Yes, yes... I'm talking about the holidays. Be it the ever Hallmarked Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Ramadan, Boxing Day, Festivus, or Chinese New Year... it's a time of celebration. Most of these annual occasions the exchanging of gifts and trinkets (or grievances...), followed up with the "ceremonial" feast. While it seems well and good and all... there is, thanks to our modern consumerism, a dark and seedy side to the holidays. I speak of course.........(feel that tension rising yet?)... of holiday shopping.
The other day (how quite past), like most lazy or forgetful goons... I went last minute shopping on Christmas eve. And where else does a procrastinator go other than the mall? Dozens upon dozens of useless shops... teeming with even more useless junk. The epicenter of superfluousness. A shopper's Jerusalem. But from the very beginning... it was pure madness. It starts in the parking garage. In such a frantic dash to buy... there are almost never any available parking spaces. So in a cacophony resembling New York City rush hour traffic, car horns and vulgarities flutter through the air like snowflakes. Grown men leave their cars and bash each other's faces into mashed potatoes over spot-poaching. Mothers and grannies flick off youngsters for stealing their parking. All in all... it becomes the end of civilized humanity. People revert back to primordial savages, hell-bent on cracking skulls open like chestnuts.
Once inside the uncontrollably diseased, albeit highly sterilized halls... it's like stepping into a zoo on an alien planet. The burned out, empty husks once known as people move about the stores like kodiak bears in a paddock; too depressed to live, but no way to die. While scanning window fronts, they catch glimpses of themselves; dried sweat crusted to their pale, clammy, sun-deprived skin makes them look like some creature from Norse mythology. In these mannequins you can see delirium, dementia, and desperation; the slightest interference or or obstacle to their psychotic crusade will send them swinging wildly or jumping off balconies onto the communal slop-bucket below called a 'Food Court.'
Moving into a specific store... it is like being checked into a mental hospital. The "patients" (which is a euphemism I've always loved) are the customers... and the wards are the employees. Dazed, doped, or in-need-of-medication shoppers drift aimlessly... their eyes agape and drool streaming from their mouths... searching through racks and shelves for discounted clothing. The minute one stops to show interest, the "nurses" descend upon them like carrion... pecking and clawing each other to get the sale. Overall... it is a level of barbary that cannot be matched by the most brutal Colosseum gladiatorial match from Ancient Rome. The comes the lines for checkout. Sometimes snaking around the store like some deranged model of Jormungand swallowing his own tail, the line is long enough for old people to die in before they ever see the end. Essentially... it's similar to a physical adaptation of a Chinese finger trap; the more you try... the worse it gets. So we are forced to be good test-monkeys. We wait in line like cracked-out gerbils waiting for food pellets... only to get to the end and SPEND our hard-earned money away. Now it that is not psychotic masochism... I don't know what is, folks.
Without a doubt, the greatest degree of insanity induced from holiday shopping is gift-wrapping. There are essentially three ways of doing this: having someone in the mall (be it store employee or the official wrapping center) do it for a fee, have an outside company (like this ridiculous British company that wraps poorly to simulate a husband's wrapping job)... or to grin and bear it and do it yourself!. I guess the fourth option is to say 'fuck wrapping paper! we waste too much as a society already for me to add more via unnecessary paper debris!' But that is a take not take very often as it can lead to arguments and bitterness on the part of spouses, children, and relatives. Thus... like the aggregation of rejects we be (yeah that's right folks! The founding folks of this fair nation were the unwanted bastards of Europe. For Christ's sake... the Dutch didn't even want them. So DEAL with it!), we spend hours of painstaking torture... almost as bad as the Haitian rattle torture... concealing our gifts behind sheets of flimsy, "decorative" paper. Only to savagely tear it apart like jackals working on a gazelle corpse days later. And we wonder why people think we're crazy...
In the end, I'd say that the true essence of holidays, here in the ol' U S of A has been completely lost. I mean how on earth does the supposed birth of Christ have any connection to a fat man who creeps around peoples' houses while they sleep annually? The answer, aside from the fact that December has nothing to do with Christ's birth (if the fellow did strut the earth once in his biblical Birkenstocks): THERE IS NO CONNECTION! Huzzah... what a surprise. Because this is America folks; we are the refuse of every country in the world. "Give me your poor, your poor, your huddled masses yearing to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me." Our own Lady Liberty says it perfect. We are the derange, Rick James- superfreaks of the world. And we managed to kill God here, ousted and replaced by our own demigods: Apple, Nordstroms, Abercrombie & Fitch, and The Gap. Oh brother. Well... I guess it could be worse. That's why there's always next year!
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