all you Christmas lovers, I’m going to shut my big fat mouth for once, and instead admit that I think that crystal white snow on Christmas morning is a beautiful, almost godlike sight to behold, that Christmas lights shining into the night can touch my soul, and that a beautifully groomed and decorated Christmas tree is just about the most beautiful man and electricity meets nature thingy out there. I mean, why bother getting upset by holiday shoppers who try to run me over in the process of racing for an available parking spot so that they can run into another holiday store in order to pick up a bar of scented soap to stuff in the stocking of some distant cousin that they’ve never met? After all, they’re just trying to emulate their peers and share and spread some holiday joy
Tobias taught me to dream, and dreaming is an important part of Christmas, because your heartfelt material dreams and wishes are supposedly fulfilled by a fat old man who climbs down your chimney every Christmas; so I should be happy around Christmas time, instead of feeling guilty for the fact that I cannot afford to get any of my friends anything decent this year. I have felt guilty all of this week, knowing that this year, instead of spending all of my cash on my friends, in order to buy them a gift that represents my heartfelt thoughts, so that this ‘thought’ can ‘count,’ I’m just going to think said thought, and hope that the actual thought is enough for my friends, and not the gift that supposedly symbolizes my actual thoughts and feelings. But I’m afraid that my friends are going to be let down, since I usually buy them some pretty sweet gifts, so sorry guys and gals! Oh, and whoever decided to tie the idea of a gift with the commemoration of a thought was a marketing genius; right up they’re with the dude at Sprint who made camera phones mandatory on all new phones. I hope these marketing geniuses have a Merry Christmas!
But if our society is really going to take two days off from work to celebrate CHRIST each year, then we should celebrate his ideals as well; like turning the other cheek. I’m sure that our President, who is a fundamental Christian, is spending today and tomorrow thinking about how he should forgive everyone who he feels has slighted him, and our nation. According to Christ, even people like Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden deserve our forgiveness. Even though these two men once bought a lot of our weapons from us, and then used them to help us fight our shared enemies, only to turn around and use those same weapons against us when we tried to invade them in recent years.
But I’m sure fairly sure that George Walker Bush is a nice guy, who wants to follow Christ’s way. Either that, or in the 80’s, his Mommy told him that if he didn’t clean up his act and quit drinking and find Jesus, Santa Claus would stop visiting him with gifts like Yale diplomas, baseball teams, governorships, and Oval Offices… Merry Christmas Bush, I hope you find the weapons of mass destruction that you used to convince America to begin your campaign in Iraq with in your stocking this year. I hope that Santa brings you the rest of your Christmas wishes, things like a national ID card and further revocations on our right to personal privacy, more lenient laws on pollution and oil drilling so your buddies in Texas can earn another billion dollars, and of course, more tax money to support our bloated, yet oddly over extended ‘national defense, which curiously spends most of its efforts and energy occupying international space.
If you’re really good this year, Bush, maybe Santa will even bring you a constitutional amendment that bans basic civil liberties like the right for a woman to make decisions concerning her own body, or the right for scientists to attempt to use harmless stem cells to try and discover cures for cancer and diabetes, and even a ban on gay marriage! If you are really lucky, and pray hard, maybe Santa will bring you a brain, a sense of rationality, and the ability to formulate basic thoughts and then turn them into coherent sentences.
I hope that Santa Clause brings me a few things this year as well; like the ability to cope with the seemingly chaotic and childish attitudes that most of the world leaders possess (This means you, leaders of Venezuela, Iran, China, North Korea, Russia, Pakistan, India, Israel, Cypress, Hamas, Palestine, Somalia, and I’d say about one hundred other nations that I am overlooking in my haste to finish this column so that I can go watch some NFL action.). I would also ask that Santa help me find the power to quit smoking cigarettes because they disgust me and yet I’m attached to my childish-rock-star-idolizing-notion that ‘great artists’ smoke cigarettes, which always draws me back to smoking. Boy is my face red! It would appear that in my effort to leave Christmas alone, I’ve actually just used Christmas as a backdrop to ridicule our president, and to talk politics, yet again. But for those of you keeping track, I’d actually gone almost five weeks straight without making fun of Mr. Bush and his cabinet, and I even left the whole Rumsfeld ‘early retirement’ thing alone. Besides, if Tobias were reading this column, he’d tell me that I needed to say what was on my mind, without any reservations or fears, and then let my readers deal with it. So on that note, I hope that if each of you can take one thing away from Christmas, and this column, this year, may it be the following idea: If most of western society can curb their immoral behavior for the few days surrounding Christmas each year, then why can’t everyone continue to do this for the other 363 days of the year? If you can do it for two days, you can do it for the rest of your life. So to all of you who say that war is necessary, there will always be evil, and world peace is impossible, I hope your Christmas sucks, because it sucks to be you, and your attitude, and you don’t deserve two fake days of cheer when you spend the rest of the year spreading negativity, helping to maintain an establishment dedicated to war mongering and the police state; and your illusion of safety is about as real as Santa Claus.