The Good Capitalist's Guide to the Holiday Calendar

Congratulations, you’re an American consumer.  Get ready for a life of shiny new items and a deep hole within yourself that will never be filled. The following is a quick guide to the calendar as it pertains to the holidays.  It is a list of the type of holidays, what is expected of you, and how much money you should spend on food, drink or plastic crap.

There are three main types of holidays.  Eating days, Drinking days, and Gift days.  All of these require some thought beforehand and a budget to accompany each one. This guide is here to help you, but if you ever get lost or confused, just go to the seasonal sections of your local superstore and they will be prepared for the next big holiday.  Even if it’s months away.

January is a quiet month.  The only true holiday is MLK Day, and no one has figured out a good way to blow your money on it.  Give them time. Superbowl Sunday is at the end of the month or the beginning of February, which is the first big Eating holiday of the year.  Its both an Eating and a Drinking Day, but since the game is supposed to be for the whole family, you have to work in soda and chips for the kids, too. By then, all your resolutions to lose weight are out the window, so go ahead and enjoy the seven-layer dip.

Valentine’s Day is next.  It is a gift holiday, and the trickiest one of the year.  You have to judge the loved ones in your life to see who deserves what level of recognition.  Chocolate? Cards?  A dinner?  The pressure is on to prove the amount of love you have by the planning and expense you make.  What about a ring?  It’s a big jewelry holiday.  One of the few Flower holidays. Make sure you choose the right style of rock with an artificial market value or its bad news for you. Plus, children get to fill out cards for all the good-looking kids in their classes.  Sorry, weirdos!

March is St. Patrick’s Day.  A Drinking day.  Just drink.  If you don’t drink, take this one off.  It’s meaningless. The rest of March and April are mostly quiet periods, as you gear up for the summer spending season.  Easter occurs during this month, and I still really don’t know the proper way to celebrate.  It may be the strangest observance ever.  Eggs and chocolate for the kids, getting dressed up and church for everybody else.  And, there’s a rabbit in their somewhere.  A low-pressure holiday.

With May brings the new phrase “Mom’s and Proms”.  Everyone better think of a gift or a dinner for your mom, and if you are a teen, you have money to blow on a one-time dress or tuxedo. Even knowing, as we all do, that Mother’s Day was promoted by Hallmark to sell crap, we all observe it like was decreed in the Rosetta Stone. Buy dinner, buy flowers, or buy a gift, or you are a terrible person.

If May is Mom’s and Proms, June is “Dad’s and Grads” Let Dad get in on the action!  You must now buy something for a person who’s even more difficult to buy for than your mom. Don’t forget the graduates in your life.  This is usually a cash month.  Gift cards all around.  Its all the grads really want, and the dads don’t give a damn.

We all celebrate July 4^th in some way.  Almost everything is closed.  If we’re not grilling or drinking outside, we’re shooting off fireworks at night.  It’s one of the two Fireworks holidays, which is odd because not all fireworks are legal everywhere. This is America!  That doesn’t keep my neighbors from getting started long before the sun goes down.

August is a hot and shitty month.  It also has no holidays. Good.  Save your money.  The big ones are around the corner.

Memorial Day in May and Labor Day in early September exist to bracket the summer months.  They serve as excuses for three-day weekends. They are days of remembrance, spent sleeping at the beach or drinking on a boat.

When the fall comes, roll up your sleeves.  Clear some room on that credit card and get ready.  Halloween used to be for kids, but in the last few decades, it is now for everyone. You need costumes. Your kids need to be monsters, ninjas, princesses, superheroes, and the latest internet meme, but you better come up with something as well if you want to go out.  But don’t be lame.  Or do.  Don’t put too much effort into it.  Or you should.  Just buy something, dammit.  Load up on candy and make sure it's so much that you have it leftover to snack on well into November.

Thanksgiving is the Eating holiday of the year.  More money than you spend on any one meal, and you get to eat it in ten minutes or so. Make room in the budget for everyone’s personal favorite side dish, until the table looks less like a family gathering and more like a Vegas buffet.

