New Year's Letter

Dear 2009:

iHate sexy.

Please, stop bringing it back. Take my girlfriend (please), who's plenty sexy, but for good measure feels compelled to smatter her work, her life, indeed, with it as a kind of personal edge-cum-business utility, which is rather like putting one of these in one of these.

It's the world we live in, she would say, and she would be right. This year, though, after idling the foregoing years in darkness, I've finally hit upon the answer: live in a different world! Become expert in the constructions of yurts and live with a nomadic tribe in the outskirts of Mongolia. Find a corner of the earth where Steve Jobs, Justin Timberlake, et al. fall a distant second to a lactating Yak.

Oops. What's this? A Greek chorus, hmm? Well, let's hear what they have to say -

But it is the sacred and the profane!
They must exist together.
They are complementary.
You must embrace the one to fully embrace the other.

- well that is true, isn't it? Damn Greeks. There's a problem, though. Today, what passes for sacred (nationalism, religious dogma, ambition, bigdreams, money, the social contract I never signed) isn't really sacred at all and what passes for the profane (Britney Spears, E! Television, Hollywood, Carl's Jr. hamburgers, Mardi Gras) sure as hell ain't profane.

To have things like these form your constellation of that which is sacred and that which is profane is to do nothing other than be a dead human being. And not in a good way.

C'mon, let's go milk some Yaks, who's in?

Happy New Year.

Juvenal Delinquency

There was a time, just a few, heartrending generations ago, when the youth of the civilized world would chant, not without a touch of monastic nostalgia,

amō, amāre, amāvī, amātum -

and thereby dedicate themselves to a scholarly fraternity to whose agency we owe the very structure of our western minds.

No longer.

The past is overwhelmed by an implacable present, a march of the now with each step measured in new reward and quickly forgotten in turn.

Antiquity? Antiquated.

The generations of more recent vintage, insulated in their connectedness, have no memory for the past, contentedly occupied with courting their own adolescent sense of irony. Which begs the question:

when the past is utterly forgotten, root and branch, and watchmen of the new generation take up their charge in the world,

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Consumer Captivity

On what should have been a perfectly harmless trip to a perhaps less than harmless electronics purveyor in search of, admittedly, more or less harmful beeping and flashing "lifestyle enhancements" - how else are we to better ourselves? - I nearly came to mortal grief at the checkout line when I found myself, hostage-style, being assaulted by the artistic stylings of that creature fallen from God's own breast, Rihanna, who was lip synching her little heart out in pleather-bound glory.

De gustibus non est disputandum, you know, but to oppress the already somewhat sullen, shuffling masses dutifully fulfilling their consumer destinies with such disaffectionate, ill-conceived excrement-in-sound strikes me rather more than vaguely of adding insult to injury.

As I find myself rather inexplicably arrived in this world in which Rihanna is given to us in HD and in surround sound, I hope to impress upon my checkout line comrades that despite this excess of diversion, this lonely crusade against aloneness, the sweet, gentle, sensual hand of death is coming, thank God -

- and if you have your wits about you, you'll set the table.