I hereby resolve...

Alright, I guess it’s inevitable. Time to make some resolutions.

It’s been forever since I’ve done this. Years of my life have gone by with nary a resolution made, and for one simple reason -- I’m awesome in every way and can’t be improved upon.

OK, resolution number one: Stop lying about how awesome I am.

The real reason I don’t typically make them is because the whole endeavor seems a bit artificial. The dividing line from one year to the next is arbitrary, a divvying up of time into digestible chunks that’s invented wholly for human convenience. Trees, trucks and snow leopards can’t tell the difference between 2015 and 2016. People follow the calendar because otherwise we wouldn’t know when to show up for work or paint Easter eggs, and we’ve been doing this for so long that when we switch from one year to the next, it feels somehow momentous. We think change is about to happen, when really, change is all there is.

So I stopped making resolutions a long time ago, figuring that if something had to change, I’d just change it, and not wait for Carson Daly and his light-up Times Square ball to give me the green light. Still, sometimes you procrastinate, and items on the to-do list start piling up. For this reason, I’ll grit my teeth -- resolution number two, stop gritting my teeth -- and make a few resolutions. Let the record show that I’m all pouting and childlike.

Resolution number three: Stop being all pouting and childlike.

See why I don’t make them? There’s a hat-trick already, and the engine’s still warming up. Conveniently, though, this does smooth the way for resolution number four: Start eating better. Oh, this is a common one, I know, prompted by holiday binge eating, which in turn is inspired by good cheer and merriment --  to say nothing of the easy availability of four-foot long chocolates shaped like alien probes. It’s perhaps the most common promise that people make to themselves around the turn of the new year, but now it seems especially pressing, considering my belt’s run out of loops and my pants could be used as a tourniquet on the severed limb of a samurai.

Healthy people, you see, consider food to be the body’s fuel; sane, pragmatic options like apples and chicken are eaten to provide nutritional energy, which is then used to power everyday activities, like walking and playing “Gangster’s Paradise” on a banjo. I aspire to this type of approach. Mostly I succeed, since the only edibles I keep in the house are bread, eggs and Cocoa Puffs (for the iron, of course). But then the holidays come around, and my Spartan dining options are supplanted by foods that clog the arteries faster than a woodchuck farts in springtime. Bread is replaced by candy canes, eggs by chocolate Santas, and Cocoa Puffs by actual cocoa. So yes, time to start eating better. And walking farther than the nearest 7-11.

Resolution number five: Stop chewing so much gum. It started innocently; stick a couple Wrigleys in your yapper and it’s like a stress ball for the mouth, an outlet for all kinds of pent-up energy. Plus it makes your breath smell like a spring meadow filled with blooming daffodils (with a faint undercurrent of garlic sauce and whiskey). The habit can easily get out of hand, though. One stick at the beginning was fine, but then the cravings set in -- for two, three sticks at a time. When I hit four sticks I knew something had to be done. With a minimal amount of gum in your mouth, it’s easily concealable and not outrageously offensive, though you probably don’t want to do it during a board meeting or make-out session at the drive-in. With four sticks, it looks like you lost a bet and had to stuff an entire coconut into your jaw.

Speaking of coconuts, resolution number six: Eat more coconuts. For some reason I can’t shake the false notion that I hate them; whenever I eat one -- or, more commonly, taste it somewhere in a candy bar -- I’m always surprised by the fact that I like them. You’d think with all this eating experience I’d have a better handle on what I enjoy, but I’m apparently incapable of learning that I love coconuts, hate hot dogs, and writhe in digestive pain whenever I come within a half-mile radius of any powdered doughnut. If I ever discover a coconut-flavored hot dog doughnut I think my head will explode.

Resolution number seven: Develop a regular flossing habit. I floss in spurts, and when it happens I feel a sense of accomplishment completely out of proportion to what I’m actually doing. My pride rivals that of a physicist unlocking the deep mysteries of dark energy; it’s a pretty harsh comedown to realize I’m just clearing out old popcorn kernels. This of course will cease to be an issue once I switch to an all-coconut diet.

And finally, resolution number eight: Don’t sweat the little things.

That means different things to different people. For me, it means not obsessing over trivial matters, like whether people like me, or tripping over my own feet during the Texas Two-Step. Life is a fleeting moment; it’s shameful to expend energy fretting.

