Work With Hope

As I look at that title, it suddenly feels much more ominous than what I intend, so breathe easily.

When I was explaining this yearly exercise to someone beside me, she asked me, “Why do you do this in December? Is this a Christmas tradition?” As I started to explain the ten-year origin, a desire to increase my number of blogposts per year by a final push, I realized that beyond the mercenary (I make no money from these, so mercenary is probably the wrong word…probably something to do with vanity), I’m not sure why do I do this in December. So, as one is wont to do, I stated enumerating reasons.

• Christmas obviously has something to do with it, and the traditions of counting down, whether through the weeks of Advent or the various hiding places of the Elf on the Shelf, make a natural framework
• Likewise, Christmas provides quite a bit of color through the charming and absurd accoutrement that accompany its approach. How can I ever forget my discovery of the Caganer, the pooping nativity figurines, or the Catalonian log that poops out presents when the family beats it (the scatalogical nature of holiday traditions is undeniable)
• The shortening days, the darkness, and the cold always put me in a pensive mood, and I’ve tried to capture that in my writing
• December is thee last month, so it is a natural time to take stock in one’s life, one’s accomplishments, and one’s direction.

Last?

What makes December the last month? Another month follows immediately afterward without a break…we usually celebrate that every year. The month itself has as many days as any other month, and though the days grow shorter, culminating with the shortest day of the year, they are getting longer as the closing bell rings. What is the lastness quality that December has that all other months lack?

When I began spouting these questions to the person next to me, she remarked that this observation had all the validity of a stoner questioning, “Why are hands called hands, man?” And I will admit, that I am being somewhat willfully naive here. I know there is the convention of the year, and a calendar has to have a final page. Blame Pope Gregory, I suppose.

I guess what I’m trying to get at is that, with the exception of the impending inevitable end of the world which we are currently courting with the ardor and and entitlement of a football captain pursuing a prom queen, our experience of the the natural world is that it goes on. There are cycles of seasons, reflecting cosmic positioning and rotation, but each one follows the other, and there is no first or last…what is the first season? Unless you are looking at a Vivaldi album, there is no first, and no last. Nothing magical happens on midnight of December 31…it just keeps going on.

I think that this tendency to think of firsts and lasts is one of perspective. While the world does keep going on, we do not, and while I am reasonably certain that January follows December every time, I know that in a frighteningly few years (“Why are they called years, Man?”) I will not.

So December is a metaphor for our own mortality, and that might be the best reason to take this time for writing. I want to examine this life before it ends, even though I know that December will lead to January…and I hope that I will too.

Well, it’s that time of year again, friends. After the year that was supposed to be better than the year before (that wasn’t), we have finally reached the last month. As I have done for the past 10 years, I will once again write my daily letters to the world for the next 24 Days. Time to pull my brain (and my fingers) out of mothballs and make some December noise.

For anyone new to this (who would be new to this?), this yearly exercise is when I challenge myself to compose an original blogpost every day from the first to the twenty-fourth of December. There are no subject rules, except that I have to come up with the subject on that day…no planning ahead.

It has been a monumental year in many ways in my life. I am interested in what my perspective might be. I joked with a friend recently that too many good things have happened to me this year, and I might have lost my edge. However, I expect that I will be able to bring forward the cynicism and angst that we all have come to know so well. Though the year has brought some wonderful treats, this old world keeps giving us curveballs to keep us from feeling too confident. As Robert Duval’s character said at the end of the movie Tender Mercies, “I don’t trust happiness, never did, never will.”

So, neither you nor I know what direction things will go this year (and next), but I’m going to try…at least one more time.

Road bike riding has a very intricate set of rules and cultural mores, and nothing is more political than passing another rider. The rules of passing insist that the only legitimate reason to pass is when a person is going at a slower speed than you are going. It is purely a utilitarian transaction, and should have nothing to do with wanting to best another person. To speed up to pass is shameful, and there is no greater shame than slowing down after passing. Technically, no one should even notice this taking place, as if two bikes are in separate universes each traveling at their own speed.

However, the real world of cycling seldom matches this platonic ideal, and riders pass for a number of physical, emotional, and psychological reasons. Like it or hate it, passing establishes dominance, and as much as I would like to be completely zen about it, I feel better on a day that I pass people that a day that I am regularly passed.

