Life As An Office

The Horrors--"Still Life" (mp3)

One of the many ways that I have ended up wasting hours of "down time" during the first days of this Christmas break has been watching episodes of The Office.

It's so easy. On Netflix, as played through the Wii, as soon as one 22-minute episode is finished, we simply click on the next one and keep going and keep going and keep going. It's like crack, or, as Ryan on the show says, "I love how people who have never done crack compare everything to crack." So maybe it isn't like crack. Maybe it's more like inertia--it's far easier to watch one more episode than it is to get up and do anything else, so there's always that one more. Until we got to the end, and then we had to face our loss.

I'm not even kidding. I started out, all those years ago, as an Office snob. Big surprise. Yeah, I was one of those who experienced The Office first through the original British version created by Ricky Gervais. For years, I refused even glance at the American version. "The British version is superior, " I would pronounce, without proof. Then Netflix happened and soon I was "cracking" my way through one episode after another of the first season on my computer (the TV hookup was a year away at that time).

Some 150 episodes later, it's very easy for me to pronounce the American version as by far the superior reasons, for the very reasons that undermine the original:

1. The characters are endearing.
2. The characters are endearing.
3. The characters are endearing.

While the British version was like cringing at an accidental stumbling upon a bad wreck that you don't want to see but that you can't turn away from, the American version, perhaps simply because it has been around so long, turns these walking disasters into people that I can't help but care about. If that violates the original comic conception, so what?

What happens instead is that as longtime viewers connect with the characters, the characters become more and more real. Based on the last couple of days, I would say that this quality really shines when one watches many episodes or seasons back to back. Sure, some of the characters are static and somewhat one dimensional, but the main characters develop all kinds of nuances over the course of hours.

There's one episode in particular that haunts me with its illumination of reality. In it, Michael and co. are being repeatedly bested by a rival salesman (Timothy Olyphant), so they attempt first to outsell him, second to spy on him, and, finally, to hire him for their company, Dunder-Mifflin.

What intrigues me so much is what happens when Michael Scott hires him. The people who work at the office, including the salesmen who are losing sales to him, are outraged. To attempt to win them over, Michael asks this question: "How do you want your life to be? Better? Worse? Or the same?"

Naturally, he assumes that they will say "better." Naturally, he is wrong. Almost in unison, when asked if they want their lives to be better, worse, or the same, they respond, "The same."

The same. That one answer, that one episode, whacks me like Maxwell's silver hammer. "Oh, my God," I think, "these aren't just caricatures, these aren't just characters being played for comedy. These are real people. These are me and the people I work with and the mass of men." And that is powerfully painful. The ways that ambition is either overarching or underwhelming, the inability of all of us to get beyond ourselves, the petty rivalries and slights and infighting--all are too real.

(And do any of us really want to see a "rival salesman" or any other outsider have to come in and rescue us?)

Saddled with a narcississtic boss, a dysfunctional workplace, a dead-end job and a local living and working world where things happen for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with fairness or logic or hard work, people would rather that things stay as they are than risk a change that appears it would make things better. With very few exceptions, that is my office, your office, and The Office.

The powerful impact of The Office is, at best, bittersweet. While I would not hesistate to give the show the label "comic genius" and while I can just as easily not count the number of times that the show has made me laugh until there were tears in my eyes, the show has also forced me to recognize that the lives it depicts, the ways that it reflects my life are hard to acknowledge as true. There are some mirrors that I don't necessarily want to look into.

Western State of Mind

Helplessness Blues - Fleet Foxes (mp3)
Wild West Hero - Electric Light Orchestra (mp3)

“He squatted before a slight body. ‘This one here can’t be more than sixteen, I’d say. Well, he should have known better than to travel with such hotheads.’” -- Charlie Sisters, commenting in the aftermath of killing a small group of riders.

Charlie and Eli Sisters are hired killers in the Wild West. They are the protagonists, or anti-heroes, or main characters, in Patrick deWitt’s novel The Sisters Brothers. The book follows these two men on a journey to their next deadly assignment, a road trip story with horses and pistols.

It is literally impossible to read this book and not think of the Coen Brothers’ adaptation of True Grit, as both juggle the intermingling of the absurd and amusing with the harsh and unforgiving. Having just left the pseudo-medieval-fantasy realm of A Game of Thrones -- a gun-metal grey land wherein lies little hope, and wherein that smidgen of hope is doomed to be treated like a sissy in maximum security prison -- the Wild West feels technicolor giddy.

