Sunday, December 22, 2002
I made the mistake of going "Christmas shopping" yesterday. I'd put the deed off as long as I could and, finally, sacrificed a day to the crowds and noise and conspicuous consumption. What else was I supposed to do? The President has made it plain that not indulging in gluttonous holiday spending is unpatriotic and cowardly, and I'd rather brave a whole herd of anthrax-infected reindeer than ever be thought either of those things. I may only be a lowly writer of crude melodramas and lurid horrors, but I still have to live with myself, you know. So I went. It was amusing for about the first two hours. And then the tawdry spectacle of the whole mess began to sink in. The sheer weight of it. All of these people, spending, spending, spending and I just wanted to start asking them, why? Why are you doing this? Sure, the economy would bloat and float like a dead carp if you didn't max out the credit cards, but that's not why these people are shopping. And it doesn't have anything to do with the birth of Jesus Christ, either. Of that much I'm almost 100% certain. A few might say that it's because they want to show family, friends, and loved ones how much they care, and, after all, in this society, spending money and accuring debt is the ultimate proof of love. Buy overpriced crap you can't really afford or your children (or parents or lover or whoever) will hate you. But I think most were on autopilot. They were shopping because it's Christmas time and at Christmas time we shop. I sat down on a bench and just watched them for a while. There was an intense, driven surreality to the scene. The dreadful piped-in music, the gaudy decorations, the halfhearted attempts, here and there, to make Christmas into anything but the secularized fiscal duty that it is. It was, in fact, enough to take your breath away, if you stared directly at it for long enough. If you stopped to consider the scope of it, that all across the country this same scene was being enacted, hundreds of millions of people in America alone, spending, desperately racing to beat the clock. Sure, they might pause at some point to pay lip service to church and family and goodwill towards the less fortunate (as long as the less fortunate are on the other side of the street), but this, this ugly feeding frenzy of buying, this has become the heart and soul of the season. No sense of a deeper meaning, that the gifts are merely symbolic gestures to convey anything of greater substance. The gifts aren't even truly gifts. They're as compulsary as any tax. They're a civic responsibility.
Bah humbug. You better fucking believe it.
There was one moment that almost brightened my day, though. In Saks, a couple of boys passed me. Both shot me disapporoving glances. One said, "Damn, she's scary." The other replied, without missing a beat, "Yeah. She dresses like my art teacher." God bless 'em.
I got back home later than I'd intended, sometime after dark, and sat down about 9 p.m. to work on the introduction for TFoC. I mananged another 951 words, despite a headache and the lingering taste of tinsel at the back of my throat. I knocked off about eleven. With luck, I'll finish the thing today and can move along to something else.
Excuse me. I'm still trying to scrape this yule thing off my feet . . .
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