So here’s a final resolution: By this time next year, I shouldn’t have any resolutions at all. With my feet propped on a leather ottoman and a cigar dangling from the corner of my mouth, I’ll look back at the year that was and say, “Well, that’s pretty much the way that should have gone.”

The big comedown

This is always one of the strangest weeks of the year. All this build-up -- the lights, the mistletoe, the endless rounds of rum-laced eggnog -- and then it ends, not with a grand symphonic crescendo but with a whimpering note from a lonely trumpet. Pauly Shore movies have had less disappointing climaxes.

Sometimes you have to wonder if the holidays justify all the preamble.

Not that I’m trying to be a Scrooge or anything. I like Christmas. This time of year it’s pretty much all I can write about, which either makes me lazy or a huge hypocrite, considering my Yule-crazed scribblings are a very part of the build-up I’m criticising. (Let’s be generous and say I’m a lazy hypocrite. Schoolchildren have called me worse names, and more recently than I’d care to admit.)

To get an idea of what I’m talking about, consider the day after Christmas. It tends to be one of the more depressing days of the year. There are no gifts left to give. No cards left to write. The turkeys and yams have all disappeared into our gastrointestinal systems. And if the tree is still up, it suddenly seems like an intruder, an oddity completely out-of-place next to our treadmills and Big Lots couches. Having a tree in your living room after the holidays are over is like smelling an apple pie when you’re already full: Unwanted and inexplicably aggravating.

It shouldn’t be that way, and doesn’t have to be. Nobody gets that feeling after a successful party, for instance. Let’s say Janet Binklebottom plans a birthday party for her best friend, Cathy Crustybritches. It promises to be a pretty extravagant affair, with a clown making balloon animals and a live band ripping through Styx covers while stage smoke blows from the nostrils of a plastic dragon. Fun stuff. Binklebottom sends a notice out to their friends three weeks in advance of the big blowout.

Now Cathy Crustybritches has a choice. She can mark the big event on her calendar and then proceed with her normal day-to-day life, working as a partner at her law firm, Crustybritches, Poopydiapers and Smith. Or she can turn the lead-up to the party into a marathon of colored lights, shopping sprees, gingerbread cookies and special Crustybritches birthday carols.

Option one: She goes to the party, has a great time, and feels awesome the next day. Totally worth the hangover, and wow, did you see that dragon smoke machine?

Option two: She goes to the party, has an okay time, but the next day she’s down in the dumps because there’ll be no more cookies and carols. The fun season is over. Despondent, she quits her job at the law firm and spends the rest of her days making stone tools in a cave in Bangladesh.

OK, so Carol’s a bit melodramatic. I can still understand the feeling.

The old saying goes, “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey,” and there’s some truth to that. December’s typically a fun month because of all the fatty food and general shenanigans, to say nothing of the animatronic snowmen and lawn-gobbling reindeer tableaus. It just ends too suddenly -- a speeding train smashing into a brick wall, an adventure cut short. That day-after-Christmas feeling is a sort of mental whiplash. That’s why some people keep their trees up until February, when the skeletal evergreens are less fa-la-la-la-la and more fire hazard.

That’s why Christmas should last longer.

Not the Christmas season, mind you. That’s plenty long already, starting as it does roughly seven-and-a-half minutes after Independence Day ends. I’m talking about the holiday itself -- the family get-togethers, the movie marathons, the drunken renditions of “Santa Got Run Over by a Reindeer.” The way things are now, the giant build-up comes to a head on a single day, and there’s always this odd pressure to cram in as many festivities as possible to make the whole thing seem worth it. Presumably there are 12 days of Christmas, with seven lords a-leapin’ and six aunts a-belchin’, or however the song goes. So let’s act like it.

Dec. 25 can remain much the way it is. No need to mess with a good thing. After that, though, the whole infrastructure of holiday reverie should be dismantled gradually. On the 26th, the outdoor lights and manger scenes can come down -- Jesus, Mary and Joseph relegated once more to the basement, where they share space with riding lawn mowers and boxes filled with ceramic cats. On the 27th, the stockings come down. On the 28th, you kick Santa off the couch and drive him to the airport in your dented Dodge Dart, where he catches a plane back to the North Pole while quashing his gingerbread-filled stomach with a box of antacid tablets. And so on, until on the last day you finally take down your tree, ornaments and all, to be placed on the sidewalk, where crews bring it out to the transfer station and turn it into No. 2 pencils. This serves the dual purpose of cleansing your home while fulfilling your New Year’s resolution to recycle more. Yay, Earth!

