A Convenient Truth – Great Society

I suffer from seasonal depression. That makes it even harder when, with strangely warm weather this Christmas, all of my little armchair liberal friends get big on the Al Gore election vehicle An Inconvenient Truth, which I have studiously avoided because Gore betrayed us all in 2000 and, now, everything he says is like those former 60’s activists who have found god and recanted their activities. Sorry I tried to help you. I was young and foolish. The revolution was wrong, Bush and Jesus are right.

So Gore steps up and, after a brief prologue where we are flashed several images during a high-pitched white noise freak-out preparing us for a dark horse run in 2008, he begins to tell us that the world is ending. Or something. I haven’t seen the shit… And you know why? I don’t care. That’s right. Fuck the planet.

It’s doing what it always does, and it’s doing it normally. Sure, maybe we’re speeding the shit up, but anyone who doubts the ability the ecosystem has to recover from our madness needs to have their head checked. The fucking treacherous ecosystem will shut us down when the time comes and get onto the path of recovery. We’ll all choke on blood and vomit and be long gone. Our actions are a blip on the radar.

In the meantime – ice caps melting, losing our permafrost… I have one thing to say: Thank god. Because seasonal depression sucks. I’ve sat here in DC my adult life and, every year, by Christmas, I’ve sunk into manic depression so deep my friends start to have trouble tolerating me.

I was fine when I was a kid, because then it was no problem. Eat brownies and watch Doctor Who or whatever. And in high school, it was all about drinking too much cough syrup and…watching Doctor Who. But my adult years brought me to the point where I had to face cold weather and gunmetal skies and that fucking half-snow that DC gets until real winter settles in. Not to mention the Christmas Mania and the false cheer and even more false hope. Commuting, working, childhood lost.

But, as the years have worn painfully on, something’s changed… The days are warmer. DC hardly gets any real snow. We might get blasted once or twice, but not like when I was a kid. You could bank on snow days every year. The schools would look towards winter and sigh because it meant going longer into the summer to make up for all the time lost.

Now snow days are a thing of the past. Hell, last year, January sported sunny skies and 60 degree days. Right now, Christmas Eve, it’s 60 degrees and the sky is a piercing blue. We’ll get shocked in February for a bit. We always do. But not like we used to. My depression would settle in over the Christmas holiday and slowly build through grey January and grim February but, now, hell, the climate is warming up. And thank the giant, wet cock of Jesus, too.

This is my first Christmas alone – family scattered to the four winds, friends kept at a distance, and me sitting here with gin and bitter lemon at noon ready for my Christmas Eve tradition – Die Hard, Gremlins and Scrooged. And I’m fine. I have my regrets and worries, the fallout from one of the worst years of my life, chronic pain and the memory of friends lost, things unsolved and great disappointments, but it’s not building up. Because my office window is open, people are laughing on the street, the sun is shining and it hurts to look into the sky. Seriously, it’s like a painting up there. The air is fresh, my plant out on the balcony probably doesn’t know what the fuck to do, and I need more gin. Which is just right over there.

Let the permafrost go. Melt those ice caps. Whatever it fucking takes to have me out at the park with my neighbor’s dog sizzling on the barbeque, that yapping tongue silenced once and for all.

Oh, I know, go to Australia. But, folks, I’m not Australian, am I? I’m an American, from Washington, DC. I was born and raised in this fucking retarded town and client suburbs. This strange place that runs a nation but isn’t, really, part of it. This place that’s a mix of segregated blacks, old money whites and transplant yuppies who, each and every one, need to receive a bullet to the back of the head in order to preserve what tiny thread of Humanity has survived to the modern day. A town that needs to be burnt down and is temporary home to the only President in history that truly – really, deeply, truly – needs to be shot. And I don’t say that because I’m a Democrat, or anti-war, or anything. I say that because he’s a bad man.

Look, I am a registered Democrat, but my family is old school Democrat. We’re talking back to the 1800’s here. Shall we say, in a whisper, since before the Civil War? We’re the Democrats who built Jim Crow. The ones who freaked out and helped the south go Nixon, and Reagan. So don’t go roll your eyes and think I’m like the armchair liberals today. No…I’m the bad man. Before you go all red and blue, it’s important to understand history. There are Democrats and there are Democrats.

And I’m not anti-war because, seriously, we need to clean out our poor people. Give them a little something to dance with. Why don’t you country-fried trailer park trash go play with them Arabs for a bit. I’m concerned now that the US population has tipped 300 million. That’s too many people between me and my post-apocalyptic goal of becoming the God-Emperor of Appalachia.

The reason we have Bush is because all those middle States have too many fucking people. Ignorant savages out there in rural America. People wearing animal skins and gnawing on the leg bones of their runt brothers and sisters. Nobody knows how to control rural America anymore. Where’s Huey Long when we need him? Round those fools up and pacify them.

Oh! I was talking about Gore. America’s favorite piece of moldy drywall. The big environmental threat which you, and you, and you need to stop by washing labels off of your soap cans because, really, it’s all your fucking fault that these giant, unstoppable corporations are obliterating the planet.

Well, I suppose it is your fault… But more of a collective you. Like, all 300 million of you. We’d need to break up into groups of one million well armed vigilantes who always move together and go take out corporations one at a time by destroying all of their buildings and having public executions of all board members to see a proper turnaround.

I don’t know why that doesn’t happen because, oh boy, wouldn’t that be fun? You wouldn’t have to go to work. There’s enough shit lying around to keep us all fed, in that idealistic layman’s communist sort of way, for quite a while. Especially after the mass genocide of various religious and ethnic groups. Mormons are at the top of my list, by the way. Except for attractive Mormon women, who’ll happily turn themselves over as breeders. And, after all, the God-Emperor of Appalachia needs a harem of pure white, wide-eyed Mormon women. Which will offset his harem of big bottomed, small-waisted nigresses.

I use the word “nigress” in a comic way, of course, to help add a dash of shock to yet another run of the mill article. Unlike Grandpa Luther, who was filled with a strange sort of glittering-eyed passion whenever he said ‘nigger.’ Then he’d be silent for a few moments, staring into the middle distance.

Of course, you couldn’t tell Luther not to say nigger, because then he’d laugh himself silly and rock back and forth manically repeating the word for hours. Which I admit to doing at several family dinners simply for entertainment value. As anyone can tell by the caliber of women I date, I am easily amused.

Now, okay, I was talking about Gore, I know. And my surprising lack of depression this year. Which could also be attributed to the fact that I’ve been severely depressed since last year this time when a couple of my hick friends fucked me over and almost derailed my fledgling company. That was bad, but I soon got over it because things fell into place regardless of the dark angels in my life. Things always work that way for me. So despite these two yahoos destroying irreplaceable materials and soaking me for blackmail money, shit fell together without me even paying attention to it. Color me vaguely satisfied with that episode of my life. Of course, one of those two fools has been emailing me constantly since them with desperate pleas to renew friendship, and even sexual advances. Color me confused.

Well, not really. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that people really are fucked up. I mean, to the degree where you want to sit on their chests and run pipe cleaners up their noses. There is no other way to help them. Like: “God told me this morning that I must remove your brain and put it through the dishwasher. Maybe more than once, too, because, wow.”

But, that doesn’t really have me that depressed. I suffer from incurable, mind-melting chronic pain that controls every element of my life. I’m taking so many drugs now I’m having trouble remembering left from right. There’s no room for these other problems. These strange little people. There’s certainly no room for the permafrost.

All I know is that my freezer is stocked with booze, classic alt-country is pounding hard through my speakers, I’m wearing a funny hat and…it’s a beautiful day out there. Merry Christmas.