Despite its problems, I suspect that 2011 was better than 99% of the years humanity has ever experienced. My personal 2011, despite me getting kicked in the metaphorical nuts a few times, was probably better than the 2011 experienced by most of the people on Earth. I’m declaring victory and moving on to 2012.
Last week a friend mocked me for washing a bowl before I put it in my dishwasher. She did it in a gentle way, and as I scrubbed out the dried tomato soup I admitted that I didn’t trust the dishwasher. Trust can be fragile in my world, and I can’t place full trust in a machine built by a guy who’s yearning for his break while daydreaming about his girlfriend in black stockings. Maybe I’m weird. Yet this was my friend who was asking me, so I didn’t mind sharing my mistrust with her.
A few minutes later, alone as I scoured a pot, I reflected on the romance of the mundane. Washing dishes seems about as mundane as you can get. At least it seems that way to me. But I was washing each dish as people brought them in from the den, so that my wife could visit with her friends and not have to face a Vesuvius of plates and flatware when everybody went home. It sure wasn’t dinner and dancing. It lacked passion, and nobody was getting groped in a promising way. Yet this mundane thing we shared had its own kind of romance.
I guess this is kind of Taoist. Maybe Zen or something. I wondered if anyone else had thought about this, and I found this neat article. It even used the same words had I thought of—Romance of the Mundane. It’s all about the simple, daily tasks and events that make a shared life, and how that constitutes real romance.
I admit that I’d make a crummy Taoist. I looked into it when I was young, and while it was cool I realized it was not for me. I could give some meaningful-sounding reasons, but basically I like stuff too much, and I enjoy it too much when things get exciting. Plus, if you’ve ever heard a Taoist joke then you’d know that Taoism require a consciousness expanded beyond my capability to achieve.
A Taoist joke, courtesy of the Hog-Tao:
Accept misfortune as the human condition.
What do you mean, “accept misfortune as the human condition?”
Misfortune comes from having a body.
No body, no misfortune.
Which reminds us of a song.
Sometimes we amuse ourself at the Hog Tao.
But nobody knows.
Except Louis.
Sing it Satchmo.
Therefore, while I’m not a Taoist, I’m also not alone in my suspicion that romance of the mundane does exist, and that it’s about sharing a life. Although it’s still nice to get laid once in a while, nothing says romance like shopping for decent produce and mint chocolate chunk ice cream. Nothing says devotion like putting your lover’s clean underwear away in the proper spot in the correct drawer. Nothing says love like working together to change the sheets because the cat barfed on them.
I’m not sure what to call this post-Christmas communication. “Debrief” sounds like we’ve just smuggled a defector out of Beijing. “Report” makes me want to write about reindeer with a No. 2 pencil in a Big Chief notebook. “Summary” is something that you deliver once you close the quarterly books, and “After Action Report” implies that we’ve just overrun a Nazi battalion in some unfortunate Belgian village.
How about “Reckoning”?
While this holiday launched a few more challenges at my people than we generally see, we managed fine. We all came out of it alive, with our health no worse than when we started, and loving each other as much as we did on December 24. That said, I feel obliged to settle the score regarding my wife’s Christmas gift. I of course refer to replacing the squatty wooden chair that I destroyed a few weeks ago, as if I were a Grimm’s fairy tale character with three teeth and a size 96 chest.
I received a lot of comments about trying to repair her old chair, since it was so charming, and any other chair I could find must suck in comparison. I admitted that might be true. My wife accepted it too, and she hinted that she expected a plain, utilitarian chair. In fact, those exact words might have come out of her mouth. But I judged the old chair to be as thoroughly obliterated as Lot’s wife and thus beyond repair, so I went chair shopping.
I stalked a new chair, killed it, brought it home, and wrapped it. I think I did a nice job of supporting the fiction that a wrapped chair should be unidentifiable as a chair. I also think that my wrapping job managed my wife’s expectations down to the lowest common denominator, as you can see here:
Festive, right?