Finally, when all is done, you can concentrate on settling in for a long winter of frozen eyelashes and doubled-up boxer briefs.

When divers surface from ocean depths too quickly, they get decompression sickness -- a.k.a., “the bends.” Next year, let’s avoid the Christmas bends by giving ourselves a gradual comedown. It’s the least we can do to honor the Crustybritches legacy.

Gifted givers

Some people are so easy to shop for they practically do the deed for you. One of my friends is obsessed with the heavy metal group Iron Maiden, and their merchandise is smattered with images of their mascot, Eddie, a zombie with an electrified Doc Brown hairdo and pale gray biceps the size of seal pups. His sneering face adorns clocks, car mats and action figures, which make for great gifts, assuming the giftee is a weirdo with a penchant for the macabre. That’s one item that was checked off my list before Labor Day.

Then there are those who are near impossible to find presents for this time of year. They’re the tricky ones, the ones who keep me on my toes, and I hate that. I’d much rather be off my toes. They get sore.

My father is a prime example of this. When I first started buying Christmas gifts for my folks, I figured he’d be the easy one; a former bar owner, he keeps a room in the house stocked with beer paraphernalia -- mirrors smeared with corporate logos and cardboard cutouts of improbably proportioned women wearing American flag bikinis. It’s a fantastic room. In a more just world it’d be a certified tourist attraction.

Mistakenly, I thought this would make things easy. A few clicks on eBay and I’d simply locate some obscure Budweiser memorabilia, a light-up sign featuring 3-D Clydesdales sipping suds from a keg or something, and boom. Done deal. Onto Uncle Hugh and his bizarre fixation on vintage Playboys.

Here’s the catch: You buy Dad a beer sign or a limited-edition frosted beer mug from scenic Holland, and into the room it goes, never again to be glimpsed by human eyes. Once in a while a new sign or mirror gets hung on the wall -- about every leap year, this happens -- but generally he keeps all his collectibles in a haphazard pile, perhaps anticipating how his belongings would be arranged after an epic flood or end-times earthquake. He calls this pile his retirement savings. He’s retired. And yet he still wears sweatpants until they’re as insubstantial as a layer of pollen. Curious.

With a guy like that, it’s a foolish endeavor to go with the obvious. So you’ve got to get creative.

This is where you turn gift-giving into an art form. It’s one thing to wave the white flag of surrender and buy something boring but practical, like tube socks or a nose hair trimmer. It’s another thing altogether to find that “Wow!” item, a gift that makes them weep like a whip-cracked baby.

The trick to solving this dilemma is to give it the brainpower you’d normally reserve for working out a complex physics equation. You can’t just wing it. Many holiday shoppers simply go to malls or local boutiques and browse the racks until something leaps out at them -- “Oh my gosh, Hubert will totally love this macramé candle holder made with the colors of the Bolivian flag!” This doesn’t always work, though, especially if you’re a selfish schmuck like me. I’ve attempted this method, and usually I just end up drawn to whatever items I’d want to see under my tree. Many a confused relative has walked away with Ninja Turtle beanie hats and video game controllers shaped like Flying V guitars. I don’t get a lot of phone calls.

To make my gifts a little more thoughtful, I started reserving time for brainstorming sessions. The typical one begins with me writing down everything I know about the person in question, even if it has no relevance to any gift I could possibly buy for them: social security number, criminal history, debit card access code, anything I can get my hands on. Then I review what I bought them the previous year so I don’t repeat myself. By the end of the session I’ve got their gift narrowed down to a few possibilities, with my final selection determined by how cheap it is.

At evening’s end, the reasoning goes something like this: OK, Bartleby is a 32 waist, but last year I bought him windpants with a picture of a mushroom cloud on the butt, so that’s irrelevant. He likes hip-hop, but I know less about hip-hop than I do about advanced software engineering, so let’s leave that one alone. He wears a lot of sweaters, but they’re all ugly, and it would be criminal of me to encourage this kind of behavior. Ah, I’ve got it! He’s a drunkard! I’ll just buy him a lot of liquor!

Indeed, when all other ideas fail, just buy people lots of liquor.