Name a Western-themed movie or TV show from the past decade, and odds are I've watched it, and odds are that I like it much more than the average viewer.

A frontier without laws. Normal people -- sometimes families, sometimes small groups of men -- venturing out into uncharted land, or into territory unfamiliar to them, hoping for the best or just desperate for better. A struggle for meaning and connection when nature, and often most of humanity, seems indifferent.

Everyone in these tales seems to posses a level of self-reliance we can’t even begin to grasp in our 21st-Century world. Their need for self-reliance is an assumption, because the ones who don’t fail to live very long. We think self-reliance is using Google Maps rather than stopping to ask for directions.

Above all, the lawlessness of the Wild West is ultimately what makes everything so compelling.

In the America of 2011, we are drowning in laws. This isn’t a judgment or a criticism. Beyond a minor neglect of our roadway’s speed limits, I am a staunchly and predictably law-abiding citizen who feels guilty even stealing music from the Internet. So I support our laws and sympathize with those charged with upholding and enforcing them.

But...

Our every move and decision seems to be tracked or observed by someone, often by an authority figure. The actions that aren’t tracked, we record for ourselves and then post them to Facebook for everyone to see.

If, as the saying goes, “Character is what you do when no one is watching,” then modern Americans have ever-fewer opportunities to discover our character. The Wild West is the closest thing we get, as a backdrop, to a complete control of our character. Most of what happens in Westerns is witnessed only by one or two people, and often most of the witnesses wind up dead.

Us modern folk spend 90% of our lives being watched. If there’s a single way I believe teenagers of today “have it worse than we did,” it’s in this: they are infinitely more supervised, policed, guarded. Maybe that’s why so many of them fly off the deep end and go wild when they finally escape the imaginary camera eye, the judgmental supervision of their provincial existences.

And maybe many of us adults do the same stupid self-destructive things for the same reasons. Many of us feel like the overprotected preacher’s daughter whose life is so controlled and locked down that her only escape is through wildly irresponsible explosions. Rebellion as an almost instinctive Tourette's tic. (NOTE: If you think I’m projecting my own issues outward, so be it. I’d originally written this all in first-person but thought it too narcissistic.)

In the Wild West -- be it the fictional imagined version or the real one -- a man had time to think about shit. Time to decide what kind of character he wished to be, time to determine what kind of light or darkness he wished to project onto the world, time to reflect and mull by the fire on the open range, the soundtrack of coyotes and owls in the background.

Most people in Westerns are virtuous and good, even when no one is watching, even when they are not governed by The Laws Of (sexist) Man. Inevitably, however, even the good people encounter the bad ones, and the drama almost always involves how far good people can or will go when stuck in the path of evil.

Ultimately, more often than not, the best Westerns are about redemption. The greatest heroes almost always have dark secrets, checkered pasts, burdened souls and bear a compulsion to set things right, to make things better, to see justice done.

The freedom to form character, for better or worse, in an environment hungry for those desperate for redemption. This is why I love them.

Oh I wish I was a Wild West Hero...

Santa Claus Vs. The Moms

Blues Magoos--"Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" (mp3)

At first glance, second glance, third glance, fourth glance, and fifth glance, I found the Best Buy ad campaign to be distasteful. If you have turned on a TV in the last three weeks, there is no way that you haven't seen it. In each of the commercials, the Mom of the family gets the better of Santa Claus by buying gifts that her family really wants, while Santa shows up planning to drop off the same stock gifts as always (cologne for Dad, etc.).

What makes the ads so irritating is the sort of "Game on, Santa" attitude that each of the moms has. She is always waiting for Santa to show up, almost ambushing him, with a smug, gloating expression on her face and an aggressiveness that leads her to infringe on Santa's turf in a number of different ways--pointing to her superior gifts, eating or drinking the snacks that have been left for him, etc.

Who needs you, Santa? is the basic message of the ads. She can do better simply by going to Best Buy.

The ads make me feel sorry for Santa, and I had to figure out why. Is it because he's a respected icon beyond reproach (what does he get out of being Santa Claus?)? Is it because he's an old man and it looks like he's being picked on? Is it because the ads make him look like he is out-of-touch and no longer essential? Is it because he's a man?

For the last 120 years or so, we've been living under a particular paradigm: man in red comes down chimney and delivers presents to everyone (I think it started as toys for children) as a symbol of kindness, goodness, and generosity. Regardless of who was actually buying the presents or where they were actually coming from, their presence was attributed to this universal (at least in Western civilization), larger-than-life, magical being who only appeared once a year and then returned to some unknown place (which is probably why a North Pole was need as the center of toy-making operations). A wizened, white benefactor from beyond our imagining.

