Finally

It’s finally over, the big day has come and gone, and now we can turn our attention to the after-Christmas sales. So long to manufactured Christmas cheer, fuzzy-headed commercial pitches for cars and diamonds and cell phones and sweaters; so long to can’t miss recipes and advice about holiday party etiquette; so long to outrageous expectations and non-stop Christmas music.

Bah, humbug? Perhaps. But when the Christmas “season” kicks off before the candlewax dries in our Halloween pumpkins, and is in full froth by Thanksgiving, fatigue sets in; while Bing Crosby croons and the ads drone, this crooked world spins on, and in my mind’s eye I see photographs of destroyed cities, block after block of shattered buildings, rubble, concrete and steel – Syria and Gaza. As an American it is my imperial right not to care about those war-ravaged places, but I do. The human beings my country kills, directly, by remote-controlled drone strikes, or indirectly, by the avid support the US provides to corrupt regimes like Saudi Arabia and Israel, have stories, histories, desires and dreams. That we don’t care about the details of our victims says more about us than them.

My country has been hijacked by dangerous ideologues.

The drought continues on the Platinum Coast of California where I have lived the majority of my life. It remains to be seen if there will be an El Nino miracle, but even if we receive a deluge of Biblical proportions, the drought isn’t going away.

Neither are astronomical housing prices and rental costs. I should tell my landlord that the refrigerator leaks water and freezes when it should cool, but I dare not get on the radar as a wanking tenant; better to remain quiet and deal with the leak until it becomes catastrophic. My son is home from his first semester away at college. My hair is thinner and grayer. My fourteen-year old daughter, now in high school, is an emotional volcano; she is either the apple of my eye or the pebble in my shoe. My wife constantly misplaces her iPhone.

As another year winds down here on the Balcony, I want to extend a thank you to all the people who read this blog. I remain an unarmed and very average American male, doing my level best to cause as little harm as possible.