[powered by orphans]

Hunting

October 20, 2008 - 7pm

Something occurred to me the other day that seems very strange.

Imagine you’re riding with a friend on a country road, when suddenly a fox appears in the middle of the road. The driver has plenty of time to safely hit the brakes, but doesn’t. The fox sees the oncoming car and tries to get to the shoulder, but your friend swerves to intentionally run over and kill it. You’d think your “friend” was a psycho, right?

How is that appreciably different from hunting?

I’ve never met anyone who goes out hunting because he’s hungry and needs a deer to feed his family. Likewise with killing a rabbit for a pair of gloves. There’s nothing you can get hunting that you can’t buy faster, easier, and cheaper somewhere else: typically, in ways that don’t involve things like synthetic urine, heart attacks in the middle of nowhere, and hundreds or thousands of dollars in clothing and equipment.

What it boils down to is that that these people go out into the forest and kill things because they just… really like to kill things. Doesn’t that seem a tad–I don’t know–sociopathic? At least in my hypothetical situation, your friend driving didn’t go out with the explicit intention of killing something.

I don’t have a problem with hunting. If someone wants to get up before dawn so they can sit in a tree, balance a rifle across their knees, and drink a beer, great. Have fun with that. But every time I find out someone I know is a hunter, I’m forced to wonder what it is that they find pleasurable about killing animals, and why that behavior is still considered normal.

Christmas Time! The Best Four Goddamn Months of the Year!

October 16, 2008 - 4pm

Well, it’s that time of year again.

Shut up. Yes it is. Been in a Walgreens lately? There are already shelves full of wrapping paper lining the tops of the aisles. How about a Jo-Ann Fabrics? They’ve got ornaments for sale. I’ve even heard the odd “holiday” radio commercial here and there. And if you read The Consumerist, you’ll know there are a number of stores that already have displays up.

Here’s the thing: I hate Christmas. A lot. More and more with each passing year.

It wasn’t always this way: when I was a little kid, it was the best day of the year. I loved it. As I grew up, it stopped being an awesome holiday where I got tons of loot and saw my favorite relatives. When I was a kid, every single family Christmas was at my grandparents’ house. After they became too old to host the event, then died, it began rotating to various relatives’ houses. It never felt the same and Christmas lost most of its magic.

Later, in college and for a few years after, I worked in retail, the belly of the slavering, wallet-sucking beast. At one store, we began receiving Christmas merchandise in August. If we were lucky, the Christmas carols on the PA didn’t start until the Friday after Thanksgiving. Most of the time we weren’t, and they started a week or two beforehand. If there’s a better way to make someone loathe Christmas music–making him listen to it for eight hours a day, day after day, week after week–it would have to be akin to the treatment scene in A Clockwork Orange. While you’d think that Christmas carols would stop on December 26, you would be wrong. Very wrong. One year at Kmart, they continued well into the middle of January.

Over the years, Christmas stopped being a magical time and became a sickening national orgy of consumerism. It became a burden, with every retailer shouting: “Buy shit you can’t afford, then give it to someone who may not even want it!” “You don’t love your family if you don’t buy them shit!” “Sure, you bought shit for your family and a couple friends, but did you remember to buy shit for your teacher or boss? How about your neighbors? The mailman? The dangerous-looking bum that always glares at you on the bus sure looks like he could use a new jacket!”

Fuck.

Even if I was materialistic, which I’m not, I wouldn’t like the holiday. I’m so impossible to shop for that I don’t even know what to buy myself. I was given a $200 gift card for Amazon.com for my three-year anniversary at work, and I haven’t used a penny of it. That was two months ago. As a result of being so difficult to shop for, I end up with a lot of well-meaning stuff I don’t want. Merry Christmas, I got you a shirt you don’t like and can’t return! My drawers and closet are full of shirts and jeans from my mom that have never been worn. I feel guilty about getting rid of them and wasting her money, so they just sit there year after year. Happy Holidays, here’s a box of warm, woolen guilt! Hold it up. Does it fit?