Imagine if you're not a man. Imagine you're not white. Imagine you've busted your ass to put a bunch of things you can't afford under a tree because because society demands it or, more likely, you can't stand to disappoint your children that deeply.

You might want to stick it to Santa. Or you might not want whitey in your house. You might be so tired of yet another circumstance where an old, white male comes to the rescue, where he knows your own children (and husband or wife) better than you do, where he takes control of an important moment and decides for you.

I've started to see those commercials as the Moms finally striking back against Santa Claus in a way that is not necessarily bad or wrong. Santa isn't a benevolent figure. Santa is "the man."

Now, I have no belief at all that Best Buy is pushing this underlying social agenda that I've probably created out of thin air. If they were, Santa wouldn't be getting his comeuppance from Mom outshopping him. She wouldn't be boasting to him using gifts that cost far more than what he was bringing into the house. Nor would she be saddled with all of the shopping, because we all know that, in reality, she works. Or did.

I hope she's not getting that shit, lowbrow diamond from Zales from hubby, 'cause that thang ain't much.

Still, I've gotten a kick out of the "rise of the planet of the Moms" that is taking place in a number of commercials this season. Think also of the Wal-Mart commercial where the Mom gets everything on her Christmas shopping list the first time around.

More power to ya, babe. Though not intended, this recognition of your triumph has been a long time coming and is well-deserved. Anyone who is not noticing the increasing power of women in our society in every way is not paying attention. When my students haul out their tired, stereotypical comments about the role of women or the way that their marriages will go, I just laugh. There's nothing more ironic than thinking that you're in control when you're not. Right, Santa?

A List of Thanks

Sly and the Family Stone--"Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" (mp3)

One of the yearly columns that used to annoy me the most back in the old Chattanooga News-Free Press before the two papers merged was this guy's piece around Thanksgiving or Christmas that consisted of nothing more than a tedious list of all of the things that he was thankful for. So, of course, I'm going to steal the idea.

Ready?

1. I am thankful for the Italian rosemary ham at Costco.

2. I am thankful for my wife's explorations into veganism and how it forced me to adapt my cooking.

3. I am thankful for Neil Young's example.

4. I am thankful for the firepit in my back yard.

5. I am thankful for people who rise to the occasion when I am "beating the bushes;" I hope that I do and will do the same.

6. I am thankful for the Pittsburgh Steelers.

7. I am thankful for my younger daughter's social intelligence, my older daughter's vision.

8. I am thankful for the hope that a garden brings every spring.

9. I am thankful for friends that push me.

10. I am thankful for President Eisenhower's interstates.

11. I am thankful for foreign students.

12. I am thankful for Emily Dickinson's poetry, which makes the world new with each reading.

13. I am thankful for dreams that scold me.

14. I am thankful for a new kitchen.

15. I am thankful for Bob, who made me get a guitar 36 years ago and for Jeff, who makes me play it now.

16. I am thankful for the salad at Lupi's, the onion rings at Ankar's, the Eggs in a Basket at Cracker Barrel, the bologna sliders at Urban Stacks, the nachos at Taco Roc, the chicken at Champy's, the Sonoma Chicken wrap at Greenlife and all of the other go-to food in this city.

17. I am thankful for community service, which did not exist when I was in high school and which has now largely transcended its usefulness on a college application.

18. I am thankful that I did not follow my major and pursue a business career.

19. I am thankful for the companionship of my dog.

20. I am thankful for Monday Night Football gatherings.

21. I am thankful for Garden and Gun magazine, which continues to present our South in its best light.

22. I am thankful for the Ebonys, Big Star, The Weepies, Rilo Kiley, Calexico, Frightened Rabbit, Meaghan Smith, and The Walkmen for surprising, stunning additions to the Christmas song canon. And, of course, Sufjan.

23. I am thankful for my father's wisdom, even when I don't agree.

24. I am thankful for this blog and how it keeps Billy and me searching. And that people actually read it.

25. I am thankful for the influences that New Orleans has had on my life; America would be stale and pale without it.

26. I am thankful for Bud's Thursday nights and how they help to maintain friendship.

27. I am thankful for the Walnut Street Walking Bridge.

28. I am thankful for my daughters' colleges and how fortunate both girls were to find such good fits.

29. I am thankful to have so much Bruce Springsteen and Led Zeppelin on the soundtrack in my head.

30. I am thankful to know how to bake bread.

31. I am thankful for live music, how it is always worth the effort; even when I don't make the effort, I know that I have missed something.