My wife unwrapped the thing after five minutes of work with a sharp knife and some other implements that might have included a spatula. She saw that the disinterred new chair differs from her crushed squatty wooden chair in several respects. The seat is an inch and a half higher. The whole chair is two shades darker. The new chair is not held together with strategic bungee cord structural supports, and the new chair has a blue shirt hanging over the back of it:
My wife smiled, kissed me, and made other positive overtures, which leads me to think I’ve done well and needn’t fear being eaten by wolves.
By the way, my wife gave me a stellar gift. She knitted me a scarf, patterned after one she screwed up in a neat and creative way a few years ago. But she made this one in manly colors, so I can wear it without fear of testosterone depletion. Here it is modeled by Lola, our articulated artist’s mannequin that sits behind our bar, a gift from my sister some years ago:
And speaking of my lovely sister the artist, she painted a fantastic painting for us. You can see it here both with and without cat, just to give you a sense of proportion:
So the Reckoning is made, and the holiday season moves into the cherished past. It’s time for New Year’s resolutions, something I’ve never been good at. I can only think of one right now. I resolve to keep my huge ass off the new squatty wooden chair.
I now know that fear of public speaking and fear of clowns are the same thing. Or they are when you look under the surface. My friend Karl helped me understand this. Karl and I sometimes go to Chili’s to hang out with our friend, Jeff. We talk about things like Napoleon’s battles and the properties of foam rubber while we drink beer and eat cheese fries. Last night I mentioned to them that I’m afraid the Christmas gift I bought for my wife sucks. Since she flat out told me she wants a squatty wooden chair for Christmas, giving her a lousy squatty wooden chair would be bad, and I fear that. I believe my fear is justified.
Karl swallowed a mouthful of fries and said, “You sure are afraid of wolves.”
I stared at Karl as if he’d said he had x-ray vision and his nipples were made of diamonds.
He went on, “Every fear can be boiled down to the fear of being eaten by wolves. For example, you’re really afraid that your wife will hate the chair, and that it will poison your marriage, and that she’ll boot you out of the house, and that you’ll wander in the snow until you’re eaten by wolves.”
“No I’m not!”
“No? Are you really this scared just because you think she’ll look at the chair and frown, or because she’ll yell at you? Nope. You’re scared of the wolves.”
“Hey, wolves don’t eat people too much. That’s a myth,” Jeff said.
“Doesn’t matter,” Karl said. “It’s a myth that most beautiful women go for fat, bald guys who play video games, but that doesn’t stop fat, bald guys from thinking it. I’ll prove this. Ask me about another fear.”
“I’m afraid of giving speeches,” Jeff said.
“Easy. You’re really afraid that when the audience hears how bad you are, they’ll hate you so much they’ll chase you out of the building, and you’ll be fired or maybe branded, and that you’ll go broke and lose your house, and that you’ll wander in the snow until you’re eaten by wolves.”
“Oh come on,” I said. “That’s dumb. That stuff won’t happen.”
“Of course it won’t happen. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t afraid of it, deep down. Ask me another one.”
I thought for a moment and grinned. “Fear of falling.”
Karl grinned back. “You’re really afraid that when you hit the ground you’ll break your legs, and that you’ll drag yourself around in the snow until you’re eaten by wolves.”
Jeff snorted and lifted his beer mug to his lips.
“Honestly,” Karl said. “You’re not as afraid of instant death as you are of a thoroughly agonizing maiming, followed by a desperate struggle and painful death. In the jaws of wolves.”
Karl stared back at us in triumph as he unconsciously played with a cheese fry, making it dance across the plate in front of him.
I squinted at Karl, hoping I looked like Clint Eastwood in Fistful of Dollars, but expecting that I probably looked like a lemur in Death Valley. “Fear of clowns.”
“Clowns riding wolves. The clowns mock you, and the wolves eat you.”
“Fear of spiders.”
“Wolf spiders.”
I raised my eyebrows at Karl.
Jeff jumped in, “No, I get what you’re saying. You look at a spider and your brain screams that some terrible thing is going to eat you. You know that little spider can’t eat you, so deep inside you’re afraid you’ll end up being eaten by wolves. In the snow.”
