It’s been great to be drawing more often. Doing pen inks again has been way better for me than the intense zoom I’ve adopted for digital work, and the lines are so much smoother with actual resistance between paper and pen. One thing that occurred to me while drawing is that I spend so much of my time looking at my hands that I primarily see my hands as the active part of my person. I think it informs the way I think about sex. If I’m just imagining a fantasy, it’s all hands and mouth, because that’s the part of me that does things. That’s the part that’s me, and not the flesh pile my head sits on.
They turned on the Christmas music at work already, on November 1st. That’s earlier than they’ve ever turned it on, and it’s way too early and I’m mad about it. A couple days ago, I was putting out some stuff in the men’s department, and I came across a Funko Pop of Santa Claus, who was listed as a Coca-Cola character. Cuz remember how Coke invented Santa? We’ve started getting our two-to-three weeks of heavy trucks to gear up for the holiday, so it’s a lot more of everything at the moment. There were a lot of people in the store right until closing last night.
All of this is to say, working in retail this time of year is a great reminder for anyone that Christmas is something stores do to people, not an organic holiday. It’s treated as the greatest holiday for kids so that we inundate our children with excitement and hype that it can never live up to, so that they grow up with a toxic level of nostalgia that will drive them to buy stupid wooden plaques that can sit on end tables for two months. The advertising is oppressive and omnipresent. And let’s face it: Most of the music isn’t that good, at least not the songs you hear. There’s like five that have twenty covers each that play on a loop in every retail establishment, and a smattering of others, and maybe a handful are actually good songs. I’m not sure why I don’t hear more people calling musicians sellouts for making Christmas albums; they’re just associating their names with this capitalist goulash for a paycheck. I’m willing to bet that the first accounts that post those terrible Mariah Carey thawing out memes in September are bots or belong to retail executives or something.
And to be clear, I like Christmas fine. It’s a good holiday. You spend time with your family, and gift-giving, despite being a capitalist vehicle for excess consumption, is still a wonderful way to show affection for others, making it a good basis for a holiday during a tough time of the year. It’s not a bad concept, and there’s good reason for people to love it and look forward to it. I just don’t think it’s the most important day of the year, and the level of capitalist propaganda around it is revolting. Plus, I generally speaking experience one day at a time, and so I prefer it when things happen when they happen, and not for an obligatory six months. I’m tired of being made to feel like a curmudgeon because I stand against this consumerist nonsense. Oh, this is an old take, we’ve heard it all before. That’s because it’s true! We all know it and simply choose to go along with it anyway.
It’s not just the consumerism, either. I know it’s a joke to say Die Hard is a Christmas movie, but I honestly think it’s got much more of a Christmas message than anything on Hallmark (a TV channel started by a greeting card company, which profits heavily on Christmas). The generic script of a Hallmark movie involves an overworked city woman spending time in a small town at Christmas, falling in love, and deciding that the simple life in the country is more real than what she had before. None of this has to do with Christmas; it is, in short, conservative propaganda designed to encourage conformity with White Christian America. Christmas isn’t a romance holiday, so while there’s nothing wrong with shooting your shot then, it’s not holiday-specific. Nor is Christmas a small town holiday, what with the majority of the population celebrating it in cities. And the whole message about life being more “real” in small towns? It’s pretty blatant. They’re weirdly manipulative romance movies that take place at Christmas, which exists as the “truly American” holiday that everyone needs to assimilate into. The idea of Christmas as the vehicle for Western Christian assimilation goes back to the modern holiday’s origin as a creation of the Catholic church to overtake pagan holidays across Europe, as part of a larger campaign to kill or convert all nonbelievers. So I guess there’s still tradition at play, even if, like Columbus Day, it’s the wrong tradition to uphold.
By comparison, Die Hard is about a man who has to learn that family is the most important thing, under all the trappings and challenges of his strained marriage. Like a real Christmas movie, John McClane has to learn to forego what he’s wanted this whole time and instead accept the love and the life presented to him. His enemy is a group of people obsessed with money and material goods, which outstrip their personal relationships; Hans Gruber tries to convince Karl to put money ahead of his brother’s death. Even the romantic element is contained to the appropriate use of the phrase, “the gift that keeps on giving,” because it’s part of a marriage and not a fledgling hookup. Also, for as much as it’s overplayed, it’s a genuinely good movie, maybe even a great movie, unlike that paint-by-numbers trash on Hallmark. So yeah, maybe it’s still a joke to call Die Hard a Christmas movie, but it at least has a much more Christmas-y message than a Republican politician looking straight to camera and commanding you to move out of those liberal hellholes on the coast.
I’ll leave it at that. It’s a monster of a holiday, and choosing to start drawing more and thus practicing something that has a lot of meaning to me at the same time as I’m bombarded by the worst workload and peak emptiness of capitalism was quite a choice on my part. Really makes things stark, as I try to get promoted for the money. On another note, yesterday I celebrated a real holiday, Godzilla Day, by buying a SpaceGodzilla plush that was, quite frankly, a huge rip-off. But it’s so cute! Godzilla has the message we really need these days: Reject war, unite with your neighbors, and never repeat past atrocities.
Weekly Thoughts 11/4/23
Life in the Gutters 