This holiday season...

Over the last two days, I went to five different stores looking for the right Barbie for my niece. Spending two days and a whole bunch of fossil fuel looking for a hunk of plastic that will most likely be forgotten within a couple of years kind of encapsulates why I'm pretty sure I'll never have kids, but I did it for two reasons:

1. I'm going to tell a 5-year old that she didn't get what she wanted because her uncle didn't feel like driving around and wanted to teach her a lesson about materialism? How much of a dick do you think I am?

2. She wanted Zoo Doctor Barbie. ZOO DOCTOR BARBIE. I have a niece that's expressing an interest in science, however tangential. I'm going to cultivate the living shit out of that.

More about the holiday season. About a year ago was a grim, grim time, even for me. A number of things personally and professionally had gone wrong, leaving me feeling like I couldn't trust anyone, most of all myself. I pulled through thanks to some heretofore untapped internal reserves and the support of a small group of friends and family. Another thing that helped get me through that time was a rant by Little Steven on his Underground Garage show. I posted this on my old blog, and I reproduce it here now:

“Okay, who wants to commit suicide? Raise your hand. One, two…quite a few this year. All right, let’s try and figure this out, shall we? Three reasons, I’m thinking:

Number One: Society says you should be happy and thankful this time of year, and you’re not either one.

Number Two: You are lonely. It’s the time when people celebrate family and friends, and you either don’t like a lot of your family, or you don’t have much of a family, and you really don’t have that many close friends, either.

Number Three, and this is good any time of the year: You’re broke. Busted. Tapped out. Bills are piling up, and now you’re supposed to buy people presents?

That pretty much covers it, right? Well guess what? Everybody’s depressed. Everybody with a brain, anyway. That is reality for most people. Some people are better actors, and some people can live in denial more successfully than others. But the reality is, life sucks. It’s a horror.

Yes, there a few people who have wonderful families and friends and money. A very few. Everybody else going around looking and acting happy is a moron. They’re idiots. Don’t they read the papers? New Orleans, the Asian tsunami, AIDS in Africa. Need something closer? Go out your door, make a right, how far do you get before tripping over a homeless person?

Life sucks, trust me. Most people’s families are dysfunctional, most people’s friends are backstabbing hypocrites, and our economy is permanently screwed. It will be bad for the rest of everybody’s lifetime because of the debt. Not just the deficit, the debt. So it ain’t just you.

So what do you want to do? Sit around and whine about it? Commit suicide? Check out and let the bad guys win? Because they want sensitive, intelligent troublemakers like you out of the way.

No. We are not going to whine and complain. We are not going to very cowardly check out. We are going to acknowledge that the world is a horror show, and in the context of that reality, and in spite of that reality, we are going to find some things to celebrate.

Like what? Like the Beatles. Like Little Richard. Like the Ramones. Like Jon Stewart. Like the Simpsons. Like Bill Maher. Like dogs and elephants and sex and love and the one family member maybe you do like, or the one friend maybe you do trust. Or the little kid down the street that smiles at you when you’re in a bad mood. Like truth. Like books. Like movies, flowers, go-go girls, and Christmas.

Christmas is cool. That’s why everybody celebrates it, regardless of their religions. It doesn’t matter if Jesus was really the son of God or not. Like all religious writings, it is symbolic. Christmas symbolizes rebirth, renewal, a second chance, an opportunity to start over. We’re not on this planet very long to begin with, so while we’re here, let’s try and have a little fun.”

Be good to each other out there, folks.


"Tom Waits and Peter Murphy" duet on a Christmas song. There are no visuals. Wash the dishes or something while you listen.