Karl smiled and held out his mug to toast with Jeff.
I refused to surrender. “Fear of success.”
“You’re really afraid that when you succeed you’ll change, and people won’t like you anymore, and then they’ll abandon you, and you’ll lose everything, and you’ll be alone wandering around in the snow until you’re eaten by wolves.”
This was stupid. I looked up at the ceiling and pursed my lips. Karl and Jeff began chatting about how electric socks are made. Then I set my mug down as if it were an iron glove flung at Karl’s feet. I snatched a fry and said, “Okay, if you can answer this one I’ll give. Fear of sinning and going to Hell.”
Karl leaned back in the booth. “I’ll concede that you’re not afraid of wandering in the snow. But you’re not afraid of Hell itself, either. You’re afraid of what will happen there.” Karl finished off his beer, which mainly consisted of his saliva by now. “If there are wolves in Hell, they won’t just eat you. They’ll eat you twice a day for all eternity. Now, you met my uncle Luther, right? The one that knocked over that liquor store after kicking the Salvation Army Santa in the stomach and stealing the donations? Well he died six months ago. So I guarantee that there’s at least one vicious, rabid wolf in Hell to welcome you.”
And thus Karl made his point. It’s all about the wolves.
Photo Courtesy of Laura Merrill.
When a bull gores you, you always lose. It doesn’t matter how tough you are, how hard you’ve worked all your life, or how independent you consider yourself to be. You’re screwed. You’re doubly screwed if you’re 80 years old, like my mom’s uncle was when the bull caught him looking the wrong way. He then spent the last three years of his life in a nursing home. Those places are called “skilled nursing facilities” now, but 30 years ago nobody felt like taking the “skilled” part for granted.
Over those three years my mom w
ore out a new car visiting her uncle every other day. She brought him all kinds of things he wasn’t supposed to have, like candy and a shaving razor and his pocket knife. Among my people, if you don’t have a pocket knife then you’re more crippled than if you can’t walk. He used his knife to take apart the TV remote one day, in order to see what made it work. He wasn’t able to get it back into working condition though. The nurses took his pocket knife away, along with his candy and razor and about every other thing that gave him a little pleasure. He was known to tell his nurses, “I know I’m going to hell. The only thing I regret is that all you god damn nurses are going to be there too.”
On to the next tenuously connected observation…
*****
I grew up hearing the phrase “knocked on the head.” I never heard anyone but my family members say it. I gather that it’s used in some circles today, and it means things like to be smacked on the head so as to leave a bump, or even to have sex with the partner of your choice. In my family it meant only one thing: to kill someone. Actually, it meant to kill someone deader than hell. It’s not that my family killed indiscriminately, but knocking someone on the head is a mighty efficient way to kill a person, not to mention tidy. One of my uncles expired in short order after being whacked on the head with a beer bottle. And my father told me the story of his cousin who was put in a family way by a fellow who left town soon after. Her daddy then left town with his ball peen hammer and returned a few days later without the hammer, but with a satisfied expression.
*****
When I was 24 I tore my knee up in a magnificent fashion. Well, the way I did it was as stupid as anyone can imagine, but the actual wreckage was spectacular. After completing his symphony of pins and sutures and blood, my surgeon gave me lots of warnings about a careful recovery. I ignored them all right away. I threw aside my crutches and just hopped on my good leg everywhere I wanted to go, and I only crashed into a wall two or three times a week. Since a gigantic cast encased my right leg, driving was impossible. So of course I drove all over town using my foot’s pathetic range of motion to mash pedals as it poked out the bottom of my cast. Don’t even ask me how I handled the clutch. I told my body, “shift or die,” and then I headed for places like the mall and Dairy Queen.
Being a stupid and contrary gave me one advantage. Rehab hurt like a cast iron bitch, so out of meanness I embraced the pain. After the nurse cut off my cast, she turned her back to put away the saw, so I stood up to test my leg and plummeted straight to the floor. But apart from that, I spent three weeks bending my knee, lifting weights, riding the bicycle, and getting some sweet, healing electricity passed through my leg. If smacking my leg with hammers would have helped, I’m sure I would have done it. Every day I couldn’t walk was a day I couldn’t make any money. It was about to be July in Texas, and electricity might soon become an unaffordable luxury for me.
