The holidays are coming. Well, according to one of the most recognisable and powerful symbols of post-industrial capitalist society, that's right Santa Claus, and that jingle that teaches my ears how to hate. Instead of the merry tune tinkling away I always imagine hearing the foreboding trailer for a new zombie movie. *in gravelly voice* "THEY'RE COMING to rip the skin from your wife's eyelids and use your son's intestines as a skipping rope..." But the holidays are ominously coming, to celebrate that strange time of year that mixes religion with greed, gluttony, lust (office Xmas party) and the other deadly sins. But that's because it's a holiday that's formed like a festive snowball rolling down the mountainside of history; starting with the pagan festival of Yuletide, before the Christians hijacked it like they do all good things, and gathering the snowy dust of Dickensian kindness and merriment, corporate mascots, and the modern onslaught of secular festivities: TV specials, Robert Zemeckis performance capture movies that desecrate the name of Back to the Future - all mixed with a dash of primitive-minded religious traditions, making a heady, toxic, mulled brew of nostalgia, farce, hypocrisy, capitalism, screaming children and joy to all mankind that leaves you feeling swollen, defeated, plucked and bewildered just like that Christmas turkey.
It's a hotch-potch of beliefs, ideals, wants and carnivalesque indulgence all sitting uncomfortably together like the image of crucified reindeer. A Frankenstein's monster wrapped in tinsel, something that has evolved over the centuries mutating and changing as our world has mutated and changed, so its greatest symbol is no longer a baby in a manger but a jolly, ruddy-faced bringer of material desires garbed in the colours of a corporation, set to a soundtrack of the lacklustre, nauseating sounds of Christmas singles past. Just another Hallmark holiday.
But what should it really be about? A festival to help us through the cold winter months when we get together with friends and family and drink and dine, a pagan feast? Or a celebration of the birth of the son of God, a celebration of the potent power of myth? Or a time for us to boost our Western economies by buying products we can't afford, to line the pockets of the men and women who can? Who knows. Just as long as I can watch another round of Christmas specials that feel like I'm being force fed mince pies until my intestines feel like a Christmas sausage. Programmes that are about as entertaining as gout. And the greasily sweet-cheese scented distaste of sleigh-bells ringing and chestnuts roasting and all the other sickeningly predictable crud that gets wheeled out, again, ritualistically. Except this is a ritual of excess and swinishness, of corporations and Christmas adverts playing up to the notion of family, love, kindness and sending a goat to Africa. When what's really going on is a world slowly, methodically, depressingly turning to sh#t. The symbol of Christmas should be of a melting snowman, covered in black soot, his smile contorted to a sullen resentment, one eye missing, a scarf hung around his neck like a noose, soon to be a puddle...
Yet we celebrate, celebrate a lie. The lie of Christianity and the lie that everything will be alright if you throw enough money at it, surround it in the warm glow of presents and shiny wrapping paper, and eat enough turkey and drink enough brandy and go to enough parties and fart your half digested bloated meals at your sleeping grandparents.
Christmas is a cliché wrapped in a cliché surrounded by clichés. I can't even bear to hear anyone say, "It gets earlier every year" any more. Yeah, well you say that earlier every f#cking year. People moaning about Christmas, just like me, is a cliché. So, I think, to stop me from choking on my own festive bile we need to take a year off, the whole Western world just ignore it for one year, all just carry on and do what you want. Nothing to see here. No need to shop for presents or act like hearing the same turgid carols again is a reason to grin like an elf that's just got a blow job off Mrs Claus. Let's not put up any decorations and see what happens. Most of us have never had a year in our lives when we weren't surrounded by its red, white and green. In most Western cultures, unless you're sitting in an abyss at the bottom of the Atlantic straits next to a giant squid and looking at the ruins of Atlantis, it's hard to avoid.
If we cancel Christmas perhaps the desolate grey expanse of the New Year with lack of funds and miserable weather might not seem so bad. So let's boycott it starting from right now. If you see some tinsel, tear it down and rip it up. If you hear some carols smash up where they're coming from, unless it's a child's face. Christmas can go shove a 20ft Norwegian spruce up its butt and go hibernate for a year, so we can collectively take a holiday from this holiday. Who's with me?
santa claus you **** where's me f#cking bike?
Added: 3 days ago by Monty the Don
Oscar Wilde, who is the author behind the title of this blog no doubt enjoyed his work and enjoyed a drink. But what about the rest of us? Huh? "Work..." you might say, "what's that all about?" Is it a necessary evil, does it give our lives shape, focus, direction and a reason to crawl out from the covers each morning? Or is it a bunch of ass that gets in the way of our drinking and good times? Do we do it just for money or is it what gives our lives purpose? Without working we'd have no industry, no food, no infrastructure, so of course it's necessary to any society, but what if you don't want to work. What if you just want to roll out of bed whenever the hell you like, smoke a joint and learn to play the sitar or walk the streets thinking idle thoughts. What's wrong with that? Or write a book, or recreate the battle of Stalingrad using Lego, or sit in your underwear drinking stale beer while seeing if you can telepathically communicate with your girlfriend? Well society won't allow it and will instead call you lazy/a bum/indolent/selfish/lethargic/bone idle/a student - delete as appropriate.
