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12/30/2023 10:20 pm  #21


Re: The New American Christmas Apocalypse

These last pendulous seasons have come to their inevitable inertia.  Much of the past year was wasted on frittering over this petty little film that I had absolutely nothing to do with.  Despite that, it still proved a drain on all of my distracted resources, anxities and confidences.  The film of Donkey did receive a soft release early in December, to not much reception.  It was pretty funny early on to see some enthusiasm among that particular kind of critic who genuinely has no idea what they're talking about.  They vaguely sense something different perhaps, about this film based on a more-or-less obscure book that they may have heard something about on twitter once upon a time.  These mildly amused reviews soon fell out of favor, though, as the wiser critics began pointing out the obvious.  At this point, within just a couple of weeks, the acceptance of the folly is taken for granted.  Even Matt Damon is sheepishly deferential - "I dunno, they told me to put on the elf puppet..."

Obviously, I don't take offense at bad ideas that weren't my own.  But I also feel adamant not to feel defeated by this unfortunate brush of success.  After all, it's preferable to the previous complete absence of success.  Better or worse, it's been more than I could have asked for.  Something from nothing.  And what a delightfully perverse turn of events in any measure.  My half-hearted book turned into a half-baked motion picture, and I have the luxury of placing all of the blame for its failure on everyone else.  Perhaps it's not all so unfortunate after all.  At worst, I'm barely back where I started.

Back home in this somewhat anonymous midsized American suburb.  Another Christmas this weekend, but not much inspiration or joy.  I call up my old buddy, Steve.  Good old Steve.  Everyone needs a Steve.  He hasn't changed too much, which is refreshing in a way that I wouldn't even cast judgment.  I mean, we're both older now, but in many ways we still shift easily into our well-worn nostalgic personas.  I appreciate that we're comfortable with our lack of adult evolution.  And anyways, I'm not in the mood to audit my malformed maturity.  I just need something comfortable and familiar, and none of this strange and alienating ever-mutating modernity still as relentlessly refered to as it is inscrutably discerned as 'pop culture'.  I've made my peace with the fact that the designation was always bullshit, regardless.

Naturally, Steve wants to go see Donkey, which does ignite not so much a sense of flattery but morbid curiosity.  Hell, why not?  Maybe it'll bring this sclerotic Christmas spirit full circle.  I admit that I've always been determined to have to witness this fiasco eventually, on my own terms, and this seems like an appropriate opportunity.  Me and Steve, trusty moral support, having a laugh at one of those water-closet screens, likely the only audience for this already-forgotten and not-very-seasonal offering.  As I suspected, the film has already exited most of the local theaters, and will only be available at the massive 30-screen multiplex located directly in the heart of the mammoth moloch-furnace Mega-Mall that serves as the communal commercial consecration center of the approximately defined civilized sprawl.  And, as I suspected, Donkey is playing in one of the back screens.  The pros and cons are clear.  One advantage of these structures is that they do have restaurants with spirit bars, and maybe a smaller screen will afford more discrete indulgences.

The disadvantage, however, is equally inescapable.  On this Christmas weekend, this place, christened as it is with the benign Birken Knoll Mall, would be an incorrigible orgy of gluttonous avarice and lust-sweat.  Faces upon folds of flooded fleshy affronts.  The sheer greed will steam every possible river of golden and silver vapor.  It is enough to make me pause at the magnitude of the practical undertaking, but, brave be the fools, I have the courage of chaotic momentum.  My underestimation is evident almost immediately, as I realize I have to walk some couple hundred yards of parking lot before I can even enter this behemoth.  And it's only now occurring to me the difficulty that I'll have to somehow find my Steve in all of this stress.  Texting, I see he's running a little late.  I'm optimistic.  I'd like to catch the later showing anyway, hopefully after this deluge of demented baggage-dodgers have dissipated a bit.  Let me please find one of these fine restaurants with an accommodating spirit bar so I can sit and think and pray and serve as a steady beacon for my arriving companion.
 