A fellow in rehab with me had wrecked his knee the same time I did, and to the same degree. He made zero progress while I was working on mine. He couldn’t even bend his knee. This concerned me quite a bit, because I feared I might hit a wall in my rehab or something, so I cajoled some whispered gossip out of the therapist. It turned out that the guy just couldn’t take the pain. He went to the point of hurting and then stopped. That knowledge relieved me a bit, and I asked the therapist how the fellow had suffered his knee damage. I myself always lied when I was asked that question, because the truth sounded so ignorant. I might instead say that I fell off a house, or that I tripped over a dog, or something reasonable like that. In any event, the gentleman with the negative pain threshold was a karate instructor, and he’d massacred his knee doing some karate move. When I walked out of rehab, the sensei was still trying to bend his leg, and the surgeon was preparing to anesthetize him again and bend the thing for him.
*****
Almost four months ago my mom broke her leg. A powder-blue carpeted floor can’t intimidate you the way a bull can, but it did the job on her leg just fine. I wouldn’t say that it snapped her leg. That’s too mild. Shattered is a better description, but not quite there. Let’s say that her femur was somewhere between pulverized and obliterated.
My mom’s surgeon put her leg back together with enough titanium to armor a guided missile cruiser. Then, despite the fact that she’s owned this femur for 75 years and it’s way out of warranty, my mom set out to walk again. She’s moved through a variety of hospitals, rehab centers, and “skilled” nursing facilities since her surgery. For hundreds of hours she’s lifted weights, stretched, cycled, and done stupid dexterity games involving pennies and Play-Doh. She’s smarter than me and doesn’t embrace the pain, but if a therapist lies to her about how many minutes she’s been working so far, my mom will keep on working until she craters.
But—she will not god damn eat.
My people like their food. Their food is almost a religion. If the bacon’s not crisp enough, then it’s inedible. If the potatoes don’t have enough salt, they might make you sick. If the soup has weird spices, then your mouth will just refuse to open and let you eat any of it. This is inconvenient for three days. For three weeks, it’s aggravating and concerning. When it goes on for three months, you’ve reached “concentration camp victim about to die of malnutrition” territory. Literally everyone she comes into contact with tells her she must eat, including me. “Eat or die.” That’s the message. If I could tattoo it on the backs of her fingers I’d do it in a minute.
Like any two family members, my mom and I disagree at times. We have issues that may be a little out of the ordinary, but that’s not really pertinent here. She has demonstrated to me that someone can crumble to sand while you’re watching them, and that frustrates me. It causes me to not want to visit her too often. But when I consider that she drove all the way across creation every other day for three years to visit her uncle, I can’t stand thinking that nobody might do that for her.
Yesterday my mom’s surgeon read her tea leaves, otherwise known as interpreting her x-rays. My mom did not get the interpretation she wanted. She got, “Your leg hasn’t healed at all. It’s probably not going to heal, and you’re not going to walk anymore. Stop your therapy, go home, and live your life the best you can. And Happy Fucking Holidays.”
That news disheartened everyone, except maybe for the guy who’ll be selling my mom a new wheelchair soon. I feel a bit guilty for thinking that things might be different if only she’d consumed a little more protein for healing, rather than trying to rebuild bone on seven grapes a day and all the chap stick she could absorb through her lips. I feel less guilty than I might, since every other person who knows her is thinking the same thing. But it may not have mattered anyway. Her leg might not have healed even if she’d eaten an entire codfish at every meal. Who knows?
So Monday my mom will go back home after an enforced holiday of 15 weeks—over a third of the time it takes to hatch a baby. If it had been a real holiday, it wouldn’t have been the kind where it just rained all day. It would have rained white-hot razor blades and insane scorpions trained by mean old church ladies. She’ll need some help at home now, so I’ll try to keep a few things in mind as I help out. She’s not 24 years old. When you get down to it, what she does or doesn’t eat is none of my damned business. And I ought to give her a pocket knife.