All of this was going through my head when I felt someone coming up on me during my ride today. As I said earlier, it is wrong to speed up to pass, but it is likewise wrong to speed up to avoid being passed. So I maintained my speed (maybe at the optimal speed that I would like to be traveling) but the other bike kept moving closer. As I glanced backward I was certain that this particular bike and this particular person should not be able to pass me, so I figured the other rider was pressing and a few miles of steady speed should finish him or her off.

However, after several miles, I was not able to shake her ( I knew it was a her by this time) and she kept gaining on me, again with a bike that should not be able to pass me. Finally, I decided that game should recognize game, and I moved to the right to let my relentless pursuer pass, a woman about my age, but with no bike gear and on a bike that looked not much more than a beach cruiser.

As she passed, barely noticing me as she did, I glanced at the wheels of her bike, and then I saw it, the telltale thick rear axle, and all became clear. I had been passed by an electric assist bike.

Let me be clear, I DESPISE electric assist bikes and those who ride them.

I’m sure there are those who are protesting, “But these bikes allow people who wouldn’t be able to get out the opportunity to exercise,” (though since Christmas I have seen a sickening number of children with them). I’m sure this is true, and I suppose there are some people who own these monstrosities who are not evil to the core. Heck, I actually have friends who own then, a couple who are otherwise good people, who love their children, and don’t belong to any satanic cults (that I know of). Electric bike apologists probably outnumber persons like me.

But at their heart, they are a perversity, and to welcome them into the ranks of bicycles is a bridge too far. Like their distant relative the moped, they are essentially motorcycles (as they are cycles with motors). The most recent plague of these things even have fat tires like a scooter. They do not belong on bike trails and no one who rides them should ever classify himself or herself as a bike rider, for she or he is a passenger, and little more.

This becomes particularly problematic for passing, as there is no integrity to the pass and no merit. Yet the smug looks I have seen by these assist-ants have the grace of a trustfund tweeker, bragging about making it through the sweat of his brow. Passing with an electric assist bike is stolen valor. It would be like a casual runner claiming six minute miles and not mentioning the skateboard.

I suppose that technology marches onward, and as long as these nightmares are legal, I guess I won’t put out an elbow while they pass. But please, please stop calling them bicycles…and put baskets in front and streamers on the handles.

He is tired.

Though he has been away for four years, after he determined that the coming storm could not be met with folksongs or planchas, he still sighs as he brushes against the máscara and the fedora (or is it a trilby? He keeps thinking he should look that up). He knows that a time will come, and may be here already, when the cause of justice and nuance will call him out of retirement to battle in the public encordato again.

Retirement is the wrong word, for 2016-2020 have been anything but retiring. He has fought throughout Northern Mexico, sometimes under his own name, but usually as his alter ego (what is the name for the alter-ego of an alter-ego?) Pájaro en un Alambre. Did pretty well, too, amassing a record of 83-15 (and would have been 85-13, were it not for the scandal in Juarez…I’m sure you know about that, it was in all the papers). On alternate years, he spent in The Greek Isle of Hydra, writing belated tributes to Charmain Clift, drinking tsipouro, and continuing the ill advised love affairs that drown his life in anxiety and pathos. He was a busy boy.

He could have done that forever, followed that dichotomous life, unified only by his burning pursuit of irony and pity. But then, he always knew he couldn’t. The pain was too great, the voices too loud…children in cages, one would think that that would be a smug closing argument, a quebradora, the “Hitler de grace” not a starting immodest proposal.

The final straw happened last Wednesday, when he saw on CNN the final affront to modern life, and to costumed advocacy. The asshole with the painted face and Buffalo (or was it bison…he needs to look that up…no, the time for looking up is past) assaulting the Capitol building with the excitement of a naughty puppy (if the naughty puppy were pure evil). He was the ultimate rufián, and there could not be justice or nuance in a world where he and his type are allowed to stand.

He went to the closet and took down the mask and hat, the black coat and t-shirt, the worn trousers and scuffed shoes, “ My traje de luces,” he thought, “no, wait that’s bullfighting…maybe I should look that up.”

So a warning out there to all who though vincible ignorance would promote their agenda of selfish hate, El Cohen is back, and he’s climbing the ropes about to deliver his familiar final curse to all his enemies, “So long Marianne!”