32. I am thankful when I am not intolerant.

33. I am thankful for a job that requires me to reread books I like and to discover new ones.

34. I am thankful for the iPhone. It has become my timer, my reminder, my GPS, my computer, my network, my Kindle, my Netflix, at times, my lunch companion.

35. I am thankful for Linda's Produce, for its figs and tomatoes and red peppers and Christmas trees.

36. I am thankful for Barber's Adagio For Strings and the many settings it is perfect for.

37. I am thankful for Christmas Eve and all of the ways it is better than Christmas.

38. I am thankful for the quirky behavior of cats.

39. I am thankful that Paul McCartney met John Lennon; neither would have or did flourish without the other. I am thankful that, even now, George Harrison continues to reveal new listening pleasures to me.

40. I am thankful for the hours from 5PM to midnight, the second life after work.

41. I am thankful that Americans never stop investigating what they don't believe.

42. I am thankful that my wife found a church.

43. I am thankful each barbeque joint, each region of barbeque can do it so differently, can take the basics of meat and smoke and transform it in wonderful, different ways.

44. I am thankful for the ways that holidays energize life.

45. I am thankful to live in a city that has the finest fresh apple cider that I have ever tasted.

46. I am thankful for the anchor of my wife and daughters.

47. I am thankful for students with ideas; they are my work's blood.

48. I am thankful for the solitude of my backyard in the early morning.

49. I am thankful for how what I think I believe is always put to the test of experience, and how the smallest events and things can carry such meaning.

50. I am thankful for pretzels.


I'm finished for now. When you make a list like this, it's what you leave out that gets you in trouble, so I'll add that I'm thankful for everything else, too.

Lost and Found

Rich Robinson--"Lost and Found" (mp3)

I am sitting in my basement with my Ipod on shuffle, listening to a mix of 431 Christmas songs, a full 24 hours of Christmas tunes, if I so desired. The problem is that it isn't my current Ipod, or even the one I owned before that. It's a cast-off Ipod that one of my daughters bequeathed me when she opened a perfectly-packaged new Ipod three or four years ago.

The other problem is that the Ipod in question's screen is a Rorschach blot in the shape of an oak leaf. No words will ever appear on this screen again, as all of the ink, or whatever it is, has pooled into the above shape in the lower right corner.

The only way to use the Ipod is to connect it to a computer and run it off that computer's Itunes. The other other problem is that the computer in question is a cast-off computer from my daughter's last 6 years at private school. It doesn't work without a power cord; I have no idea where the battery is. And, for some reason, it defrags itself every other night or so, wiping out anything that I have attempted to store on it.

Currently, I sit trapped between the power cord on my left and the adaptor plugged into the headphone jack and running to the Bose sound system on my right. It's quite a set-up.

Most of the Christmas songs I have ever owned are on this Ipod and can only be played this way. It is nice to have them, but I know full well that their time on this Earth is completely dependent on a portable machine whose ticker could go at any second. I only found the Ipod recently, as it was stacked in the pile of lost (but is there still a chance they might work someday?) Ipods in some dark corner of our house renovation last spring and summer. So I have the songs, but I don't. Most of their parent CDs are nowhere that I know of; most of the individual files I picked up here and there exist nowhere else.

Yesterday, the hard drive on my school computer crashed. All of the music files that were on the computer are gone. Much of the email. In addition to that, all of my Word documents are gone. By my estimation, I have lost some 15 years of words.

It's an interesting prospect to ponder. The first thing you realize is that you have no idea what you have lost because you had no idea what you had. You just kept saving it.

Then you start to focus on the "highlights," those pieces that you do know that you wanted that were stored on that computer. I know that I was supposed to back all of it up, but I didn't. Over the past three or four years, my problems with the computer centered on it getting too full, so my focus has always been on the quick fixes that would get things off of it. My maintenance of my computer involved looking for things to delete so that it could operate at a decent speed. So, yeah, I am stupid.

Anyway, the highlights, for me, were a cookbook I wrote for my 50th birthday, a variety of stories and poems in various states of disrepair, a play that was still waiting for its final act. I had hundreds of college recommendations that I had written and that were no longer of particular use, and probably thousands of handouts, essay prompts, quizzes, worksheets, exam topics, tests and the other daily papers of decades of teaching English classes.

