I've been asking around, but it seems to me like Christmas did used to be normal-sized when I was a kid. Maybe a soupçon of "the commercialization of Christmas," unless you grew up with my dad whose idea of a Christmas story was this chart that he worked up proving that Jesus was born in July because God wouldn't send the Baby Jesus to freeze to death in a barn. My dad, charts, me, I KNOW. But anyway, it seems like Christmas has steadily grown over the years at a sort of gradual pace that seemed organic and therefore unstoppable. I feel like people always complained about Christmas, but with a sense of there goes the neighborhood and nothing you can do about it. Until Christmas decorations started going up before Halloween, then we realized that we had a monster on our hands that we have to do something about. When Nordstrom sends out a note that their Christmas decorations will not go up until after Thanksgiving, it actually occurs to you to hope that proportion might be restored. That's the moment it feels like we're in, and not just about Christmas.
Hope spurs action, sometimes big actions, but more important to me small actions that we could have been taking all this time and maybe we wouldn't have found ourselves in this situation. Except I think that getting ourselves into situations is basically the human narrative, and when the human narrative finally gets interesting is when we take matters into our own hands. When we make things ourselves, which is why I love derby in a nutshell—it's a DIY sport. Derby kind of is the change that I want to see in the world and that I hope people will keep voting with their dollars for.
A way to make money blogging is to write about things that people can want and things that people can buy, which I'm not that interested in. Because the amount that I actually want or buy isn't enough to generate that kind of content. Blogging more than you actually want and wanting more than you actually buy and buying more than you actually need is just clutter to me. I'm not against blogging or wanting or buying, just against blogging and wanting and buying for feeding the giant maw of consumerism. When you blog or want or buy something, it should be for some purpose. It can be for a purpose like I need four different hat, scarf and glove sets for my four different coats, I need to have a set in every coat pocket and save three minutes of searching and matching every time I go out. I did the math, it adds up to like thirty hours per year!
In fact I'm sharing the same pair of black gloves between my play and pastime outerwear, and I can never find that damn pair of gloves. When I do find them, I don't know where to put them and they end up on the towel shelf in the bathroom. Look I can have brain surgery, or I can buy another pair of gloves. I'm never going to put together a page of this season's cute gloves, I'll show you the pair of gloves I got instead of having brain surgery.
The coolest thing that's going to happen to me next season is that I get my own WCR trading card, which Urban Folk Circuit voted with their dollars for. I was introduced to them by my furious upholdin' wifey T.S. Helliot, and it is a match made in heaven. I mean, right? People making their own stuff, the hottest thing there is. So tomorrow I'm going to their November market at Double Door to vote with my dollars for gloves to go with my WCR Dickie's jacket and for the change I want to see in the world.
