| [from the desk of Stickboy]
hey kids!! merry Christmas, and welcome to the breakdown lane, also known as the pretty sure 2006 Christmas letter. if you’d like to skip the yuletide flaming liberal invective, feel free to proceed directly to – http://www.oliosonline.org/ my new strip, THE $100K BOWL OF SHIT, is available now and ready for its close-up. more new strips will be visited upon you, gentle reader, in January. I’m still hard at work on a myspace page, but I keep getting emails from a slinky, buxom blonde named amber who wants to add me to her friends list. I’m telling you, it’s an internet out there. we also have merchandise available – http://www.cafepress.com/buy/stickboy for those of you with far too much time on your hands, press on! but be warned, we are in a foul and frenetic mood this holiday season. as my idol, jp Donleavy wrote, life is always traveling to a sorrow. how is it a jewish stick figure such as myself – raised as a conservative jew, no less, which requires untold hours of Zionist indoctrination and prayer (for christ’s sake) – can be so enamored of everything about this time of year: the Charlie Brown Christmas Album, colored lights and sugar cookies, an endless war on terror? then at midnight the animals are given the gift of speech? I have to hand it to the goyim, you've got us beat. I’ve got latkes and a supply of oil that was only supposed to last one day, but it lasted eight days. the miracle of Hanukah is, of course the model for our current energy policy, per dick cheney: “plenty of fossil fuel left, kids – come on in”! hanukah is a bone they throw us wee Jewish boys and girls, so we don’t feel so bitter about stockings and trees, about peppermint hot cocoa and this year’s starbucks Christmas album (my wife says they’re the same each year, but I’m a sucker for packaging). Hanukah? a minor holiday, at best, it puffs itself up every December like a macy’s thanksgiving day Joe Lieberman float. eight nights of presents? like everything else in Jewish religious practice, it just goes on forever. and, as on every other interminable Jewish holiday, not even a deep drink of the blood of Christian babies kills the pain. according to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary (which, Allah be praised, is still a free site), “Hanukah is an 8-day Jewish holiday beginning on the 25th of Kislev and commemorating the rededication of the Temple of Jerusalem after its defilement by Antiochus of Syria”. what the fuck is Kislev? According to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, Hanukah doesn’t exist (it begins with an H). my Christmas present to Iran? A B-52 Stratofortress and a six-pack of nuclear warheads, so we can’t invade them. have you ever wondered what it would take to absolutely demolish the world? you’re about to find out. new york’s such a lonely town, when you’re the only Jewish boy around...give me lights, give me snow, give me bing and frankie, give me elvis, give me red and green foil wrapping, give me ribbons, bows, jimmy stewart and donna reed. ravish me with nativity, make me pine for pine, o’ little town of manhattan, come alive in every department store window. any new year’s resolutions? george w. bush will stay the course in Iraq and probably institute a draft. why shouldn’t more people die in Iraq? what’s an oil-rich desert nation for, if you can’t strew it with hundreds of thousands of dead men, women and children? this is an occupation, and an illegal one at that, and you can’t fight an occupation – it’s sort of like fucking a brick. so many meaningless little brown lives, so little time. they’re at the white house right now, watching braveheart – any strategy will do at this point, and don’t be surprised to see bush on the white house lawn after Christmas, wearing hair extensions, his face painted blue… forgive my prattle. the time is short, and I want to approach everything with awe, stop pretending the lies are inconsequential, that the pile of bodies has nothing to do with me, that the world will last forever, that I’m not afraid, despondent, beaten down. maybe not in our lifetime, but one day this beautiful, aching orb will be half a giant charcoal briquette, floating in a black, airless, frigid infinity, and we are hustling it along. I see death everywhere, like we’re racing to it. I see it in the shops and on the corners, digging through the flowerbeds and stirring coffee. it follows me down to the subway platform, nudges me into the car, stands beside me, rests a claw upon the bar. rilke said it’s the other side of life. fine, let it come, but it’ll be duck season and rabbit season, and we’ll dissolve like sugar, reaching for the silver burning edges of the clouds. george w. bush is an atheist. condoleeza rice is an atheist. tony blair is an atheist. dick cheney is an atheist. and I, of course, am an atheist: if any of us believed in god, we wouldn’t be doing this. one day my children will ask me what I did in these gray and graceless times, and I’ll tell them I signed quite a number of internet petitions. so much for Christmas cheer. in short, I am afraid. I haven’t read enough Shakespeare, I haven’t been to Montreal or Ireland, I’ve never owned a cat, I haven’t weaned myself off lexapro, I haven’t benched my weight, I’ve never shot a man just to watch him die, I haven’t seen Roman Holiday, I haven’t saved the world…to be so perpetually unfinished. as Chekhov wrote in “An Anonymous Story”, take what’s left of your life and save it. give, give, give. the love you take is equal to the love you make. we’ve been so lucky. to have the Beatles. bob Marley. frank Sinatra. ella Fitzgerald. Stickboy. Lewis lapham. Jesus. yes, Jesus. and I’ll tell you why I love him so much. because he still represents an idea more radical today than it was in the Levant 2007 years ago, that poor people matter. that love is more powerful than money. that belief is more powerful than the point of the sword. that we can create monumental inner lives that matter. that there is a fineness within each of us, a divinity. if we could reach for it…I keep reaching, I keep hoping, I keep trying. so happy Hanukah from another sparkling manhattan Christmas and its glamorous chaos. je suis ici, amongst the million things I’ve acquired, the million things I’ve discarded, in this delicious cold air. please let it last. all of it. happy Christmas, j’taime, “I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly, the stairway which leads to a dark gulf”. www.daveaaronoff.com – great music |