sad santa

The Holiday time has always stirred up melancholic feelings in my old doomer pain-in-the-ass heart, but never more so than now. There's a stubborn desperation in the denial of impending disaster this year which permeates the weary discharge of obligatory customs and traditions, and causes the Christmas music piped over the speakers at Starbuck's to sound very sad indeed.

It seems that nearly everyone except the usual malcontents like myself, from retailers who are barely hanging on to suburban homeowners doing the same, is furiously hoping and praying to get through one more New Year without experiencing some sort of collapse -- bankruptcy, or foreclosure, or losing the job, or the ultimate and inevitable disaster, the U.S. dollar losing its status as the universally recognized standard global currency, which would knock what's left of our money and our economy into a cocked hat.

I would encourage everybody during this anxious and uncertain season to forego the exhausted and moribund seasonal ceremonies except for the family gathering, and to begin to consider ways of living as if the worst disasters had already happened, so as to learn how to deal with less prosperous circumstances as easily and gracefully as possible.