Books have changed my life. “Trout Fishing in America” taught me that there are people weirder than me. “Breakfast of Champions” taught me that if I do something really stupid, nobody will care that I intended to do something really smart. “The Silmarillion” made me so mad that I forced myself to read the son of a bitch three times so I could at least keep all the elves straight in my head. And now I find my life again changed by a book.
Last weekend my wife and I attended a huge street festival. On Saturday, 50,000 people shoved their way through eight square blocks of downtown Galveston, shopping for cheap silver earrings and lining up to buy shrimp on a stick as if they were lining up to be healed by the Shroud of Turin. But on Sunday the winter rain fell. We joined seven other people wandering the streets, watching vendors pack their trailers and go home to their TVs and beer. We didn’t walk those streets because we’re stupid. We did it because we’ve been conditioned to walk around festivals in the rain, as if there were a bell at the end of the street and Pavlov was our master.
At noon we dodged into a restaurant, but it turned out to be a store disguised as a restaurant, trapping unwary, hungry people in aisles of glass beads and cheap purses. We perused. In the back corner, between some tasteful scarves and some cocktail napkins with pithy sayings, sat a book, and the title snatched my attention. It was called “Assholology.” I don’t think anyone could resist picking it up to browse. I wanted to know what the assholes among us look like, how they live, and how to avoid them.
I read a few paragraphs and snickered. I looked at some chapter titles and became thoughtful. I scanned a bunch of pages and swallowed real hard. My wife was poking through some signs with pithy sayings. I said, “Sweetie, I do 75% of the stuff in this book. I must be an asshole!”
She raised an eyebrow at me. It made me feel like I’d just told her I was a vertebrate, something that would be instantly known by anyone who saw me walking around.
I looked at the book again. The authors were Steven B. Green, Dennis LaValle, and Chris Illuminati. I realized that I don’t want to be an asshole. I don’t want everybody to hate me, and I thanked these men for stopping me in time.
I internalized the book’s main premise. Assholes get what they want, and they get away with it. That made sense. Everybody hates someone who gets what he wants and gets away with it. You’re not supposed to get what you want, or else you should get caught and punished. I absorbed the mantra, “Don’t get what you want. Don’t get what you want. Don’t get what you want.” I whispered goodbye to that dream of a flat screen TV. But hell, I’d have to find someplace to hang the thing anyway, and I can spend the money on lottery tickets and caramel frappucinos instead.
I rushed on to specific asshole behaviors like, Always tip and tip well, Become the bartender’s best friend, and Treat your boss like he’s not your boss. Okay, from now on I’ll only tip exactly 15%, and only if I get good service. I’ll help that waitress understand how it feels to not get what you want. If I don’t get good service, that’s okay. At least I’m not being an asshole. And I’ll work to be a non-entity to the bartender so I can wait an extra 10 minutes for my whiskey sour. And I’ve got a lot of work to do in order to begin treating my boss like a divine potentate whose presence I’m not fit to contaminate with my tawdry self. These were going to be tough, but I could do it.
Finally, I faced the three essential qualities of an asshole. These things I must expunge from my being so I won’t be reviled by my fellow man. A thick skin. This makes sense. If I’m not an asshole anymore, no one will have a reason to hate me. I won’t need a thick skin. I can accept being devastated when someone tells me I sing like a mule with strep throat, or that my taste sucks because I like the movie “Frankenhooker.” That one’s easy.
The ability to say no to anyone. Perfect! I hate saying no to people anyway. Now when my co-worker wants me to work Christmas Day for her, or when my visiting niece wants to go to an un-chaperoned party at a lake house next door to a meth lab, I can just say yes. My life is about to get a lot less stressful.
