'Tis the Season 4 Decking the Fools With Boughs of Molly
If you're expecting some holiday hate here you've come to exactly the wrong place. Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, whatever, as long as it involves Johhny Mathis we're in!
Places I’ve spent Thanksgiving. Ready? Go!
1] a garbage dump in Mexico: literally sleeping on what we thought was a beach when we pulled in at night but which turned out by light of day to be a garbage dump. A garbage dump with requisite dump dogs that chased us from said dump. In the rain.
2] with Wendy Whoppers on my lap: having written extensively on porn for the better part of three decades, the hows and whys of how I ended up here with the protuberant Ms. Whoppers on my lap at the Market Street Cinema? A longer story than we have space for here, but noted now because it was purposely and successfully the most depressing place I could imagine being on Thanksgiving and
3] in the company of felons: “know anybody you hate?” John Norman was an inveterate thief, disowned as he had been by his Silicon Valley hotshit father, he had discovered he had an aptitude for burglary. But his specialty? Breaking into the houses of people you told him would not be home. This Thanksgiving he was selling cameras and jewelry complete with instructions about which neighborhoods to avoid when using them. This is before he asked me to be the wheelman in a drive-by shooting of a cop who had beaten him up.
And despite my Byronic attempts at mining the most depressing of experiences possible, the holidays, from Thanksgiving through the end of December, are never lost on me as being products of pure joy. Which has confused me and been the cause of some sort of analysis.
[I]f you consider that you had a “good” childhood, a safe place where mysteries, and not felonies, abounded, it is my belief that you’re more likely to hold on to the holidays…
I mean how is that someone with such a prevailingly dark outlook on life on December 1st spins the radio dial to Johnny Mathis, Bing Crosby and Dean Martin’s most loved holiday songs? Especially in light of the raft of articles this time of year stating that so many of us ostensibly have some sort of seasonal affective disorder (SAD) or some other generalized reason for being down, or downers, for the next 30 days. Or even over the entirety of winter.
Not saying there’s not a reason for this. Drunken fathers figure heavily in some of our annual throwbacks to bad times gone past according to just about almost half of us. Fist fights, collapsed trees as a result of aforementioned fist fights, bad gifts, no gifts, or in the extreme case of Cameron Earle, a known former associate, he visited rape and misery on Christmas eve to a family that is unlikely to ever forget it.
So there are tons of reasons to hate the holidays. The outsized expectations, the commercialism. Hope, disappointment, anxiety, all of it shooting both forward and backward it’s almost unfair to expect a holiday to do as much as we expect the November-December ones to do. People journeying uncomfortable distances away to sup with people they’ve long ago lost any desire for rapprochement with. I…get it.
If the meditation is on things we’re to be thankful for, this list could easily be outpaced by the list of things that we’re not at all thankful for. Hemorrhoids, parking tickets, staff meetings, rickets, no sex, too much sex, prison, prison sex, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But that’s not the point since those things are perennial annoyances. So why/how is it that they almost outweigh everything else on one day of the year?
Easy, because, in general: people suck. So trying to fashion something wonderfully solid from that which sucks is going to be as successful as building a car from cheese. If that wasn’t proof of the wrong dog barking up the wrong tree though, I don’t know what is.
But like the Grinch somehow figured out it’s not about the transactional nature of the holidays. It’s not even the Suessian claim of fellowship I think, though that’s part of it. It’s about…and bear with me here: magic.
Nick Cave sang it best most “recently” when he sang Bob Dylan’s “Death Is Not the End” on his Murder Ballads, because this is the Rosetta Stone of mystery.
Not the David Blaine, David Copperfield, Gallagher type of magic, but more in the Old Persian understanding of the word maguš, for sorcerer. A trader in mysteries. These days are our links to those days. But as the occasions of and for magic have been diminished by almost everything around us, we’re not thinking of now but of what comes before that underscores our understanding of the holidays.
To put it bluntly: if you consider that you had a “good” childhood, a safe place where mysteries, and not felonies, abounded, it is my belief that you’re more likely to hold on to the holidays as a collection of significant moments when magical, mystical stuff happened, and was expected to happen.
Seeking out depressive masks during the holidays then was more of a way to use evil to ward off evil than it was a true belief in the general worthlessness of community, fellowship and good tidings of comfort and joy. Call it an “all-the-kids-were-doing-it” shield versus a true belief in the worthlessness of a belief in magic. Which, if you think about it, is much more terrifying than the real miseries that have been visited on us.
Not the chimney bit, the milk and cookies thing, fat guys on sleds, great pumpkins, Charlie Brown specials and babies in mangers. None of that. But the idea of an invisible machinery of life beyond the one that has us worried about hemorrhoids, parking tickets, staff meetings, rickets, no sex, too much sex, prison, prison sex, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, is massively concerning. And laden with the possibility of a certain kind of greatness.
Nick Cave sang it best most “recently” when he sang Bob Dylan’s “Death Is Not the End” on his Murder Ballads, because this is the Rosetta Stone of mystery. The world beyond the seen world, a world where wives get fucked by G-d, where reindeer fly, where the relighting of the altar fire by Nehemiah gets called a miracle.
This world can’t be talked about with any degree of seriousness though since no one can prove anything so it gets relegated to things that we tell children even though, and here’s the key, the rest of us non-children don’t know much about anything else either.
I mean I’ve never seen an electron but I am a firm believer in the mystery of the electron. But I also think that my cat has spoken to me, that Hitler didn’t die in a Berlin bunker and that the head of the Trilateral Commission is not completely human.
I’m also, at the very moment of writing this, listening to Johnny Mathis singing “Sleigh Ride”, wherein he sings about it being a “happy feeling nothing in the world can buy,” a sentiment that suffuses my body with a glow. Maybe kind of like Frank in Blue Velvet when he hears “In Dreams” but nonetheless, the sorcerer Mathis perfectly captures “the perfect ending to a perfect day.”
And this is my mindset from Thanksgiving right up to the end of December. Nothing but unbridled joy, gifted to me by parents who had some inkling of the value of the unseen. At least, despite my father’s piece of shit standing he, along with later my stepfather, and my mother, who was the primary driver, drove this home. For that, despite it all, I count myself thankful.
Now the Amateur Night of holidays, New Year’s Eve? Now that’s a holiday worth hating. How many completely terrible decisions have been made on that night? Here’s a flyer: every single one.
And so finally another reason to be thankful this time of year…you’ll never blow it as badly as you will on New Year’s Eve. Just your Uncle Eugene here…trying to help.
HO HO HO!
OK…So you have ordered the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row, from Amazon…Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?
Might you consider giving it a review in either of those places?
I’ve been told it matters, somehow. So please: review away! Unless you think it sucks. Then, maybe, just keep that part to yourself. At last count there were 73 reviews…so yeah…GET AT IT!!! Every one helps, if everyone helps. Or so they tell me.
If you’d like to book a book show? Please DM.
And FINALLY the new BUNUEL is creeping out….be about it. ON SALE DATE is OCTOBER 25, 2024. For digital. Vinyl, CD and cassette? November 22.
And now THIS…the monster live. For starters. This February. Be there. And if you were planning on going to ROADBURN in 2025 know that we’ll be there TOO.