You probably think that I am morose. For whatever reason, I am not. Early in the renovation process of our house, I dragged a file cabinet outside and went through four drawers of paper that represented my earliest years of teaching before the computer was so central to creation and storage. I threw at least 95% of that stuff away, and didn't give it a second thought. I had no nostalgia for it--I am now teaching different books and I am now a different teacher.

I remember when my friend Steve retired a few years ago and basically gave everything away or threw everything else out. Though I was kind of shocked at the time, I feel pretty much the same way now. My old schoolwork probably does not merit a saving for posterity. Whatever good ideas there were have probably been passed on orally, the same way others' good ideas have been passed on to me. The other stuff, whether missteps or unrecognized genius at the time, can disappear safely into posterity. Someone else will either figure the same thing out or will figure out something better.

What I do miss from today's word holocaust are the things that I had written. The loss of those, like the taking of a photograph for some natives, feels like I have lost a bit of my soul that cannot be regained. Unlike the other teaching selves that I freely abandon, I am always interested in my previous writing selves, just in case there was something there that I didn't notice at the time.

Oh, this digital world is a strange world, one in which we don't own anything, even though we think that we do, even though we think that our "possessions" are as safe as those we keep in drawers and cabinets. It is a world where what we do own, we do not always own on terms that are easy for us. The music, for example, may be ours to listen to, but not ours to share. In the very next few years, all of this will change even more. My daughter declared today that if I had Spotify, I would not need anything else. But that is not true. Not yet. What I need is the ability to hold onto what is important to me and to cast off what no longer matters. I feel that power slipping away.

Wanted: Dance Chaperones

And We Danced - Hooters (mp3)
Get Low - Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz (mp3)

Wanted: High School Dance Chaperones

Must be on staff of school. Must be willing to stand and watch teenagers dance for extended periods of time, including girls age 15-18 in ridiculously tight-fitting dresses, but finding the scene neither arousing nor disgusting, but rather merely just what teenagers do these days. Especially teenagers with overly-permissive parents who apparently don’t mind their daughters looking like expensive escorts from Thailand or some poor section of what used to be Russia.

Must be willing to say the following to teenagers jacked up on hormones:

• “Please stop grinding” up to 20 times, knowing full well they will go back to grinding as soon as you are more than five feet removed from their presence
• “Please consider returning your skimpy dress down to its intended location, thus covering your backside and preventing your thong from being seen by others”
• “No I was not looking at your girlfriend’s bare ass”
• “OK yes, I was looking at her ass, but only because it’s my job. And because you were showing it to me and everyone else and even using your hands to point to where I should apparently be looking. And I’m asking you to remedy the situation so that I may no longer have the free show”
• “No I do not enjoy this job. I needed the Christmas money because I’m a teacher, you little prick”
• “Yes, when you’re in college, you can fellate yourself in the main quad for all I care, and you can have group orgies disguised as a dance in your frat basement, but this dance is organized and sponsored by an educational not-for-profit institution, and we are in some small way responsible for your behavior while at this event”
• “No, we’re not violating your fucking privacy. You have no privacy on a dance floor”
• “No, the $30 you paid for you and your date does not purchse you the right to do whatever you like while you’re here”
• “Yes, it is our business. Now please cover up your girlfriend’s breasts so that I can go back to looking you in the eye when we’re talking”
• “And say no to drugs”

If you are capable of saying these things to sometimes large teenage males and their dates -- young innocent flowers who certainly have no responsibility whatsoever in these acts because they almost never say anything in protest or anger but merely shrug and return to their grinding activities -- please apply as soon as possible. We’re running short on adults willing to do this job.

Sincerely,
the School Administration

Yes, this was inspired by my weekend. I again chaperoned one of our dances. And all reasonable minds seem to agree that, as high school dances nationwide go, ours is relatively tame. (Then again, so was the tiger that mauled Sigfried's pal Roy.)

At the end of the dance, we all decided the grinding at this year’s event was less disturbing and less all-encompassing than it had been at last year’s event. However, considering a ban was enacted on grinding at dances, and considering that decision was made by and demanded by people who were nowhere to be found chaperoning this event, I found myself getting angrier the farther I get from the experience.

One of the boys, an absolutely great kid who danced in completely appropriate ways the entire evening -- hell, he even actually talked to and looked his date in the eyes -- told me, “I really don’t see how anything we do out here is your business. I know you’re all claiming to look out for us, but I think it’s pretty clear we can take care of ourselves, and all you’re doing is proving to these guys that you’re out of touch.”