Confidence coming out of, well, your ass. From now on I must endeavor to be too insecure to make a statement like that, even if I were talking about somebody else. I’ll have to rephrase it as: Confidence coming from a place we shouldn’t really be talking about, and you shouldn’t be having so much confidence anyway since it might make you look like a bad person, and people might not like you. If I say that, no one will hate me for being an asshole.
World, I am done with being an asshole. Prepare yourself to like me a whole lot more. I owe a profound debt to the brothers Green, LaValle, and Illuminati. They’re like the Three Wise Men riding Harleys instead of camels, and bringing bribes instead of frankincense. Their book stands as a magnificent signpost telling us how not to live. And it doesn’t have any damned elves.
The only Beach Boy who could surf was Dennis Wilson—and he drowned in 1983. This is the kind of valuable, compelling fact that I used to keep in my brain. How foolish I was, possibly because I’d stuffed my brain with a bunch of facts. But the world has transformed itself into a place that provides alternatives, and I needn’t clutter my thinking apparatus with facts anymore. I now let the internet and six terabytes of data storage in my study remember things for me.
You may doubt that I can function after transferring my organically-housed data to off-site storage. I get by fine, thank you. I have fewer headaches, I don’t tell people they’re wrong anymore, and I never waste time on bar bets or whether $2 is a good tip on a $25 check. By the way, my iPad says that is not a good tip, but I have to pay 99 cents at the App Store to get the full version that will calculate the right tip. In the meantime I just left a $20 bill and stole three forks.
To give you an example of my newly superior functioning, I’ll describe how I don’t need to carry any facts in my head in order to get a good deal on a car. I first go to Google and type in “car,” which produces 4,490,000,000 results. This is far better than my unassisted brain could do in 0.23 seconds. I do realize that I need to narrow the search a bit, and I type “how to buy a car.” That gives me 77,800,000 results in 0.25 seconds. Now I’m making progress. But I can do better. I try “how to buy a used car” (4,460,000), “how to buy a good used car” (391,000), and “how to buy a used car without getting screwed” (24,000). Although I’m excited by this success, I still find the prospect of scanning 24,000 sites a little harrowing, so I trust Google and pick the top one on the list.
I won’t tell you the name of this website in case I ever decide to sell cars. I don’t want you to have these secret inside facts to use against me. I will say that the site hosted 18 advertisements, not including two pop-up ads for discount insurance and payday loans. I scanned through the flashing and wiggling ads and found the pertinent facts on buying a car. The first item was, “Decide what kind of car you want.” That made me pause, because I wasn’t sure how to make that decision. I didn’t have any facts about what I needed in a car. Gas mileage? Trunk space? A great stereo, or maybe seat warmers for a toasty bottom in January? I tried “what kind of car do I need?” in Google, but I just got a bunch of questions asking me what I need in a car, and I’d already established that I didn’t know. Finally I just took the choice at the top of the list, which must always be the best, and selected a convertible. I experienced a moment of hesitation, feeling that I might need more detail than just “convertible,” so I narrowed it down to a blue convertible, seeing as I really like blue a lot.
Now the absence of facts in my brain became a powerful tool for good. The internet provided every fact I might need, such as vehicle history reports, list prices, feature packages, and the evils of extended warranties. This left my mighty, unencumbered frontal lobes free to concentrate on the negotiations and the sale. When the salesman whispered that he could give me the secret sport-rally ultra-burn package without his manager knowing, my brain recognized that it must be a valuable deal since I’d never heard of it. I snatched the offer in order to prevent it from going to that greedy couple from Abilene he told me about, who were coming back for it in the afternoon. The best part of all is that the car is colored “Porpoise Snout Blue.”
I’m lucky to live in today’s world, where my brain’s capabilities can be fully unleashed on society, and you’re lucky too. I’ll meet you for lunch at Starbucks, and we can have a disjointed sharing of vaguely connected sentences while we each search the internet to find out what we’re talking about. I may be late. I’m driving my new convertible, and I have to launch a browser on my phone so I can look up what that triangular red and white street sign means.
A week or two ago I described how my father made sure nurses and aides checked on my mom frequently. He did it by placing a huge sack of candy in her room, free to anyone who wandered by, somewhat like corn scattered at a deer stand. It worked as if her room had been enchanted by elves.