A blog post? What happened? Blogposts are in December! Did I fall asleep for all of 2021? Is the COVID over? Have they finally confirmed the 2020 election? Is HE gone? Please, tell me that HE’s gone!

If we want 2021 to be different, then we have to be different, so I thought a good resolution for the coming year would be to write a blogpost every week. I suspect there will be plenty of activity for comment, and I hope it will keep me thinking about new things during our endless winter of discontent, and the seasons that follow.

Today I was speaking (via Zoom, of course) to the teachers from a school in Sacramento. They, like many teachers, are returning to school this week while not returning, as the students will stay home for the first weeks. These courageous educators are asking the big questions about the time that has past and the time that is yet to come, and though it is difficult in the middle of the crisis to see outside of it (one can’t re-engineer the Titanic in the middle of sinking), people brought real ideas and real hope to their discussions and to the day.

Though I’m hesitant to come to conclusions about this, particularly as my COVID path has been different from theirs, still I think there are a few things that we can use as a framework for the what comes next.

1. We MUST stop talking about children “falling behind.” Whether students mastered the same amount of standards as previous years is largely irrelevant, because no year is like this year. “Falling behind” has such a judgmental quality that it seems like throwing an anchor to students, many of whom are already sinking.
2. I know that we all live in hope for the day that this is “over.” However, the immediate effects of this time will not be over for years to come and the larger effects will never be “over.” To use the term I have used in several other places, COVID is merely an accelerant for things that were already happening. There will not be a “flip the switch” day that will return us all to March 2020.
3. Finally, just as we have to look out for the physical and mental health of students, teachers must be recognized and applauded for their efforts during this time. If I had planned for the type of transition that took place in March, I would have said it would have taken five years. Instead, for many places, it was done in a weekend. Many things did not go well, and that is entirely what should have been anticipated. However, what was done, as incomplete as it may be, was something done, and it’s better to light a lamp than curse the darkness

During my presentation today, someone sent me the picture that I used for this post. This is my wish for these great teachers, for myself, and for all of us this year. May we bravely move forward and boldly suck at something rather than safely stagnate. Work with hope, not always adeptly, but always earnestly.

As the song from The Who’s Tommy says, “ So you think that 21 is gonna be a good year?” (My friend David pointed out that actually a murder takes place in the middle of this song…but let’s leave that for now). Let’s make it a good year.

Be safe, be strong

My Christmas wish this year is based on a song that I don’t really like…somehow appropriate for 2020. The song “Hard Candy Christmas” was written for the musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (because nothing says Christmas like a play about a brothel). However, since that time it has been recorded by several artist and has become a tier 2 or 3 Christmas standard.

Me, I’ll be just Fine and dandy
Lord, it’s like a hard candy Christmas
I’m barely getting through tomorrow
But still I won’t let
Sorrow bring me way down

The song is built on the image of families in lean years having to resort to the meager joys of cheap hard candy as opposed to luxurious chocolates or other confections. It’s a charming, nostalgic memory that is completely wiped from our experience. Would today’s equivalent be “A Kentucky Fried Chicken Christmas”? However, the idea comes across nonetheless.

So all I can wish for you is a hard candy Christmas. For most of us it won’t be great, and the joys we have will be small ones. However, this is the Christmas we are given, so lean into it. It won’t destroy you, and I hope you will find some tiny lights in the darkness.

In that spirit, I would like to share three small experiences that most of us can enjoy, even in this year of diminished expectations. Even if you don’t get the Christmas you want or the Christmas you deserve, there are tastes of sweetness from the hard candy of life

1. Watch Darlene Love sing “ Christmas, Baby Please Come Home on the David Letterman show. I’ve written about this before all the way back when Davis Letterman still had his show. A yearly tradition was to have Darlene Love on the show at Christmas time to sing her most famous classic from the Phil Spector Christmas album (this is skewing so old!). It started as a very simple thing, but the production values grew and grew, as each year, musical director Paul Shaffer worked to better capture the “Wall of Sound” of the original.