 

12/30/2023 11:47 pm  #22


Re: The New American Christmas Apocalypse

My opinion of the stale Christmas season has not necessarily improved in the years since my last visit to my family home.  There's still a pallid, shallow facade across all of these decorations and celebrations.  Everything just seems cheaper by the year.  Worse, it seems that this cheapening is deliberate.  Layers and layers of the rich, glossy, and yeah probably lead-inflected glows from the bulbs of yesteryear, yestergreen as they were, are increasingly mere flakes of glittered detritus.  But all of that typical denigration is too pathetic to entertain.  I'm not actually feeling very miserable at the moment, even in this environment guaranteed to maximize my irritation.  I'm sitting at the edge of some interior establishment called Findley's, at their bar, sipping a vanilla cream bourbon, and watching, surprisingly enjoying, the faces of the young children, and understanding that whatever mythical magic of Christmas is still there, here, despite whatever we're all compelled to do to screw it up.  The problem has always been the parents, never the kids.  Parents just use the kids to blame their failures, and Christmas is the season of bribing that blame.  But then again, I never had kids.  It's a lot of responsibility to allow all of these little versions of yourself to run around.  And you think they're yours.  And they're not.  They're worse.  They're yet another distance away from all of the earlier misunderstandings of the brood.

Ah, finally, Steve arrives, eager as ever.  I tell myself to not joke about his ponytail. 

S: "Hey, man.  You got a movie!  This is going to be great!"

J: "Yeah, I don't really have anything to do with it.  It got made, so there's that."

S: "Fuck, yeah.  Goddamn acorn, dude."

J: "I appreciate it", tipping my beer chaser to cheer my companion.

S: "We have time to eat, right?"

J: "Sure, we got a couple of hours."

S: "You know that white fructose shit?  They finally got an investigation on that.  I got stuff you need to read.  Fucks with your brain."

J: "How exactly does that work?"

S: "So...it's like a sugar, but it starts to, uh, promote myelin proteins...."

J: "C'mon, man."

S: "No, no, no really.  It starts to cause, like, brain plaque, you know?"

J: "I don't know."

S: "So your brain cells start to plaque and your nerve cells start to plaque and eventually you descend into dementia and hallucinations.  And...get this....that's what the Elves are!"

J: "Hallucinations?"

S: "Right, but specifically they call them..."

J: "Who calls them?"

S: "Doctors."

J: "Mm-mm"

S: "Lilliputian hallucinations, like the little people in Gulliver's Travels."

J: "...Who aren't real"

S: "Right, but the thing is that they think they're real."

J: "The Lilliputians?"

S: "No, the people seeing the elves.  The elves are a medically defined form of hallucination associated with the myelin protein plaque caused by eating white fructose."

J: "Jesus Christ"

S: "Exactly."

J: "White Fructose has been causing people to see these supposed elves?"

S: "Well, little people, call them elves if you want, it doesn't matter."

J: "And people are protesting the elves?"

Steve leans in, "They think it's a government thing."

J: "Government elves?"

S: "I mean, that's the surface!  The real question is who's responsible for the white fructose?  Is that a government thing?"

J: "Have you considered that maybe people are just crazy?"

S: "EXACTLY!!!!  And what's driving us crazy?"

J (patiently): "I hear what you're saying.  I just don't know if it's the...candy that's the problem."

S: "I'm telling you, just look at what I've got to show you later about it.  It'll all make a lot more sense in the context and the research.  The science is there!!!"

J: "Alright, I'm not...against reading the science.  It's just...I just want to try and relax, you know?"

S: "Absolutely!  I'm sorry I'm coming in hot, but this is the fresh information."

J: "I appreciate it."

S: "Let's have a good time.  Dude, you made a fucking movie!"

J: "I didn't....We'll see."

S: "Hell yeah! I like this attitude!  This is so sur-reeeel!!!!  You want some acid?"
 


     Thread Starter
 

1/15/2024 12:51 am  #23


Re: The New American Christmas Apocalypse

(OK, I'm really going to try to end this.)