When I spoke to my mom last night, she told me that the latest bag of chocolate bars had been depleted, and that my father had decided against bringing another giant candy lure. She also reported that almost no one came by the room anymore unless they needed to shove something down her throat, stick something into her arm, or wake her up in the early hours to take her vitals and generally fiddle around with stuff. The courtesy calls have ended.
My friends, bribery works miracles.
My wife could be getting a remodeled bathroom with heated tile floors for Christmas. Or she could be getting a cruise down the Danube with a personal chef and her own burly Teutonic masseur. Maybe a puppy that will grow into a huge, destructive dog, or maybe a freezer and a “Tasty Animal of the Month” membership. But my sweetie will not be getting any of those things because the universe is unfair, and it requires me to pay for everything I want to give someone. Therefore, my wife will receive a squatty wooden chair on Christmas morning.
Presents were a big deal in my family, and I guess they still are. We didn’t have much money when I was a kid, but we didn’t care about spending a lot on gifts. We wanted to give a gift that was so perfectly suited to the recipient that he would go into convulsions from pure joy. It was a modest goal. Occasionally we found the perfect gift at a reasonable cost. Usually we couldn’t afford it even if we sold all the grandparents for medical experiments. So we’d buy the most nearly perfect gift we could afford without actually weeping blood from the expense.
I’ve carried this pathology with me into adulthood. My preferred gift shopping strategy is to walk into an interesting store and stride up each aisle. My goal is to shop for some loved ones whose lives I want to make ideal for one shimmering, eternally-remembered moment. So of course I don’t think about any of those people at all. I just absorb the merchandise’s aura in a consumer-zen fashion, and when my intuition smacks me in the forehead about some item I buy it. When I get home I’ll figure out who it’s perfect for. Or as close to perfect as I can afford.
Over the years, that strategy did not drip insanity, no matter how it sounds. I always employed a critical safety measure. I only went into stores that I could afford that year. If my income made it a Woolworths Five and Dime year, I did not walk into Aberdeen’s Custom Jewelry and Furs Worth Going to Hell For. I could set limits. I indulged my neurotic gift giving compulsion and still remained fiscally responsible. The universe made sense, at least through the skewed lens of my childhood.
Then came the internet.
The internet blew away my safety interlocks faster than a reckless starship captain in a David Hasselhoff movie. Suddenly the world was one big store, with nose hair clippers on one aisle and matching Ferraris on the next aisle over. My strategy would lead only to wailing frustration, immediate bankruptcy, or catatonia induced by irreconcilable psychic and moral conflict. In other words, bad strategy.
I turned to my wife for guidance. She has always adopted a more reflective approach than I to gift giving. She follows the, “Give them something nice and move the hell on,” philosophy. She doesn’t give crappy gifts. She doesn’t shop at the gas station for presents. I’ve never received from her a 5 Hour Energy Drink and a Zagnut Bar in a used Arby’s sack for my birthday. She even dares to ask people what they’d like to get as a gift, which I kind of consider to be cheating. If they don’t tell her what they want, then she gives them something modest and charming, and if they don’t like it then it’s their own damned fault for not telling her what they wanted. It all seems like insanity to me, but I don’t see my wife obsessively scratching furrows into the back of her hand because her brother wanted the blue jacket instead of the brown one she gave him.
So under my wife’s tutelage I’ve developed a new strategy. First I ask people what they want. If they want something too lavish, I just ignore whatever they said. Then I count up the rest of the money I can spend and divide it by the remaining gift recipients. Hopefully it comes out to at least seven dollars per person. If not, I decide which family members and friends I want to offend and maybe never speak to again. Then I find something that I can give to everyone, making sure it’s the nicest thing I can buy for seven dollars. I buy the gifts, bestow them as appropriate, and drink some Christmas tequila to smother my sense of having violated some natural law. Simple.