On the flip side, I enjoy giving gifts, but only ones that I think people will actually enjoy and use. My family is just as hard to shop for as I am. My parents have three cars (one is a Corvette), a boat, and an ATV. My dad has a full woodworking shop, my mom has a full sewing room. If there’s anything that they want, they already have it. My sister is equally difficult. There’s no joy in giving a gift, then awkwardly pointing out that the gift receipt is tucked inside the box, because, you know, in case you don’t like it or something.

The most ridiculous part of all is that I celebrate this stupid, made-up holiday in the first place. If it wouldn’t disappoint my parents, I’d dispense with all the extraneous trappings of the season: the tree, the presents, the garish light displays, the Jesus, and just use it as a day to spend with my family. (Not the food, though. God, do I love the spread every Christmas.) My mom loves to buy me things, I think because it’s a tangible way for her to show her love. My dad is the same way–when I was a kid, Christmas day was just about the only time he seemed genuinely happy. Like me, he struggles with depression.

I’m also not looking forward to the next four months of incessant reminders of a religion I take no stock in. Those of you who still believe the reason for the season isn’t money, imagine you walk into the mall, and every store is filled wall-to-wall with dreidels and menorahs. Vendors are hawking latkes from every mid-mall cart, and Klezmer music is blaring from every low-fidelity thirty-year-old speaker. What’s more, the Chanukah Zombie is in the middle of the food court with all the good little Jewish boys and girls. Imagine that this goes on for months at a time, and that every commercial break on every TV and radio station is filled with constant reminders to buy, Buy, BUY! BUY SHIT FOR THIS HOLIDAY THAT HAS NO MEANING TO YOU! In between the commercials, imagine that there are very special episodes of all your favorite shows where everything is going wrong and Homer isn’t going to make it home for the lighting of the menorah but oh wait everything is fine because a miracle happened, happy holidays everyone.

It’s enough to make me choke the first person I see wearing a red and green sweater.

As the Holiday Season fervor whips into a frenzy over the next few months, I’m going to get grit my teeth and snarl every time I hear a happy Christmas tune, see a poorly-done light display, or receive another Holiday savings flyer in the mail. I want it to be done yesterday. Quietly.

Religulous

October 13, 2008 - 4pm

[For those of you who have been playing along at home, I've said a few times here that I'm a Buddhist. I've drifted away from that over the last few years.]

Megan and I went to go see Bill Maher’s new documentary Religulous yesterday. I use the term “documentary” loosely here–it’s a documentary in the same vein as any of Michael Moore’s work.  His viewpoint is clearly expressed, and anyone who disagrees with him is shown at their worst, mocked, and their words twisted–assuming they’re allowed to speak at all.

I consider myself to be an agnostic. I don’t like the connotations that come along with the word “atheist,” since to my mind it conjures the same sort of dogmatic certainties that exist within religion itself. It’s too easy to say “there is no God” or “there is a God.” They’re opposite sides of the same coin. If you’re willing to go to either extreme–and be absolutely certain of it, despite any evidence to the contrary–I find that to be frightening. If someone is able to show to me that God/Allah/Osiris/Quetzalcoatl is real, fine. I’m willing to accept the possibility that I’m wrong. But to believe anything so blindly as to refuse to take into account contradictory evidence is a sad thing to me. It means that the intellect has been completely defeated by dogma–that the person has shut down their capacity for rational thought and replaced it with what they believe to be the Truth.

That said, Bill Maher found ways to mock the interviewees he disagrees with, splice footage to remove any context from their remarks, and generally prove himself to be a self-important jackass. Even as someone who agrees with the major points of his movie–religion has no place in government; it enforces hatred and bigotry; it’s been hijacked for use as a club and a checkbook by corrupt leaders, it’s ludicrous gibberish–he lost me.  If you’re preaching to the choir and lose the crowd, you really need to work on your sermon.

In a related matter, I’ve found out that I react to people speaking in tongues exactly the same as I would to someone with running sores on their face: with barely-restrained, polite horror and revulsion.

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