With a first light of the new year there are many well wishes and sundry other tidings of joy that are now at an end. We now move in to that nebulous period of time where the days are short the nights long and cold and our stores are already filled with Valentines Day products, Easter grass, and summer beach towels considering this first holiday is a mere month and a half away and the other events fall in line with our ten thousand mile supply chain already set in motion by forces we can no longer control, a chain so mechanized and automated that I imagine our stores will continue to receive chocolate rabbits and jelly beans for about a decade after all life on earth has been extinguished. That and just what commercial product has yet jumped up to capture the national Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day (DMLKJD) market and fill the consumer void since we’ve barely returned all the unwanted holiday gifts by then let alone figured on what products would fit this our newest holiday and one that honors someone who was sort of anti-consumerist if not downright hostile to corporatism.

Our post-holiday blues may also include the disappointment at all the Fiscal Cliff™ hype and that this pent up expectation for economic ruin or equity has become the sin of Onan and now we have just tracked through it with our good shoes. Things in our government have worked themselves out, but not so well as to rob the networks of thrilling TeeVee since the fixes to our numerous national economic issues are but temporary solutions to longer issues that will continue and will provide us a series of deadlines and showdowns that keep the fire under the nation’s public(s) and prevent us from going about planning for our future. Fear not, we can continue to fear. Our political actors are indeed actors and we have not so much voted for representation than given leading roles in our political drama series, a poorly lit on-going episodic Telenovela – minus the women with huge liptitsasses – which is a shame, since liptitsasses are the best part of those Telemovelas (a package deal of plastic surgery that seems specific to Hispanic women).

The new year starting is our first teenage year of the century and as such promises to be moody, zitty, and horny. This period of time in the last century led to one of the most massive wars that the world had ever seen and invented the concept of Total War. Perhaps our century’s teen years will repeat this youthful folly, however, I (and several academies) believe that history does not repeat itself and that we will be in for new surprises as our moody century unfolds. One of the surprises perhaps will be that our government continues along a right wing agenda, the ruling party a slightly more sanitary, well-spoken, and brown fascism than our red-faced alternative waning Party of No can or could ever offer. Drones will start their flights over our cities (actually, it will be admitted that drones are flying over our cities), corporate rules will be adjusted but not tightened, and our national dream of energy independence will be stoked as tar sands and toxic sludge is pumped about our great land and each movement of this matter will be counted as a fresh number, each barrel of sludge counting as ten as it is pumped ten times about the landscape.

It is to these new deadlines and coming parade of cliffs that we must give this year to. A series of fights and points as if government were one huge Bruins season and the Stanley Cup a papier-mâché object d’art that was considered the most valuable prize, the Holy Grail or Ring of Power rather than the solutions being the salvation and cooperation and compromise being the ideal rather than competition and competitive cocksucking being encouraged and lionized and the prize but rag paper and horse glue.
Discooperation may be the sign of the times if indeed we need yet another sign in a world inundated by signals, symbols, and syllogisms. Voting off the island, winning the playoffs, competing for entry into pre-school, beating the lowest price with prices that are insane, are the hallmarks of victory and pinnacle of achievement regardless of whether the island is worth living on alone, the game was played fairly, the school worth the money, or the hunk of shit electronic device useful. Fiscal Cliff™ or not, we are in for more of the same, and from all levels of society as our nation state enters that final condition, that same set of symptoms the SOVIET Union exhibited prior to anathema…. It turns out that we are not a nation of contradictions, but we are a nation driven by contradictions and to wit we extend an increasingly bizarre logic in order to prop up our parody world we keep inventing. Like the insane person, this fictional world must be ever more fantastic in order to keep the rest of the universe, that which exists as nature, as water takes on its three forms and does not have a fourth state nor stay the jelly beans whose colours do not reflect the flavors and hollow coco bunnies delivered long before the snow has melted and that share the isles with sub tan lotion and Halloween candy.