Numbers racket

As a younger man, the transition into a new year seemed somehow significant, a major event of sorts. Friends and I would gather around a TV to watch the ball drop in Times Square; and then, as with any big-deal moment, we’d consummate the celebration by cracking open bottles with swashbuckling pirates etched into the glass, tip back our heads, and awaken hours later in a tangled mess of limbs and confusion: Did I really dance the tango with the neighbor’s dog? Where are my pants? 

 

I’d say you can’t buy memories like that, but calling them “memories” would be misleading. It implies remembering things.

 

Fun at the time, but years later, I’m glad to have left that era behind. Partly, of course, this is due to age; you can’t do that kind of thing forever, at least not without the feeling that your head is filled with burly construction workers, feverishly jackhammering blocks of concrete. Increasingly, though, I find the whole New Year’s phenomenon curiously arbitrary. 

 

I mean, we kind of made the whole thing up.

 

The Gregorian calendar, which most of use, has sort of become the de facto international standard, but it’s basically an invention of the Roman Catholic Church, whose timekeeping ability is only surpassed by its predilection for really pointy hats. Back in the day (1582, to be exact), the robe-enveloped men who ran things were pissed off about Easter, the date of which kept floating around like Keith Richards’ lazy eye after a coke binge. They wanted the holiday, which is tied to the spring equinox, to come about a little more predictably. So they reformed the old Julian calendar. Which itself was a reform of the Roman calendar. Which was based on Greek lunar calendars, which were based on some guy in a toga pointing at the sky and yelling, “Hey look, the moon!” This is all according to Wikipedia, which, as we all know, has never been wrong about anything.

 

As for January being the start of a new year, well, we owe that one to Roman dictator and Shakespearean murder victim Julius Caesar. When he wasn’t busy revolutionizing the salad, he was inventing the Julian calendar, whose months were named after Roman gods. January’s namesake, Janus, was the god of doors and gates, and had two faces, one looking backward and one looking forward, a physical trait envied by algebra teachers the world over. So January, thought Caesar, was a natural fit to kick off the new year, which was typically marked by riotous celebrations and wine-fueled orgies. Nice to know some things never change.

 

All this is to say that our demarcations of time are random, the historical equivalent of a blindfolded child trying to pin the tail on the donkey. That Wednesday marks the start of 2014 – that we even recognize it as 2014 at all – is the result of happenstance. While human beings were building civilizations and devising ways to more precisely define time, the earth was oblivious, spinning on its axis and Tilt-A-Whirling its way around the sun with perfect indifference. We’re still the only species that cares that it’s 4:07 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 27. To the planet, and everything else that lives on it, time is a rhythm, not a number or a name. The sun rises; it sets. Seasons change. For most living things, that’s enough.

 

Not so for we people, with our watches and clocks and Garfield calendars. Humans like to compartmentalize. That’s what timekeeping basically boils down to: dividing our lives and our history into digestible chunks, so we can ascribe to them significance, meaning. As midnight approaches on Tuesday, we’ll be the only ones taking note; while owls and anteaters plod on with their lives sans ceremony, we’ll be wearing goofy plastic 2014 glasses and sipping champagne to the tune of some awful boy band draped in feather boas. We’re weirdos, you and me. Okay, mostly me.

 

I guess when you deconstruct it to that degree, it’s easy to condemn New Year’s celebrations as being superfluous. They mark the passage from one arbitrary number to another, while absolutely nothing of note actually changes, except of course for varying levels of drunkenness. But subdividing an abstract does have one advantage: It allows a person to cut off ties with one era and look to the next with optimism and – is it too corny to say? – hope. I’ve never put a whole lot of stock in New Year’s resolutions; if it’s June and I need to drop five pounds, I’m dropping them in July, not waiting six months. But sometimes people need that dividing line, a looming threshold on which they can fixate, so they may galvanize their will. It’s like a boxer psyching himself up for the big fight, except when all is said and done, most of us won’t be bleeding from the ears and sport a face that looks like a chewed Trident.

 

In other words, it’s sometimes helpful to erase the slate, even if we have to invent the slate in the first place.

 

I still don’t know if I’ll ever truly get it, this fixation on a number, but that’s the way I’ve got it worked out in my head, and it’s fragile. So as 2013 slides into its grave and celebrants toast its successor, I’ll stifle my confusion and go with the flow. It’s all you can really do during this strange period between celebration and living.

 

As the minutes tick away on Tuesday, my only thought will be: Do I still have a 10-year-old bottle of Cuervo stashed in some forgotten cupboard? It’s gotta be around here someplace.

 

Wire the long face?

