I bought my own true love a radio for Christmas last year. It wasn’t just any old radio mind you…it is a Tivoli Audio music system…with little buttons and lights and a screen that tells what day it is and the time. When music plays the little screen scrolls the name of the artist sometimes. Otherwise it is the very paradigm of of minimalist design…a simple rectangular black oak box with an aluminum face. Sits on the dresser quietly waiting to be awakened with the slimmest remote control device ever. Now you might think that buying her a radio is unromantic…but I also had the stairway to our apartment carpeted and honestly…that is unromantic. It’s nice carpet though. The thing is that it gets more difficult every year to endure the cringe of crawling through the malls with desperation leaking from every doorway. I watch those sad and increasingly angry husbands being dragged along by determined wives or vice versa. Actually I saw the picture of colossal “I-Don’t-Want- To-Be-Here” the other day when I saw a wife being coaxed along the aisle of the automotive parts department. That woman could not have been less interested in the latest developments in windshield wipers. Every time the hubby stopped to investigate a nearby bin…she’d cock her hip and cross her arms, turn her head about forty five degrees and stare though a small window inside her head that looked out onto the Boulevard St. Germaine in Paris. I love watching people. I’m fascinated by people. This used to be a favourite time of year for me….going to places where people gathered in big numbers with all sorts of intimate and unconscious behaviour. Unguarded facial expressions offer incredible insights on the human condition but It’s important that one follows the rules. This isn’t personal research…the object isn’t to get “inside someone’s head” for nefarious purposes. For me it’s about trying to understand who we are. And each of us is less a singular being than a combination…a cohesion…a conjunction of everyone around us. More importantly we are also shaped by everyone who ever was around us. I stopped believing in the Miracle on Thirty Fourth Street years ago…although I knew his beard was real…but the holiday season remains a time when the best and worst of human nature flows like a herd of cats in every direction. If you want to know the state of the society or community you live in…this is the time and place to start paying attention. A lot of bad things have happened over the past couple of years and every year around this time there are those who get knocked off their perch…go all white noise and bullets…It’s a very pressurized time. Standing in a shopping mall with hundreds of people moving by is like having a kind of barometer…”How are we doing?” is the question and the sum of the answers tells us whether we need to go home and pack…move to another town…or just put on some old Joan Baez music and chill. This is also the time of year when we reflect and wonder about next year…I always wonder about next year. At seventy every next year is a miracle. Checking out the malls this year I was reassured. In spite of the fiscal cliff and the general mess that is still chewing on Europe…In spite of the widening gap of filthy rich and desperately poor in the world…In spite of the belief held by some of my pals…that the world is going to hell…(and I do agree), it doesn’t seem to be getting there any faster than it was last year or the year before. However…the reassurance of a seventy year old man with a limited education and several chronic and potentially fatal diseases should offer no comfort what-so-ever to younger generations. It merely means that I will probably be long gone before the worst of our excesses finally pisses off mother nature to the extent that the new rulers of this planet will be cockroaches. The best advice I could whisper from my little corner of the shopping mall this year is this…Cut the shopping in half…get off your ass…your parents and grand parents were idiots…you can love them if you want to…but they injured the planet…or did nothing to prevent it…and the planet needs our help. Right away. Happy New Year.
This year I gave her diamonds…it was the least I could do.
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