There are many, many versions on YouTube, and I recommend that you watch them all (there is even a “the making of” type video), but at least watch this one from 2009

2. Pop a Christmas Cracker

In the best of times, this is the silliest tradition, but there is something wonderful in the sheer stupidity. My mother always had crackers at the Christmas table, and though we lacked the coordination to ever manage the crossed arms group pull, the crackers always provided the opening act for the dinner. Though we all must pull our own cracker this year (shut up…you know what I mean), it can be a great reminder of Christmases past.

A paper crown, a tiny plastic toy and a very stupid joke.

• What is yellow and white and goes down the train track at 60 miles an hour.
• The engineer’s egg sandwich

3. Have a glass of Screwball.

Obviously this is not for young people (I have a friend who was put in Facebook jail for mentioning alcohol without an age warning!) or for those who don’t partake, but for those who are and do, it is a celebration. Screwball is peanut butter flavored whiskey…I know, I thought the same thing, and it is one of the most remarkably wonderful sipping beverages with the added benefit of warming a person up on the inside. Give it a try.

I hope when I greet you in 2021, this world (both micro and macro) will be a better place. However, thank you for walking though this awful year with me. Enjoy your hard candy Christmas.

Be safe, be strong.

As an added gift today, I have created a ten song playlist of “hard candy Christmas songs that those of you with Spotify can enjoy here.

Tonight I start the yearly task of bringing this yearly enterprise in for a landing. Christmas Day has practically arrived, and short of a major lapse, I should manage to turn out my twenty-fourth post (traditionally my Christmas wish) tomorrow making ten years of the exercise. The penultimate post is always a self-evaluation of the process. No more topics to find, just bring it home.

I began today by rereading each of the previous twenty-two entries and thinking what has changed from the starting post to today. Sadly, the the biggest feature of the past month (as the eight months before) has been a lack of change, at least change for the better. The lockdown in California is as restrictive as ever, the cases more numerous, and the death count rises as fast as temperatures are falling. We see the small gleam of hope in the picture of people receiving the vaccine, but real impact of this still feels a lifetime away, and watching those responsible for so much of the suffering moved to the front of the line is infuriating. COVID stole Christmas, and all of 2020.

My own life has been constricted throughout the month. I have spent lots of time alone, I have missed my friends, my activities, and just a feeling that life is moving forward. Personally I have had good things and bad things happen to me over the course of the month, and despite writing about something every day, I am definitely no smarter and have no more understanding of my life than I did at the beginning. I’ll hope that 2021 might bring the growth of the pruning of 2020,

I think the entires are no better or worse than most of the previous nine years. Just as with the daily entries at the beginning of quarantine back in March, I’ve often felt that there wasn’t much to say. Perhaps writing 70 posts over the course of one year was overly ambitious. My well is not that deep.

Still, there were a few moments where I felt the ideas blazing as I pounded with two fingers on my iPad (a fury that has left me with numb finger tips on more than one a occasion). There were a range of ideas, and only one day when I threw in the towel (not talking about the tea towel from yesterday) and essentially skipped. The world does continue to give me ideas in the midst of this morass.

I end with the same question every year. Will I come back to do it again in 2021? Some years I have felt a great deal of uncertainty, but I have none of that this year. I am hopeful that 2021 will be a very exciting year, one of new opportunities for me and this world, and I hope I will have a lot to say.

Of course I’m the guy who spent the first few days of the current year saying, “I have a really good feeling about 2020,” so what do I know.

Be safe, be strong…let’s hope I can find a Christmas wish in all this tomorrow.

Today my friend Lisa brought by a gift. Though the package contained several things including a coffee cup, hand sanitizer, and candy, my eye was quickly drawn to the tea towel with the words FOLD IN THE CHEESE scripted across it.

The line refers back to my favorite scene of the show Schitt’s Creek where Moira Rose is attempting to teach David how to make her mother’s recipe for enchiladas. As the scene progresses, it becomes clear that she never made this recipe and is unable to provide any real assistance beyond criticizing her increasingly stressed son.

The scene culminates when she reads the direction for him to “fold in the cheese.” He asks what that means, and she merely repeats the direction as if it were self evident. I mean, how can one not know how to fold in cheese? As the conflict escalates, the audience can see (and David sees) that she has no more idea what this direction means than he does. Finally in frustration, David announces, “I can’t fold broken cheese.” And he leaves the room and Moira Rose with her bowl of unfolded cheese. If you haven’t experienced the joy of this scene, you can watch it here.