This is how I know that my wife will receive a squatty wooden chair for Christmas. She got me started on my new strategy by flat out telling me what she wants. She wants this chair so she can sit on it while she applies makeup. She had a nice chair for that purpose, but I crushed it when I sat down to talk to her about weather stripping the front door. She coaxed the chair back into cohesion using a bungee cord and some profanity, so she can sit on it for now if she doesn’t mind risking permanent spinal injury whenever she applies blush. So, she wants a chair, I understand why she wants it, and I even feel responsible for her needing it. I will buy her the best squatty wooden chair I can find.
I wonder if they come inlaid with sapphires and ivory from extinct animals?
Dear Mr. Thanksgiving Turkey,
Greetings. You don’t know me, but I’m the guy who told Santa Claus to kiss my ass in September. Sadly, when I sent him a Halloween card it came back with the address scratched out, and scrawled in crayon on the envelope was: “North Pole melted. Elves eaten by polar bears. Screw off.” It’s all terribly sad.
I have a proposition, Mr. Turkey. I’m sure you’re aware that Thanksgiving sucks. I hate to be blunt, but why pretend? Your holiday is mainly about football and food, which we’ve already got every Sunday from August to February. You also feature dinner with family members who ruined our childhoods, a parade with giant blow up animals that frankly give people nightmares, and shopping on the day after Thanksgiving to buy presents for a far superior holiday, rendering your holiday forgotten and completely pointless. I’m saying these things with love, but I hope I’ve made my point.
You have an image problem. Compare your “football and food” approach to Halloween’s “eat candy and dress like a Shanghai prostitute” theme. Or compare it to the Christmas motif of “rake in free stuff and pretend you love your fellow man when in fact you parked in the handicapped spot at the liquor store.” Your holiday doesn’t resonate with people. It bores them. Hell, you’re so boring that they eat turkey and then fall asleep. Again, said with love.
We need to repackage you and change your image, Mr. Turkey. You’ve got a hidden strength, which is the word “thanks.” People like it—who doesn’t like to be thanked? But you’re not specific enough with it. You say we’re being thankful for the good things in our lives, and that’s wonderful. But can we sell peanut butter candy in “good things in our lives” shapes? No—specificity is what we need.
So, think thankful. What specifically are we all thankful for? Not militant protestant white guys with huge belt buckles on their hats, I’ll tell you that for sure. We are all thankful for—puppies! People adore puppies, and that will be the secret of your success. No more can-shaped cranberry sauce and ugly wreaths with dead leaves. Instead we’ll have sweet, floppy, nap-taking, ball-chasing puppy dogs, and that’s what Thanksgiving will be all about.
Everything will change for you. People won’t sit around stuffing their faces and farting on the couch until halftime. Instead they’ll bring their puppies over to grandma’s house, and everyone will play with the puppies! There’ll be puppy cards, puppy lawn art, puppy-shaped cakes, gifts for your puppy, stories and songs and TV shows and podcasts about puppies. People will not be able to resist—heck, they already go crazy for stuff with puppies on it, and there’s not even a holiday for it yet!
The best part is the lack of waste. After other holidays you’re throwing out pumpkins and trees and leftovers. But nobody but a sick creep throws away a puppy. They keep that puppy, and it grows into a beloved, walking, barking, backyard-littering billboard for your holiday. Christmas cannot begin to aspire to that kind of advertising—who wants a reindeer curled up at their feet as they watch reruns of Will and Grace?
Mr. Turkey, I know that you may feel threatened, since you’ve been the face of Thanksgiving for so long. But we have a place for you. Think what a hit you’ll be in your own commercial with a collar and floppy ears, trying to bark and eat a cow hoof. People will die—it’ll go viral on YouTube the first day!
So please consider my proposition, Mr. Turkey. I think we can accomplish great things together, and the nation will be happier on many levels if we succeed. Your holiday will no longer be the beat-up Yugo of holidays. It will be the Lamborghini of holidays, and you will be racing it down the highway of American culture. With a whole lot of ears and tongues flapping out the windows.
Reprinted from Bring Us The Head Of The Velveteen Rabbit, available at Amazon and at Barnes and Noble.