Nothing is more desperate in such a glistening fashion than scenes from an American mall on Christmas.  Why are these people even here?  I want to point out that the evening after Christmas celebrations should be best spent at a warm home with family and loved ones, but of course that would undermine the whole reason why I happen to be here tonight, which is to watch the film of my tale of why I don't have a warm family home to spend this Christmas.  How much of my sour lens is my internalized disappointments and how much is simply objectively observing the dregs of these pale consumer illusions.  I would like to believe that as a kid, I would have been somewhat aware of this communal pantomime where we gather in mutual celebration of a TV commercial that never actually existed.  Or maybe not.

Me and Steve, or Steve and I, wander down the bright chaotic lights of sparkling store after store to get to our venue.  Plenty of eager people rushing through, making their way to the more popular attractions of the IMAX. the arcades, whatever 3D Zoo movie happens to be out.  I start to appreciate the flop of "my" movie, hoping to finally slim down into a comfortable water-closet screen, away from the maddening crowd.  It's a suitable solace for my flash of success.  Standing in line, Steve keeps talking.  I'm sometimes listening.  Elves and infantilization, the broader agenda of turning Americans into loyal, grateful mouths.  I don't disagree.  I'm not exactly convinced of the tactics.  Steve turns to Marcuse, always enlightening mall conversation, our manufactured needs and desires, our prison of acquisitions, the ultimate planned obsolescence of human experience, making way for the endless industry of simulation.  Christmas is both an abyss, the endless solstice night, and a candle in the darkness.

I had deferred the LSD, by the way.  No, these streams of insight were merely the symptoms of the social saturation associated with these temples of expense.  Eventually, me and Steve manage to navigate ourselves into one of those lost hallways where our film awaited.  Surprisingly, there were a few other people there in attendence, looking similarly forboding and broody, like survivors of their own private hoaxes.  They seemed just as annoyed at us, for ruining what was presumed to be a more solitary viewing.  Oh well.  We're here together now.  Despite the small screen, the theater still has stadium seating, which gives the room kind of a feel of a missle silo or something.  A little too vertical.  Steve does pass me a vape though, and I have no reason to reject the offer now.  These things are quite odd though, with no sensation of smoke and a dubiously delayed high, it also feels like a cheap simulation of past ritual.

The detachment is welcome.  The layers of distance accumulating from memory to fiction to all of these people I've never even met is a deliriously alienating experience, but I wouldn't say it's not recommended.  The problem that's becoming increasingly intrusive is that the theater next to ours, which is playing the latest of The Taut and The Turgid installments, is exploding all around, and making our more modest soundtrack difficult to decipher.  Steve keeps nudging me, "What was that you said?"  "Why did you do that?"  "I don't know what you're talking about here."  OK, I say.  I'll go and see if I can get someone to care enough to maybe turn up the volume.  Wandering around, asking for a manager, I'm eventually led into an office with a distracted middle-aged woman who greets me with "What?"

"I'm sorry, the sound in theater, um, 17, I believe, is not very loud."

"Is that a problem?"

"Well, yes, because the theater next to us is very loud."

"TnT6?"

"Right, the Turgid thing.  It's just...It's hard to hear the dialogue."

"What do you expect me to do about that?"

"Um, maybe, can we turn up the volume in our theater?"

"We?"

"Yeah, you, or whoever's in..."

"Who else are you talking to?"

"Whichever employee in the projection..."

"I'm going to need you to stop yelling at me."

"I, uh, Ok."

"Why didn't you just buy tickets to see Taut and Turgid anyway?"

"It didn't..."

"I love those movies."

"Sure, I just would like to be able to hear the movie I did buy a ticket to see."

"Are you being a problem right now?"

"I don't think so."

"Oh, you don't think so?"


After getting escorted out of the movie theater multiplex, me and Steve find ourselves sitting by a small fountain in an American mall rendition of a cupola covered enclosure which malls like to call "courtyards".  There's a part of my brain that is excited by the anecdotal potential of being thrown out of the film adaptation of my book on Christmas from a fairly anonymous American mall theater.  But there's another part that's deeply perturbed.  Steve's going on about 'fascists'.  That's fine.  But for some reason, this air of hostility seems to be not confined to our little bench in this make-shift retail grotto.  There's something else, a malicious energy which seems to be sweeping around the contours of the establishment.  It's hard to pin down.  My ambient senses are drawn to faint, distant disruptions, wrestling with my more immediate irritation.  I start to look at Steve accusingly, hoping he didn't slyly dose me.  No, there does seem to be an aggressive germ, a cortisol consternation.  It's not just us.  Looking around people appear to be increasingly distraught and aggreived.  "I think we should leave."