In mere days – days! – I’ll be sitting on a carpeted living room floor, surrounded by a dizzying kaleidoscope of torn wrapping paper and flung bows, one of which will invariably be stuck atop the head of a confused housecat. Buried beneath this festive camouflage will lie boxes filled with Christmas gifts, and although Santa usually plays his cards close to the chest, at least one of these gifts is bound to be an electronic device of some kind – something that plugs into a wall and probably makes a whirring sound.

Being a man (sort of), I’m genetically programmed to like these things; buried in the male DNA are instructions to drool over shiny things that power to life by flicking, turning, or pressing something. That’s why guys tend to drool over stuff like electric drills and televisions, much the way a puma will drool in sight of a picked-over deer carcass. These analogies may get more disgusting as we go along.

Even though I love loving this crap, these flashy gizmos with their lights and loud noises, what accompanies them is pure evil: The necessary, yet troublesome, scourge of wires. Tangly, knotted, mind-of-their-own electrical wires. They’re the most insidious plague to befall humankind since the mullet.

I keep a junk drawer in the kitchen, right? Just about everyone has one of these; you never know when something around the house will break, and you’ll need to scrounge parts from the old portable cassette player you used in 1986. When I first crammed said drawer with heaps of misfit detritus, I tried to be organized about it. I placed the items in carefully – cell phone charger, can opener, an ancient Game Boy from another life – and coiled the corresponding wires into tight curlicues so pristine they could have passed as modern conceptual art. Like those confusing exhibits you see in which someone places a Burger King wrapper next to a dirty diaper, and claims it’s an exploration of the human soul vis a vis the digestive system.

Such attention with which these items were stored. Such care. Such delicate placement. And what happens when I open the drawer to retrieve a set of AA batteries? It looks like the contents were shelled with heavy artillery. Like the rubber bands flew a tiny plane over my electronic Hiroshima and dropped a big fat A-bomb.

 It’s not just that the wires fall slack with time. Logic would dictate that, even if the coils were to gradually loosen, they would still maintain some semblance of their basic shape, and stay segregated. But no. They’re tangled, twisted, knotted like shoelaces, wrapped up in a bizarre lover’s embrace that can only be undone with time and patience and a crack team of NASA engineers. It takes no effort at all to store these items, but the delicacy of a seasoned heart surgeon to restore them to order.

Only after long, stressful minutes of untangling am I able to recover enough sanity to ask the obvious question: How does this happen?

At first, it seems physically impossible – a mathematical enigma that would blow Stephen Hawkins’ glasses straight off his face. When asked about it, most people invoke theories that conjure the work of mythical creatures, like elves or gnomes. Any rational person would discredit the existence of these fictional beings, hallucinations of Tolkien and Suess and the self-proclaimed Lizard King who lives in the Dumpster near my house. But when you’re dealing with an issue so stupefyingly mysterious, you suspend your disbelief.

It’s easy to see how the scene would unfold: Elf Team Six, comprised of tiny men the size of peach pits, assembles on your kitchen table, having snuck in through the pet door. Buford, the elf with the hairlip and the uncontrollable flaulence, fires his grappling hook toward the uppermost drawer closest to your sink; one end hooks around the brass handle, and other is fastened to the centerpiece that holds the wax candles scented like cougar butts. The elves shimmy their way across this makeshift tightrope, nudge the drawer open, and pounce headfirst into this wire-rich eden. Then they tangle everything, light up cigars, raid your fridge and eat all your cheese.

Bastards! Infidels! Stupid jerks!

But wait. Turns out there’s a scientific, elfless explanation.

See, scientists are nerds, and some of these nerds have developed something they call knot theory. This is real. The math is complex, but according to Cracked – a website dedicated to explaining weird crap – the gist is this: Most of these wires are round in circumference. This means they lack aerodymanics and friction control. Since there are many more configurations in which wires can be tangled than untangled, the laws of physics dictate that a tangled arrangement is much more likely, statistically. So whenever there’s movement – jostling, rumbling, opening and closing – the wires move, unfettered by friction, and seek out one of these more probable tangled arranegements. This is called action-reaction motion physics. That’s why, when a college student tosses her headphones into a backpack and walks across campus to basket weaving class, she pulls them out to find the wires twisted into the kind of knots that could tie a sail to a clipper ship.

Physics! It’s a gas.

With the proliferation of wireless devices, this stands to become less of an issue. But as long as gadgets need to be charged, we won’t purge the world of wires completely – meaning junk drawers like mine will continue to be havens for disarray, confusion, and anarchy.