Although many people enjoy their jobs greatly and strive all their young-adult lives to get to where they are (And to those smug people, well done, pat yourselves on the back, you made it. Don't drown on your Cristal though.) - many don't. Work, for many, means getting up at an hour you don't want to and going to a place you don't like to work with people you hate who you wouldn't ordinarily associate with even if you were loved-up to the eyeballs on ecstasy, compassion and benevolence for all mankind, where licking the skin lesions of a rotting leper seems like the best idea in the world.
People will tell you it's all about finding a work/life balance. How about no work, all fun, is that an acceptable balance? Because even if you do a job you enjoy, like being a rock star or photographer for Penthouse, your talents will still be exploited and you'll still toil all the hours our nonexistent God sends. But there's only so many of those dream jobs to go around and if they're not taken through nepotism (which doesn't always mean the worst candidate for the job) or if you didn't study hard enough to get the required grades or certificates so our society can judge your worth or for some reason you locked horns with the school system and thus were left on the fringes or you're a talentless buffoon, then what? What do you do then? Cry? Get lost in the seas of life? Choose heroin? Or take a job in a factory and shut the f#ck up, or get some mindless office goon work and grease your way up the corporate ladder? F#ck that. If you don't want to work and instead choose to travel, bum around, be an artist or whatever, society shouldn't judge you or attach such a stigma to it.
Maybe they should teach idleness in schools along with all the other subjects, just so you get a choice. They could teach you how to while away whole afternoons by staring into space. Or how to f#ck up job interviews, and live cheaply but happily by ripping off those more fortunate. Maybe some people want to hang around for the rest of their lives doing whatever they please and if that means doing f#ck all: so be it. To live as an outsider, hold contempt for authority, whether that is the government or your boss. Be a maverick, read all day, drink all night, have fun all the time. Become an iconoclast, renounce society as we know it, and make your own definition of "work". Because you'd be in good company. Many great thinkers and writers, artists and poets were lazy bums and now they're canonised. We live in an age where work is considered the very pinnacle of human achievement, with an around-the-clock work culture that's fed by BlackBerrys and the blurring of work and personal life. Where you stand, career-wise, is where you stand socially.
The great philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote his essay In Praise Of Idleness decrying the nobility of work way back in 1932, so this attitude against working so hard is nothing new. He knew the worth and value of laziness, as did Karl Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue, who wrote The Right To Be Lazy from his prison cell in 1883. If you can be assed, have a read.
Me, I can't be bothered to write any more. I'm going to go sit under a tree and wait for an apple to fall on my head, just to see what happens. Plus I'm phoning in sick tomorrow, so I'll see you at the beach. Bring some beer.
buckminster fuller was told by a very rich uncle that in order to maintain wealth, one must be long enough of tooth, and sharp enough of claw. it takes 100 workers to support bucky, and 100 more for each member of buckys family.
so the idea is to have the highest paying job without doing any actual work. you could use your time and money to invent 'bucky balls'.
top popo love this idea because they dont have to actually work. they can blame those smart enough to see, and then claim society rots from the bottom up.
dont trust anyone over 30?!?! more like dont trust anyone whose paycheck is big enough to be considered a complacency bribe!
so our richest role models do nothing for their money. is it so wrong a stretch to consider ourselves victims? or lazy? or overworked? popo just wanna crack our heads open to protect and serve the most successfully lazy amongst us.
money sucks the big one and gives us too many excuses to do the wrong thing. (just look at the health of the planet and its residents)
eat the rich, and we'll find ourselves on the bottom of the plate. unless were too starved to notice the plate.
Added: 22 days ago by tuko
Personally I become anxious when travelling relatively fast on a highway, or I begin to experience the dizzying queasiness, the nauseous delirium of vertigo when staring over a 10ft balcony. So I do admire these sports and the people who do them. The fact that they can contain their fear, manage it, and use it to strengthen them and drive them onwards fascinates me in its foreignness; it's like a strange alien landscape, mysterious and enchanting. Perhaps one day I'll attempt something modest, like leaping from a wall while holding a plastic carrier bag above my head.
But it's all about the buzz, right? So the more dangerous it is the bigger the buzz, that wouldn't be too much of an assumption. And those listed below seem, to my mind, some of the most dangerous out there. In wanting to feel alive these people push themselves to the very edge of death. A strange paradox but not completely unfathomable.