Christmas.  Oh sure, there are other religious holidays, but not one of them has the immense marketing campaign as the reigning king.  Christmas is December.  It is a series of festivities.  Office parties, friend gatherings, trips, lighting ceremonies, extended family visits…all with gifts, food, and drinks in tow. The gifts can be anything and they are plentiful.  Anything and everything can be a gift and your job is to figure out who gets what and how many.  Don’t forget the trees. The ornaments. The lights and decorations.  The dinner.  Something for your dog?  Do it.  The added bonus is you need to keep this all under wraps.  Speaking of wraps, don’t forget this year’s wrapping paper, tissue, bows, tag, boxes, gift bags and you can’t possibly give that special someone a gift card in an envelope!  Buy a box for that card!

And lastly, we have the most useless holiday of them all, New Year's Eve.  Fireworks at midnight. I guess you drink or something…I’ve really never given a shit either way.

Now that you know how to celebrate, get out there and start spending!

Blog Post #124 - Invisible Boy Made Friends

             I remember my senior project in my high school TV Productions class was a video about my friends.  In retrospect, it was a stupid idea.  I guess I got a decent grade, but when it was judged, I heard that the video really didn’t make a lot of sense unless you knew the people that were featured. They were right.  At the time, that little circle of people we all try to create was all that really mattered to me at the time.  That was also bad news for me.

             Instead of criticizing myself for that time (anymore) I found myself understanding why it happened.  I think it is an exercise in self-love, or forgiveness, or wisdom, or something you can find on Oprah’s bookshelf.  As you get older, memories creep their way to the fore.  It’s as if they are being shaken loose from an old photo album.  You see a photo you haven’t thought about in decades.  Sometimes it floors you.

             The memories of my childhood, from about 14 to 18, are mixed.  Some bad, some good.  Anything under 13 is almost certainly depressing.  They are sad.  They aren’t singular traumatizing events so such as they are a cumulation of a very young life spent almost completely alone.

             The memory was this:  1984 or so.  My parents would occasionally go over to the home of a work friend.  They would hang out in the backyard, drinking beers and having fun.  My brother would probably be back there trying to get some attention of his own.  But I would be in this strange living room, sitting a large couch by myself, watching an old TV with 3 channels.  For hours, I would sit there.  That was normal to me.  The saddest part?  I would look forward to going.  I could sit in a different home and watch nothing on a different TV.

             Our parents left us alone most of the time, plus my parents worked long hours.  Earlier than the previous memory, I have a few of my brother and I being completely alone on Friday nights.  This was in one of the shittiest neighborhoods in Orlando. (We would one day live in the shittiest.) We lived in an apartment complex and would stay up because our parents would hang out after work on paydays. I remember a neighbor that made us soup one night, probably at nine o’clock.  I was eight.

             One bonus about living in Orlando was that my parents were both Disney employees and we would get to go to the park a couple times a year for free.  When I mean ‘we’, I mean my parents would drop my brother and I off at 9:00 when the Magic Kingdom opened and then would pick us up at night.  They didn’t spend the day with us.  We wandered the park alone with a few bucks for lunch.  We did have some fun, but we were still alone.

             I’ve written before about feeling invisible. I have cobbled together these memories plus a few revelations from my mother that this started very early.  You see, I have an inherited mental condition.  It makes other people feel uncomfortable, and even today, you can be ostracized and isolated because of it.  I was born…smart.  From what I gathered, my family noticed very early.  I was around 4 or 5 when my father withdrew from me.  I don’t know how my extended family reacted. Although my grandmother celebrated it, even if she didn’t exactly know what it was and what it meant.  She liked me. But because my intelligence wasn’t embraced, I didn’t know how to deal with it out in the world, especially at school.  So, again, I was on my own.

             So, until I was 10, it was me, my little brother, and my TV. 