So when I rip the wrapping paper from my long-awaited Christmas loot, I just might squeal with delight if one of those gifts happens to be tube socks.

Ye Old Internet Shoppe

There’s this love-hate relationship I have with the Internet. On the one hand, it’s drained people’s attention spans like pus from a cyst (sorry, that was gross), and I’m pretty sure I just spent the last 20 minutes in a trance, looking at someone’s random collection of silly and embarrassing wedding photos. On the other hand, I no longer have to leave the house to do my Christmas shopping, which pleases me as both a consumer and a reclusive hermit.

 

Grudgingly, I do have to acknowledge that, yes, there are a handful of benefits to the in-person shopping experience that you miss out on by going the eBay route. No mall excursion would be complete without the honeyed background noise of Johnny Mathis singing about his ring-ting-tingling; that’s always a nice touch, although after a while it just sounds like he’s crooning about a rash. And mall Santas are always fun, unless you’re one of them, in which case there’s a pretty good chance you’ll finish your shift looking like you’ve gone a few rounds with Clubber Lang from “Rocky III.” 

 

I jest, of course; the sights and sounds of the season are among the more compelling reasons to get up off the couch and into the thick of things. (That and walking off Aunt Ethyl’s Thanksgiving pie.) But every year I find it more and more difficult to suck up my courage and walk through those automatic sliding doors. Maybe it’s a function of getting older, but fighting crowds and jostling elbows to get a prime deal on a toaster is less rewarding than it used to be. At their worst, holiday crowds feel like a giant mosh pit at a heavy metal concert, only they’re more violent, and no one seems to be having any fun.

 

Sites like Amazon and NewEgg have become especially attractive now that the holiday shopping season has nearly overshadowed Christmas itself, devouring it with the flesh-hungry fervor of a rabid wildebeast. Black Friday has now given way to Thankless Thursday; rather than settling in with family for an afternoon of gorging on goopy turkey innards, the way Thanksgiving should be, many people now spend that kickoff to the season camped outside big-box stores like they’re waiting to score prime seats for a Springsteen show. Retailers have brazenly ignored the languid vibe of that hoiday in favor of keeping their doors open, presumably because people would rather trounce their neighbors for ten bucks off a TV set, and all in a kind of mad rush that rivals Spain’s annual running of the bulls. In fact, being chased through narrow streets by a bull is less likely to result in injury, since bulls tend not to place much value in the entertainment potential of a discounted Iron Man Blu-Ray.

 

Contrast that with one of my recent online shopping splurges. Here’s the scene: Me in a tattered hoodie bespecked with ketchup stains, butt sinking into a couch cushion, feet up on a makeshift ottoman. Laptop on a table in front of me; steaming cup of herbal tea within arm’s reach. Music playing through the TV, volume low. Mellow lighting. Not a soul in sight. Solitary, peaceful, quiet.

 

Ahhh.

 

That’s what holiday shopping should be like. No garish displays featuring cartoon Santas using Gillette’s latest shaving technology; no long lines at the register, where the cashier has the hollowed-out expression of someone who’s trapped inside a North Korean prison camp. Just me, my debit card, and the strangely disquieting sound of Ted Nugent shredding on a hard rock version of “Deck the Halls.” I didn’t even have to wear pants. (Turns out I did, but it’s nice just to have the option.)

 

It’s hard for me to acknowledge the superiority of the online experience given my antipathy toward technology run amok. Not to sound like an old fuddy duddy, but between wi-fi enabled refrigerators, smartphones that cook waffles and clean your underwear, and Facebook profiles for peoples’ pets, enough is enough. Gadgets and whiz-bang machines are supposedly designed to bring people closer together, but it’s now easier to make eye contact with someone over a Skype connection than it is in person. There are benefits to this – living in a digital world lowers the possibility of randomly running into Pauley Shore – but increasingly, society is a fractured mirror, and the blunt instrument of its damage is inscribed with the Apple insignia. 

 

Only something drastic, like holiday fever, could drive me to seek shelter in a cyber store. I won’t do all my shopping online; once I’ve covered the major purchases, I’ll hit up local shops and mom-and-pop outfits for the odds and ends. Those are usually the best places to find the more unique items, like candles that smell like beaver poop, or wood sculptures of Maine black bears riding tricycles. And unlike the big-box stores, these little nooks in the wall still know the value of an understated Christmas motif: A few tasteful lights, a mellow instrumental holiday album on the stereo, and a manageable traffic flow that avoids human logjams. If that was still the soul of Christmas giving, I’d gladly exchange the hoodie for a reindeer sweater and hit the bricks, seeking those gifts that warm hearts and make eyes sparkle. Maybe someday the tide will turn that way once again.