1. Wingspan Proximity Flying
This is the most dangerous thing you can do on Earth. Yeah you could swim with sharks while covered in dolphin meat. You could kick a polar bear in the nuts while wearing a seal pup slipper, or you could forget you girlfriend's birthday. But they pale into insignificance when compared with jumping out of a helicopter or off a cliff edge thousands of feet up - dressed in a wing suit that gives the pilot's body the shape of an airfoil, creating lift in the fabric sewn between the legs and arms. Then flying within 10ft of the jagged mountain face daring death to come and get you while poking it in the eye. A young exponent of this called Jeb Corliss could be called the world's most fearless man. Diagnosed with counterphobia - a pathological desire to confront fear - as a child, his greatest achievement was flying down the Matterhorn, one of the highest peaks in the Alps, coming within 7ft of the mountain at speeds in excess of 100mph. So a neutrino's worth of margin for error, then. Invigorating and terrifying to watch, it's pure, authentic, unrivalled craziness.
2. BASE Jumping
This is very similar to wingspan proximity flying - which evolved from BASE jumping when BASE jumping just wasn't cutting it in the danger stakes (go figure?). But it's different because the practitioner just freefalls from a fixed object before opening their parachute, rather than flying or more accurately, gliding. BASE stands for Building Antennas Spans Earth, the various platforms used as a jumping point. It's more dangerous than just normal skydiving because of the lower altitude and has a quite big fatality rate. The British Journal of Sports Medicine reported the overall fatality risk for the year 2002 was estimated at about one per 60 participants.
3. Space Parachuting
On August 16th 1960 Joseph Kittinger, Command Pilot in the United States Air Force, made a high-altitude jump from a height of 102,800ft falling nearly 20 miles to terra firma in around 4mins and 36 seconds. On his way exceeding the speed of sound, setting records for highest parachute jump and longest and fastest freefall. Here is that amazing feat. That's the sort of sport I call extreme, breaking the goddamn sound barrier while freefalling to Earth from space. The record he attained for highest jump is something that champion skydivers like Cheryl Stearns have been trying, unsuccessfully, to break ever since.
4. Ultimate Fighting Championship
A sport dubbed by John McCain as "human cockfighting", but what does he know? That was just the sound of his balls shrinking. These guys fight mean, and while it's more mainstream than when it started out, it's still a championship where fighting styles are mixed like you were baking a cake made from badass. I certainly wouldn't want to go into a caged structure with the current UFC Heavyweight Champion, muscular Marvel-esque monstrosity Brock Lesnar. The only way this sport could become more dangerous is if you told the competitors their wives were seen leaving a hotel with their opponent a few nights back.
5. Bull Riding
We all know this one, rodeo riding, the stuff of legend and what separates the cowboys from the cowmen, or something like that. Dosed up to the wide-brim of their cowboy hats on the finest American beef - no doubt deep-fried on pitch forks in a bucket of oil and pork fat - these guys rodeo ride a large bull and attempt to stay mounted for 8 seconds. Quite easily you could be thrown to the ground like a rag doll and trampled into an oozing fleshy mess. Every instinct in your body would be telling you to run for the hills, screaming wildly, which is why it's been called "the most dangerous 8 seconds in sport", and I wouldn't argue with that. Not only does it take supreme strength but it also takes balls the size of California.
6. Whitewater Rafting
There are varying degrees of danger in this sport. At the lower end it's family holiday territory, but at the higher end it's like battling with an angry river god. At its highest grade, Grade 6, only a maddened fool would attempt it. If you live to tell the tale, a gold statue is built of you 100ft high and you are worshipped like an Aztec king. Even on the lower end of the scale you'll likely to sustain some injuries. What's the matter with a nice relaxing sojourn down the Thames, with Pimms, your favourite pipe and a few beautiful ladies. Hmm?
7. Freestyle Motocross
This action sport sees only the brave fly through the air on a motorbike while performing stunts like pouring a cup of coffee with their foot while completing a crossword. Maybe. It involves backflips, handflips, foot jumps, one-handed hart attacks and all sorts of insanity before attempting to land the bike on two wheels thus avoiding a devastating crash that leaves you in such a state that compared to you Christopher Reeve was "able-bodied". Meaning he could blink.
8. Free-diving
The mind-boggling activity of holding your breath while diving up to and beyond 330ft underwater, unaided by any breathing apparatus. If we were meant to do such things we'd have evolved gills, but let me not trivialise such a dangerous sport. I imagine there was a time when our ancestors used similar techniques, and some still do, to go spearfishing. My own lungs wouldn't stand such depths, if I sip my coffee for too long I begin to drown, emerging spluttering and gasping after too big a gulp.
i like every thing it was the best for sure.
tia smith
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Added: 57 days ago by tiasmith123
