“I rest my head on One Fifteen but miracles only happen on Thirty Fourth so I guess life is mean and death is the median and purgatory is the mode that we settle in” —Vast Aire
Post-truth people living in a post-truth world runneth over with birthers, and truthers and young flat-Earthers, anti-vaxers and Yosemite Sam bloggers taking intellectuals to task, to divorce court, to the whipping post, to the brink of breaking reality into a million scared little fractions; mommy shamers and Holocaust deniers standing in solidarity with false flag wavers, heading off to prison for harassing and threatening the mourning parents of Sandy Hook casualties; emotionally-despondent gamers crashing against the gate, private iPhone investigators, chasing no-real-physical-evidence all the way to the tippy top of the Illuminati and beyond, dropping a few retweets along the way for good measure; militia meetings at the Pizza Hut, “Don’t Tread On Me” T-shirts wrapped around tubs of guts, proud pea-brained and tea-bagged Christian soldiers holding down the front lines on the war on Christmas, every idea but the good ones seized upon, spread and sopped up with a biscuit from a bucket, dim offerings courtesy of Snowball, Squealer and Napoleon.
I saw a woman outside of a Circle K begging for nickels and dimes, only to watch her use this change to buy a can of Friskies cat food for her hungry cat, but let’s stay caught up with utter bullshit, let’s remain enamored with nonsense and let the beams buckle and collapse. Let’s be C, falling for the same half-cocked and cribbed hysteria over and over again. It was child sex rings, secret tunnels and blood sacrifices in the ‘80s with Satanic panic, and it’s child sex rings, secret tunnels and blood sacrifices today. The only thing that’s changed is the location. It’s gone from daycares to pizza parlors, but the end game is still the same. Incite armed idiots to escalate their stupidity until someone gets hurt.
Let’s lose all good will to men, over who should hold the position of what has got to be one of the most thankless jobs in America, a shopping mall Santa, some poor soul who has to deal with sticky, gooey, little flesh globs in Rocket Racoon attire covered in snot, ick, sick and Sour Patch dust, screaming and wailing day in and day out for the better part of a cold month. How bored and pathetic do you have to be to get your wits singed over the color, or gender, of the person willing to play Santa Claus, who, as a character we categorize and catalogue under mythical and pagan gods? Kris Kringle literally shares page space with the likes of Neptune, Davy Jones, Set, Juggernaut, Osiris, Mumbo Jumbo and Thoth, and who in our modern era has been so debased and diluted? The jolly ol’ fat man has been seen doing everything from engaging in battle with Martians, to getting gross in the pages of Hustler to hocking washer and dryer sets in July. As it stands, in this day and age, Cap’n Crunch has more dignity of character and street cred than Saint Nick. In other words, Santa is some made up bullshit who can be portrayed by anyone desperate enough for the cash to suit up!
We got baby’s being born addicted to opiates, an exasperating and ever-expanding murder rate and corruption coming from every corner of those who live up high. But let’s remain remiss, and let us regress, regress, regress into beefcake berserkers, so we can bring back the sword, the ax, the horse and the hammer — back to warring clans of subprime simpletons bashing our neighbors in the head with a rock, because we’re so blood-curdling terrified of even the most minute and natural of changes as to show contempt, without spine, to degrade our equals and opt-out, wall off, segregate, go apart, as we turn a blind eye to any and all of the very real problems we have both abroad and in our own backyards that are now stacked Yertle the Turtle-high and ready to topple us all into the muck.
“As you got older, and felt yourself at the center of your life, and not at a point of its circumference, as you had felt when you was little, you were seized with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling and the noises and glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped it.”
— Thomas Hardy, “Jude the Obscure,” Part First, page 22.