This scene has always spoken to me, because of all the cooking directions I learned from my mother (who, unlike Moira Rose, was an experienced and supportive teacher), the one thing I could never wrap my head around was folding. How does one take a liquid and a solid and crease them? How do you practice doughrigami with a spoon? I would do the actions that she told me to do, but I never understood what was the purpose of this, or what it had to do with folding.

Today when I come on the direction to fold, I always remember my mom teaching me, and my utter lack of understanding. The funny thing is that I could easily look online and read (and watch videos) of the reasons and techniques of this skill, but I don’t want to. I would like folding in cheese (or anything else) to remain a gap in my knowledge and a regular reminder of my wonderful mom.

Be safe, be strong.

What is one to do when he has already written about the solstice on the day before its official start and already bathed the page in emotion? Well, if you are me, you go back to a constant source of material throughout these years, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Anyone who has read these posts though the years knows that this is my favorite Christmas story, and I am always on the lookout for new manifestations of the classic.

I found a very different approach this year. While scanning through YouTube clips today I found a video of the Ghost of Christmas Present done in ASMR style.

Though I assume most people reading this are familiar with ASMR, it stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. It describes the tingling feeling of euphoria many people get in their scalp and spine when exposed to auditory and visual stimulation. Videos in this genre are characterized by tiny sounds, delicate movement, and soft sibilant voices. I do not have pronounced ASMR reactions, though I can feel twinges at times, but those who do describe it as one of the most pleasant sensations. Videos designed to trigger this response can easily be found throughout YouTube.

The Christmas Carol video is broken into two parts. It begins with Dickens writing the beginning of the scene of the second visitation. The actor whispers the words while his pen quietly scratches on paper. We are brought into the scene up until the moment when Scrooge opens the door to see the apparition.

The room is much as we expect from other retelling of the story. Lush food and greenery with colors to stimulate the senses teem through the previously barren chamber. A fire crackles in the background, and in the central chair we see the traditional green rob of the spirit. However, in this retelling, the spirit is a woman, and a woman with a somewhat heavy French accent.

She speaks a combination of original lines from the scene coupled with descriptions of things that were originally stated by the author. As she speaks, she weaves al holly wreath and puts it on our head, for we are in the position of Scrooge in this scene. Fire crackling, low gentle voice, and the sound of holly leaves dragged against the edges of a wooden box are all designed to set off the tingling in the scalp of the viewer while the word of Dickens and the message of charity tingle in the heart. There are a few other characters who appear in their own whispered presence, but it is the woman as the spirit that is the focus of the video, as she gradually ages through the day only to fade away at the last stroke of midnight.

For a gimmick piece, it is pretty effective. The spirit (literal and figurative) of the story comes through in this new form, and it is a restful watch on a winter afternoon. I recommend it to you whether you enjoy the ASMR response or not.

Be safe, be strong.

.

Tonight we make the transition from fall into winter. The next two nights will be the longest nights of the year, and we will have less daylight than we thought possible. I’ve set the automatic timers on my lights back twice, and it will still be dark before my lights come on. The lights I have are cheery, but they are no match for the darkness outside and inside.

More than anything, as I grow older, I find this is what Christmas is all about. We hang lights to defiantly battle the darkness outside and the cold inside. Sometimes we are successful; sometimes it still feels dark and cold. But the lights of Christmas remind us that it won’t always be this way, and that after the high tide of darkness that is the Winter solstice, the daylight can fight just as indefatigably to reclaim its share of the hours. At some point we will no longer need artificial light.

If the seasons didn’t exist, we would have to invent them, because they provide such wonderful analogs to the events (and the span) of our lives. I feel this most profoundly at this winter solstice. The last week has been one of profound, profound sorrow, like don’t know if I can go on sorrow, but in the midst of that, I was given a candle of new opportunity and possibility. Today those two emotions have been battling within me, as I have felt myself almost torn apart with contradictory impulses, the sadness and the loneliness pulling me down into darkness and the new hope lighting me up like a defiant string of lights sparkling above.

As I look at the lights of my Christmas tree, the lights shine so much brighter when it’s dark outside. They remind me that the darkness will not overcome us. The sadness will pass, and even if this new hope doesn’t pan out, it will have carried me through another winter night.

Be safe, be strong.