His honesty was painful, refreshing, and downright infuriating the farther I get from it. His generation is more sexually responsible and no more slutty than any recent previous generation, from what I've read on the subject. So maybe he has a point. But he's also rubbing my face in it. Literally. And I'm not getting paid enough to have his point rubbed in my face, not by a longshot.

No matter. His point won't scare me away. I’ll be attending every single dance I can when my daughters hit high school. They’ll get their friggin’ dance floor privacy when they move far far away to college.

A Tale of Two Christmas Songs

Ramsey Lewis--"Here Comes Santa Claus" (mp3)

"I hate "Here Comes Santa Claus," my daughter said yesterday. "It's the worst Christmas song. It's so lazy."

You know how it goes:

Here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus
Right down Santa Claus Lane
Vixen and Blitzen and all his reindeer
Pullin' on the reins, etc.

Not even knowing that the song was written by Gene Autrey, the singing cowboy, I immediately rose to the song's defense. "I like it," I said, "it's the only song that connects Santa Claus and Christianity."

Can you think of another one?

"Here Comes Santa Claus" makes a Christian connection to Santa Claus throughout its verses, with lines like "Hang your stockings and say your prayers/'Cause Santa Claus comes tonight" and "Santa Claus knows we're all God's children/That makes everything right" and the one that I remembered immediately when my daughter criticized the song, "Let's give thanks to the Lord above/That Santa Claus comes tonight."

Autry boldly goes where other Christmas songs don't do--they're either religious or secular.

"Here Comes Santa Claus" reminds us of that sometimes-forgotten need to create religions that human beings, as a species, have. It reminds us that the more "modern" religions are, of course, going to draw on some of the characteristics and stories of the older one and try to blend them into something coherent. Jesus and the Easter Bunny. Grendel and Cain and Satan. Most of the time, we like to think that, yeah, we're basically done with religion, that all of the good ones have already been created, but even something as annoying as the primary campaign of Mitt Romney tells us that, much as we may not like it, we will have to confront religions that are "too new." Maybe not this time around, but soon.

Meanwhile, "Here Comes Santa Claus" slips innocuously into our consciousnesses each year and posits God as the power behind the red-clothed man slipping down chimneys. I kind of like that. Just as Cotton Mather spoke of the "unseen world," many of us in this modern, over-analyzed, supposedly-quantified world still hunger for the mystery of things. It probably explains why my friends' children have such a hard time letting go of that elf. For all the talk of Santa, they never really see much tangible evidence (parents gobbling down cookies and carrots aside), but the elf who moves and gets in trouble and responds, well, maybe, just maybe, there's a chance. As with the other cosmic unknowns we hope might be true.

**********

For as much Christmas music as I listen to, there is only one song that can actually move me to tears, or at least to misty eyes. Oh, there are many that I respond, remembering nostalgically my childhood or my deceased mother or my lost youth, there are ones that make me wistful, contemplative, even worshipful. But only one stirs my emotions so much that I tear up.

The surprising thing is that the song is "Fairytale of New York" by the Pogues, with Kristy MacColl.

Set in a New York jail, in a "drunk tank," it's a kind of flashback/reminiscence/update of a relationship between a man and a woman who started out their relationship with such hope and ended up, well, in a drunk tank. When they talk of how they first met and kissed, their language is positive and romantic, when they ponder their current state, they are downright hateful as they trade insults back and forth:

You're a bum
You're a punk
You're an old slut on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed
You scumbag, you maggot
You cheap lousy faggot
Happy Christmas your arse
I pray God it's our last

Hardly the stuff to make people weep, eh? Perhaps as much as anything, it's the melody that gets me, especially the soaring part where the "boys from the NYPD choir still [sing] 'Galway Bay'/And the bells are ringin' out for Christmas Day." But I don't think so, though I do love that part. There's something sweet about the song, something that has both parties acknowledging that the American Dream didn't quite come true and that they've seen the worst that each has to offer to the other, but they still haven't quite given up.

The song says that the birth on Christmas offers a chance for rebirth for the rest of us, and the song, for all of its vulgarity, hammers that point home. It's a reminder of failure and defeat, disappointment and despair. But somehow that also makes it a celebration of a special day, a day of hope against hope. And I'll always cry for hope.



This post is dedicated to the memory of the late, great Kristy MacColl.