The Essential Weirdness of Christmas Music

After some time in the employ of some of America's finest retail clothing establishments, I went off Christmas music. I didn't stop liking it for what it was, but spending 240 hours with it blaring in the background, in the six-week period around Christmas, eliminated my ability to take much joy in it for a few years.

I imagine I otherwise might have gone to a store to buy CDs of Christmas songs, but over-saturation drove the impulse from me, for a couple of seasons. Besides, like any good family member, I spent most Christmases with family. Having my own copy of James Galway flautin' the bejesus out of "O Little Town of Bethlehem" was unnecessary.

So this year, as host of Christmas festivities, I had nowhere to turn when it came to listening to music I had long since come to enjoy again. I turned on the cable box and cued up the "SOUNDS OF THE SEASONS" channel. If you've purchased a digital cable package anywhere in America in the last decade, you know exactly what kind of channel I'm talking about. You also know exactly why the Christmas music I listened to might be plainly weird.

Funeral Post #1

A friend of mine died the other day. She wasn't a very close friend — we started out as antagonists and only moved years later and, it turns out, too late toward unguarded fondness for each other — and naturally it's upsetting that she wasn't and now can't be. I'm not going to the funeral, although I suppose I could.

So far, if pressed, I've explained begging off with the truthful reply that I don't want to introduce myself to her mother and have her mother only remember me as the guy who got in something like an old-fashioned epistolary feud with her daughter where we each accused the other of being an addict and a criminal. But I'd also hate to go there and be confronted by lines of mourners of longer friendship and greater intimacy, and worry that my being sad was a luxury of affect I had not earned, some pose I was enjoying, some voyeuristic grab for the raw and genuine. Although I suppose if that were my motive, writing this is no less emotionally predatory.

Maybe I'm overthinking it. I've never especially understood funerals, beyond what I'd like mine to be: Pogues playing loud enough that people could have intimate conversations where they wouldn't have to worry about "he was a bit of a prick" being overheard, lots of ashtrays and no smoke detectors, Jameson dispensed not too far away from anyone's chair, a sensible abundance of handrails and bannisters for those who'd eventually need them to get around. I've never been able to picture myself lying in a coffin without thinking of at least one friend of mine rushing up to it, not to fling his body across mine in some cold final embrace, but rather to say, "Fuck, I just got here! Sorry, man. No—don't get up." In fact, most of the time my vision of it just descends into ludicrously inappropriate abuse:

First Thing Jesus Ever Said Was, 'Our Father, Who Art in Heaven, Are You My Real Daddy?'

Even though I like Twitter, I have to admit it's mostly useless. You can't really use it to promote your work or network effectively without becoming a soulless whore who follows everyone, courtesy-retweets drivel without a second thought and sucks up to famous people by writing "@[famous person]" for every other comment, regardless of whether it's germane to them in the slightest. As for keeping up with people, probably everyone knows the score by now: for every one friend who makes an effort to be funny or thoughtful, another 50 won't stop talking about every goddamn thing they see or whatever their kid happens to put in his mouth.

So far, Twitter seems to be good for not much more than occasionally exposing islamophobic birther Republican congressmen who will follow anyone who accuses the president of being a foreign terrorist, making lists of absurd things like "Failed NES Games," or telling the world about Hoobastank's malicious insistence to force freedom fighters to ask, "Dear God, what is that man doing to his anus?"

I've found another decent use: wishing everyone a sacrilicious holiday. I've never been one to allow success to happen to me without taking immediate corrective measures, so it's best to immediately sabotage all the goodwill and interest from economist Brad DeLong's "The True Spirit of Christmas" link to us by undermining all those nice Christian sentiments expressed in the first Robert Byrd Death Prayer piece. The only remedy for a sincere and well-meaning invocation of Christian forbearance is a bunch of "you're so fat" jokes choked with references to early Christian heresies and high-church liturgy.

Totally Important Announcements

Just a couple of notices and acknowledgements as we head into the big familial- and travel-related headache that is Christmas. Just as an aside, I wrote at least a third of this while in gridlock in a parking lot just trying to get at a Bed Bath and Beyond. I wasn't there for Christmas value: I just wanted a goddamned meat thermometer so I could cook a roast for Christmas dinner. Anyway:


Feed Stuff:
A couple of people sent in emails complaining about the feed. Apparently about four articles in a row never posted to their RSS or Google Readers. So far as I can tell, nothing is going wrong on this end. I checked back through Feedburner and through this site's settings, then posted a couple of test articles, and everything worked fine. I was going to suspect user error until I ran into some other people complaining about publishing outages on Blogger and strange irregularities in Gmail. Since Feedburner is part of the same family, I figure they were having similar issues.

Naturally, after about two days of looking into this stuff whenever I had a free moment, the people who'd emailed me sent me an update letting me know that all the older articles had suddenly posted to their feed. So I'm going to assume the problem is solved. If it's not, post here or click on my profile and say something. But, going forward, I will just assume that this feed address is working perfectly.