 

Until then?

 

On eBay, on NewEgg, on Etsy and Bulktix! On Bookswim, on GameFly, on EToys and Netflix! From the guts of my laptop plugged into the wall, I’ve got my free shipping ... so to hell with the mall!

 

TGIT

Thursday’s an awkward day to have a holiday. In some professions, a Thursday holiday translates into a blissful four-day weekend, and if I worked in one of those professions, I’d probably be ranting about something else, like candy cigarettes, or Toronto’s crack-smoking mayor. Another time, perhaps. Another time.

 

The way things are now, last Friday was a regular workday, and workdays that follow straight on the heels of a festive national event never feel quite right. If a holiday is punctuation, then celebrating Thanksgiving on Thursday is like an exclamation point right in the middle of a sentence. It’s a headliner playing before the opening band. It’s weird.

 

Not that I’m complaining about a day off, mind you. Every year, it’s a mind-bending ritual, spending a random weekday in front of a football game, cramming my face with can-shaped cranberry goop, and passing out face-first in a dinner plate caked with congealed gravy. It’s not an experience one typically has in the middle of the week, or, you know, ever. In fact, if it weren’t for Thanksgiving, I might never have discovered the perverse joy of chasing banana bread with gooey pie and a still-dripping turkey heart. Stop me when this starts getting gross.

 

It’s a glutton’s delight, but its placement is curious. Why Thursday? Thanksgiving is a secular holiday – not like Christmas, which is consistently held on the same date each year, one determined by men who probably knew Latin and wore robes that vaguely resembled Snuggies. The placement of Thanksgiving is completely arbitrary, so even if it was settled during an era when the typical two-day weekend had yet to exist, the very nature of its genesis suggests that it could be changed with relatively little effort. Thursday is ingrained as a tradition, granted. But frankly, a lazy three-day stretch of meaningless sports and too-tight belt straps is a tradition I’d be all too ready to embrace, as long as we could still dress our school kids like pilgrims and cartoon turkeys. One of the great joys of a holiday is making children look silly.

 

I’m a curious dude, so I did a little searching, trying to find out why it’s on Thursday in the first place. The answer is less satisfying than I had hoped. Some holidays have clear and simple origins: The signing of the Declaration of Independence gave rise to Independence Day; Easter got started because Christians believe Jesus was all like, “Screw you, death,” and rose from the grave, probably with a pretty mean hangover. These are explainable traditions.

 

Thanksgiving is one of those holidays that got refined over the years, and the further back in time you look, the fuzzier its origin becomes. It’s like trying to read a road sign when it’s a mere speck of dust on the horizon. In 1941, Congress formalized the holiday, which was based on the Thanksgiving-on-Thursday event that had been observed since 1863, which was started by Lincoln, which was based on a national day of thanks established by the first Continental Congress, which killed the cat that ate the rat that lived in the house that Jack built.

 

In other words, no one truly knows how in blazes we ended up with it. (We’re told tales of Native Americans and pilgrims getting along famously during a harsh winter, but c’mon. It smacks of mythology.) I’d take that history with a grain of salt, though, ‘cause I got it from the website of a horse rescue in Massachusetts.

 

If you were around in the days of horse-drawn carriages and unruly hyena beards, then I guess a Thursday Thanksgiving wouldn’t have been that big a deal. The standard Monday through Friday, nine-to-five workweek had yet to be spawned by the industrial revolution, and life moved at a pace that was stately and slow; there was no such thing as hopping in the Volvo and hightailing it from Portland to Providence, arriving at cousin Lemmy’s bungalow in time for the opening kickoff. With the average person’s social radius set at about a mile and a half, you simply put down your spade and pickax, dressed in your best overalls, and cooked a sumptuous bird for your nine brothers and sisters, most of whom probably lived in the auxiliary barn with a bunch of flatulent cows.

 

Arrangements are a bit more complex these days; life moves at a speedier clip. So speedy, in fact, that it’s often difficult to take a moment and do what the holiday suggests we do in the first place: Take stock of the things for which we feel thankful. That’s hard to do with just the single day off, and doubly so if you’ve got to squeeze in a 500-mile round trip, punctuated by a gargantuan meal that could drag a tweaking meth addict into a peaceful slumber. 

 

Thanksgiving’ll probably be on a Thursday until the end of time, which I guess is fine – it’s nice to have some warm holiday time with family no matter what day of the week it is. But that won’t stop me from dreaming of a Friday holiday, and a three-day weekend dominated by excess and intentionally bad food choices.

 

‘Cause then we’d really have something to be thankful for.