             Getting back to my friends.  We have all read one thousand greeting card-quality quips about the importance of friendship. We’ve watched all the tear-jerker movies about true friends. We all want them and feel lucky to have them.  My reason for writing this is how my friendships actually saved me from God-knows-what hellish existence.

             I went to a different school every year until fifth grade.  Different towns, different states. Fifth grade was a big one.  I was now in a nice school in a decent neighborhood, and I would be starting my first year of gifted class.  Gifted class was one day a week with a bunch of dorks like me, doing projects and being smart.  In my normal classes, I was approached by a kid in my class while we were out playing in recess.  He asked me about my T-shirt, and because he did that, I had someone to talk to.  Because he asked me to come hang out with him at his house and play with Star Wars toys, I had somewhere to go and goof around.  His name is Eric, and because I am eternally grateful, I am still friends with him to this day. That was almost 36 years ago. 

             In gifted class, I had a similar experience.  I met a few people like me (a few of them were girls! What???) and became friends with one of them at the same time. Sam recognized we had similar dorkiness and we liked to be funny.  I also got invited to his house to hang out and listen to Duran Duran records. We are still friends, too.  I know his kids and I’m anxious to meet his grandkids. (Huh?) It was great. My whole life was invisibility and waiting for The A-Team to come on, and now I had two friends.

             They did this. They made this happen. I would have never done it.  I would have to wait years to talk to a girl or even try to a kiss a girl.  I was awkward, painfully shy, cross-eyed, nerdy-smart with a complete lack of self-esteem.  With a couple friends, I had a chance.

             The teenage girl who would one day become my wife was one of the few people I forged a friendship with.  It was a big deal in my life, to have girls as friends. It would also mean a lot of relationship construction would be completed when we actually started dating, which was a plus.  High school was drudgery and aimlessness.  I had no idea what to do, and no guidance from anywhere.  Eventually, that time is over and your friends move on with their lives. They move away, get jobs, start families.  Most people understand this, but when no one is looking out for your interests, the most obvious shit can be a shock.

             A shit-shock.

             I kept close the best I could, with phone calls and letters and mix tapes.  I’m pretty good at that stuff. The only other person I had ever traded letters with was my cousin Denise.  We’ve never lived in the same place and we’re the same age. I guess that is what you had in the days before Facebook.  You’d get a letter from your cousin a few times a year and you would go back and forth, bitching about life and cracking jokes about whatever.  I come from a large family, and she was really my only tether to them.  I still have every letter I received from her, and again, we are still in touch.  Although, now we text the Three Amigos references.

             My sense of invisibility influenced nearly every decision.  I dreamed of doing stand-up comedy. (This crowd will laugh and love me.)  I wanted to teach college (These students will pay attention to me.)  I want to write books. (They’ll all love my stories and think I’m awesome.) When I had children, the invisibility had a difficult time raising his head.  You are the sun and the moon to your kids. I loved it and I loved being a father.  I loved the attention and giving it right back to them. You truly get a chance to right some wrongs when you have kids.   I don’t know how good of a father I was, but my kids never felt unseen or unheard.  I probably overdid it, to be honest.

             Amy and I have been together for a little over 26 years.  We’re about to be 46.  You can probably imagine the topic of attention has come up once or twice.  She is just one person.  She is an awesome person and a wonderful partner to have in life, but no one human can provide the amount of attention I need.  The hole is just too damn big.  My job is to remember that, and her job is to remember I am trying to tame a tenacious beast.  

             That’s where friends come in. I have spread it around the best I can.  My friend Jo and her brother Andrew are the only ones out here in the Pacific Northwest.  Jo endured raising kids right alongside me for years, and we both have similar needs to be seen and appreciated.  It is nice to get to see someone in person and chit chat, too.  Texting is nice, but it’s just you know…texting.  Another friend from high school communicates this way.  I think technology helped me keep in touch with Andy, who lives about 3000 miles away.  Having a conversation once or twice a year is cool, but it’s the little back and forth of dumb jokes and observations that I always missed.  When you meet someone cut from the same cloth, it’s the shorthand you develop that is most appreciated.

