| [from the desk of Stickboy]
Christmas Calling
bon natal, mes amis. oui, it’s been awhile
since “the year of living miserably,” I know, and you might wonder
if my year concluded any less miserably, if I spent our overheated
autumn foraging for acorns, storing up for winter, or lying fallow
in some other form, in the long grass, as the Irish say, or up to
fucking nothing, as I might describe it, standing in shirtsleeves on
seventh avenue, bedazzled by Manhattan’s gilded roar.
the truth is I’ve been busier than a vampire at sunup, riding more subways than a winter cold. I’ve been a rotoscoped bell curve, rising like smoke, falling like a spent matchstick, a cold hard thump on the pavement. to bring you this, my brand new strip, “The Redemption of Michael Vick,” in two delicious versions, touch – http://www.oliosonline.org/Olios/stickboy/vick/stickboy_vick.html and tackle –
http://www.oliosonline.org/Olios/stickboy/vick/stickboy_vick.pdf you won’t find a better stocking stuffer anywhere on the Internet. and our windows are better than barney’s. speaking of which, come on, buy stuff! – http://www.cafepress.com/sticky_tbs you’re broke anyway… okay, as always, the drill is the same. if all you want from me is yet another brilliant comic strip, then spare yourself the usual socialist rants, atheist posturing, existential panic and glazed ham recipes that follow. for everyone else, let me welcome you, comrades, to the 2007 Pretty Sure Christmas letter. ‘tis the season that finds me addicted, as always, to the soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas. I leave it playing as I lapse into sleep, half the day’s deeds undone – I can’t fit my life into my life, it seems, can’t keep up with it. the waves march toward the beach in relentless, towering sets. I need a personal assistant, a sherpa, a cleaning service, someone who can actually draw, a big bag of money. mine’s a story of debt and dishonor. my life has become, quite simply, beyond my means. so how do I begin, to spit out the bookends of my days and ways? how is it our disappointments seek us out, come to know us, press against us like determined lovers? it’s Christmas. there will be hot chocolates and the Yuletide cheer of friends and strangers, girls in Santa hats and fishnet stockings and black boots, if we’re lucky, shredded wrapping paper, more dead Iraqis, more dead American troops. snow will fall on manhattan and the sound of shovels scraping against wet pavement will echo down the cold white canyon of 71st street. the year will turn again, passing in a blur, as always. this wouldn’t be a Pretty Sure epistle without some invective devoted to our Middle East misadventures, would it? well then, let’s get down to business. genocide, as we’ve seen many times throughout our checkered history, is the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political or cultural group. why don’t we count Iraqi casualties? and why did the Bush administration decide we should operate outside the Geneva Accords? what did the poor people of Iraq do to deserve more than fifteen years of devastation, imprisonment, invasion, sanctions, more air strikes than all six Star Wars movies combined, and waterboarding…and if they’d met our assault with nonviolence, like Gandhi or Jesus or Martin Luther King, we would have bombed them where they sat at prayer in silent rows…soon enough we’ll be crucifying them up and down Firdos Square. one of the most hideous results of our current engagement is the idea that war is an acceptable activity, justifiable in any circumstance, a fact of life, something that (yawn) has to be done, like cleaning your toilet or flying coach. we’ve somehow decided it’s okay to invade and occupy a sovereign nation, to slaughter its millions and divvy up its loot, to just march into someone else’s country and start shooting. that somehow the people of Iraq (or Vietnam, or Darfur, or Haiti, or Iran) aren’t entitled to get up in the morning and go to their shitty jobs and their under-funded public schools, to eat Whoppers and fries at their desks, to come home and pass out in front of the television, accompanied by the blare of a Tivo’d episode of I Love New York 2. fuck, for all we know they sit backwards on their toilets and fingerbang their daughters. so fire up the willing engines… I spent much of the wee smalls of a recent Saturday night watching Spartacus. One scene that struck me took place at the gladiator school (and prison) of Lentulus Bataitus (Peter Ustinov). Glabrus and Crassus (Laurence Olivier), along with Lady Glabrus and Lady Marius, visit Bataitus and demand a spectacle in honor of Glabrus and Lady Marius’s impending nuptials, “two pairs to the death.” Bataitus protests – “we never fight them to the death…the ill feeling it would spread through the whole school…” Then Crassus tells him, “name your price,” and Bataitus’s objections are blown afield like a dried dandelion in an Appian breeze. Two centuries after Christ, after the salt mines and the Roman galleys, after the Inquisition, after Austerlitz and Auschwitz, after Rwanda and Hiroshima, it seems we’ve rounded a terrible, bitter corner – once again, life has never been cheaper. and it is in this – not in our mighty corporate democracy and its attendant hypocrisy, graft and plunder; not in our tentative stranglehold on Persia; not in our temporarily heaving coffers; not in the columns of our soldiers marching across the seething desert – but in our subjugation, oppression, torture and slaughter of the poor and dark so far from home, in our disdain for the value of so many, “lesser,” individual lives, we have become, finally, so very much like Rome. Name your price. My new strip, a memoir of my early childhood, tentatively titled, “Rectal Thermometers and Other Tortures,” should be available once I get the most recent draft back from my therapist. In the meantime, you should remember that I’ve seen a million faces, and I’ve rocked them all, and thus mortal life is enough for me. I should close with a Christmas wish. I hope, I hope, I hope…I hope I find a way to make it back from beyond hope. I hope we’ve skidded along our nadir, and that things might start to get better, for all of us, somehow, for the starving, the illiterate, the ravaged masses. I hope you get snow, blinking colored lights, that brief moment when you’re outside in the cold drinking a hot bevy with someone you love, maybe Sinatra’s “Christmas Waltz” or Louis Armstrong’s “Cool Yule” (cats are sleeping warm as toast!) somewhere within earshot (something to drown out the death rattle of the New Deal, 40 million Americans can’t afford health insurance, the new favela on the next block), and everything’s sort of okay. you know – Christmas? that non-denominational two days off from work, that brisk winter air, a couple of presents, a big meal…Christmas. D’accord? Gustav Klimt was fond of cats, smocks, vaginas and a Latin aphorism, “quos dues perdere vult prius dementat” – “whom a god would destroy he first drives mad.” it’s how I’m signing all my holiday cards this year (I can only imagine how my eight year-old niece will respond). All of them save this one, which I sign to you, “avec amour, jamais,” and “bon annee.” here’s hoping your life stays pricey. J’suis, |