Nearest exit.  We wade out into a supposed vestibule, but, insanely, the parking lot on the other side of the glass doors appears to be a painting on brick.  Unfortunately, I'm not familiar enough with this mall to know much about its blueprints.  We cross back to the fountain, heading to a foyer, but again the exteriors seem to be part of the decor.  And we're not the only ones beginning to panic now.  Shouts and screams start to shiver from spaces both far and wide.  Steve grabs my arm, "Jesus!  Look!"  He points to an advertisment screen near the escalator which informs us, presumably merrily, that this mall was inaugurating its brand new state-of-the-art white fructose air filtration system.  "It's in the vents!!!", Steve cries. 

At this point some young man began shooting an AR-15, and we reflexively duck for cover under some fake ficuses.  "He's trying to kill the elves!", someone shouts from somewhere.  As me and Steve try to crawl our way to a side door, possibly a loading platform for the nearby department store, we find a woman who's somehow been tied to the railings of a metal detector.  "The ELVES!!!", she screams.  Steve looks at me with a surgeon's scrutiny, "You don't see them?"  I do not.

But then what I do see is all too stranger.  I see Matt Damon.  With that goddamn hand-puppet.  And Brian Cox.  And that director whose name I never learned.  And I see Mom and Dad.  Clear as the night is long.  Who the fuck are these people?  A whole group of them, wearing their matching sweaters.  Have they had surgery?  I'm following them closer now, and this is definitely them.  But their hair seems...whiter?  Brighter!  Their eyes dilated or possibly more bulbous.  I hear Steve behind me somewhere, "They've got them all!!!"  But I'm focused on following this crew, being very fastly and shiftily shuttled through the carnage, their opulent eyes searching warily and nervously toward their destination.  I follow them all the way back to the multiplex, where they're hurriedly ushered in.  I watch them file into the back hallways and into the theater showing Donkey.  Now some of the theater attendents try to accost me, but I'm determined with sharp elbows.  I holler out, "MOM!  DAD!"  They both jerk their heads directly at me, as if I scared them.  "WAIT!"  I charge on, but the crowd is thick and these sweater crew stooges start to restrain me.  I push on past the auditorium doors, and I'm amazed to see that the theater is now full of these sweater, bright-haired egg-eyed bastards, and they're strapped into their seats while some kind of electric fume is whipping through the air.  And as they're dragging me out, I see on the screen something that I'm absolutely sure was not in my book, an elfish incarnation of Robin Williams as Santa Claus.  Handedly discarded, thrown from the auditorium, the doors shut with what now looks like steel reinforcements.  Soon enough, any sound I could manage to register from inside was now drowned out by the cacophony outside, in the halls of this mall's seasonal abomination.

Still reeling, confused, irrationally agitated, I walk out among the mass demolition, unconcerned about the rabid fever of those congregants surrounding me.  But I do find that fountain.  And I find squatting there with two skewers from a nearby hibachi kiosk, Steve, perversely stoic.  "I don't know what the fuck", is all I could muster in the moment.  Steve looks at me with a deep sobriety, and says, "It's not the elves.  It's the kobolds."  I'm not sure I even care anymore.

We're then startled by a profound rumble, and me and Steve cower defensively against whatever unseen destruction is cast upon us next.  This seismic disruption continues for many seconds and it truly feels as if this is how it ends.  Looking over at the multiplex lobby, I see it start to fills with sulphuric smoke, billowing through the grates.  A raucus roar and a steamy breeze later, we both look up through the glass ceiling of the cupola, and in real awe which renders one dumb, watched as the auditorium rocket showing the film adaptation of the fictional book of the worst curse of my life lift and levitate up into the sky, into the stars until it became like unto a candle in the night.
 


     Thread Starter
 

1/15/2024 1:16 am  #24


Re: The New American Christmas Apocalypse


     Thread Starter
 

1/23/2024 3:27 am  #25


Re: The New American Christmas Apocalypse

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