             I’m not just thankful for these people in my life. I needed them. I am indebted to them because of my condition.  My dream is to be gregarious and memorable and make an impact on people.  But in this stage of the game, I don’t know if I’m wired that way.  This could be it for me. Self-promotion is a struggle, socialization is as foreign as the rings of Saturn and I don’t have a network of people to access to increase my circle. 

             I am living proof that learning how to be a friend, or at the very least, reaching out to someone else can change lives.  It can save lives.

             

Puppies, Cookies, and Giggling Babies

(Just giving the new title a shot.  This is classic bait and switch...)

Nowhere, in any ancient text, or contained within any bylaws of this culture, does it stipulate that one must remain in touch with everything.  We have been examining our addictions to social media and what it does to us lately. Nice. I have to add that the notion that any one person has to have up-to-the-minute information at the ready at all times is ludicrous.  This isn’t a question of willful ignorance.  The question is what it always has been: How much time from my finite life am I willing to devote to this shit?

I had to take a step back.  I wasn’t as addicted as some and I managed to escape political arguments for the most part.  My problem was its poisonous effect on my creative process.  Facebook, Twitter, and all the websites they draw content from are drenched in opinions and critique, often by dumbasses or others who are paid to write commentary for clicks and advertisements dollars. 

This blog is full of my opinions and my feelings from a singular perspective.  I’m also under no delusions. No one reads this. This is for me. This is a practice site for me because I am opinionated.  I do it for word count.  I do it because I journaled for 20 years before I ever started a blog.  The time devoted to social media has nothing to do with this site, it has to do with the shit I really care about.  I write books. I want to get better at writing books. 

Writing books is some hard-ass work.

You have to juggle a million ideas and keep them spinning in the air for a good 90 days straight.  That’s for just the first draft.  Three months is a lot of time to let self-doubt and foreign opinions creep into your process.  Negativity can take root and kill an entire project.  It can keep a musician from completing a record, or a young artist from practicing their skills to get good. 

Of course, I want my books to sell a million copies.  Anyone who says different is fooling themselves. I want it so I can continue to write for a living. What I’m not excited about is drawing one million critiques.  That comes with the territory, but there is no rule that says I have to read them.  I don’t want to know what they think. Good or bad.  Good is something I can glean from sales.  If I sold a bunch of copies, it must be good enough for someone to read.  But the critique isn’t for me.  It’s for someone else. 

And ‘critique’ is giving it more credence than it deserves.  It’s just everyday assholes and their opinions.  This sucks.  This is lame. The thing I like is better.  Weak. Dumb.  Does anyone need that at all?  For anything?

Personally, Facebook has comments that make me feel bad.  That’s really what this is all about.  It's not all negative, but it's enough to make it worse than real life. I mean that.  In your day-to-day, how often do you encounter someone who is specifically trying to make you feel like a piece of shit?  It’s life, so it does happen, but every single day?  That’s what social media is.  It’s an outlet for the weak-minded and the angry to take it out on the world.  Maybe they need that to survive.  Fine.  I don’t have to be there to experience it.

There is nothing wrong with anyone being out of touch with the current culture. Nothing.  The culture itself made that a crime.  ‘Pay attention to me every day or you are old and lame and a pariah and not worth listening to.” When I was a kid in the eighties, I didn’t give a shit then, either.  I’ve never cared about staying current with anything.  I found it pointless and exhausting.  Shallow and fleeting.  A waste of time.

There’s that phrase again.  A waste of time.  We should always keep an eye on those things in our lives that are a waste of our time.  If there anything more precious? Really?  If I can save some time by deleting Facebook from my phone, and save myself from the venomous fangs of negativity it injects into me, then why wouldn’t I do it?

              I feel as if I could on for another thousand words writing about how this applies to the news as well. Same shit.  I know who sucks already.  I know how to vote in November.  If you feel that you should get involved, then do so.  At the moment, I’m not involved.  I’m doing my small part to battle negativity, which isn’t good for anyone.