This is much the same thought process that people have anyway, just protracted and turned into an ordeal. It gets results, though. Rarely do I get a chance to catch my father off-guard and surprise him with something really nice, but a few years ago, that’s precisely what happened. In scouring the Internet, I tracked down a pair of women in Sabattus who make three-dimensional clay models of people based on photographs; email them a pic, and in a couple of weeks they mail you a small statue the size of an Academy Award. My father’s visage is ripe for this kind of interpretation, what with his shoulder-length hippie hair and a three-foot long triangle beard that could slice through chainmail. When he tore off the wrapping and saw his own sculpted mug staring back at him, he had to fight the tears from welling at the corners of his eyes. Pretty remarkable since he thinks crying is for sick toddlers and literally no one else.

All it took was a little creativity. These hard-to-shop-for family members can be vexing, but they’re also a fun challenge. Meet that challenge, and you’ll have a Christmas you won’t forget.

Now I need to start getting creative with my mother; I’ve already bought her every season of “The Golden Girls” on DVD. Time to start browsing for booze.

TV Guide my sleigh tonight

Maybe you’ve never heard of the old Rankin/Bass television production studio. Nobody could fault you for it. Not only is it not a household name, but it could never become one, seeing as how it sounds like someone’s description of a particularly smelly fish.

But if you’re within a certain age range -- say, between 20 and 80 -- then the good folks at Rankin/Bass have probably made your Christmases a little jinglier. And ring-ting-tinglier, too.

They’re the ones behind a glut of TV specials that have become annual staples, most of them made with stop-motion animation techniques. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town.” The hand-drawn “Frosty the Snowman” (one of my personal favorites). All of these are Rankin/Bass productions, and all have become, to borrow a tired cliche, timeless classics. Airing year after year for decades, they’re as much a part of the fabric of the holiday as roasted chestnuts and discounted Old Navy pants.

These Rankin/Bass people were clearly geniuses. Not calculating-the-density-of-dark-matter geniuses, or inventing-the-Snuggie geniuses, but geniuses nonetheless.

Because what they recognized is this: Television can become tradition.

And tradition, of course, is what Christmas is all about. Consider all the rituals that are resurrected every December. The stockings filled with shaving cream and scratch tickets. Plastic manger scenes gobbling large tracts of lawns, with one toppled wise man eating a faceful of snow. Heavily-ornamented pine trees, eggnog with cinnamon, turkey and Santa and drunk relatives singing “Deck the Halls” in the key of just-shoot-me. These occur with such clockwork regularity you’d think society was suffering from a mass epidemic of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

When TV became ubiquitous in the 20th century, it was uniquely situated to become a part of these wintry shenanigans. It’s a communal activity, after all. Instead of gathering around the fire, families now gather in front of giant flatscreens, rooting for Charlie Brown and his flaccid little tree. It’s nice. It adds to the spirit of the season without requiring us to actually do anything.

In a house in Lewiston, tucked away in a basement next to old snowshoes and sixth-grade science projects, lies a weathered box marked “Christmas specials.” Inside it are moldy VHS tapes packed tight with Christmas cheer. My mother is to thank for this. During the early ’80s, she went through a phase in which she recorded pretty much anything on TV that was worth saving, and more than a few things that weren’t, including old soap operas and at least one production of the Ice Capades. She taped a bunch of Yuletide programming for posterity, perhaps sensing I’d rather spend my snow days watching tube instead of streaking down hills in a sled and picking ice from my nostrils. She was right.

Relatives would frown and fret over the time I spent in front of our weatherbeaten set. “You should be outside with friends, making memories,” bemoaned an aunt. “You can’t make memories in front of a TV.”

Wrong, auntie. I can and did. Older relatives saw my cousin and me watching movies and playing video games and scratched their heads, contrasting our chosen pastimes with their own childhood activities, which likely involved things like eating lead and repairing stagecoaches. It’s understandable that they wanted me to be more grounded in the real world, and I did on occasion chase down real-world pursuits, riding bikes and burning expletives onto wood beams with a magnifying glass. But there were times when the coziness and comfort of the living room beckoned. Winter and the warm tidings of December were prime for this, and I did make memories, without the inconvenience of feeling my toes gradually fall to the temperature of frozen cow carcasses.

A lot of those memories centered around my favorite holiday specials. Sure, I’ve got plenty of fond reminiscences of things that actually happened. Uncle Roger and his acoustic guitar, wailing on “Love Potion No. 9” in the paint-peeling squeals of a burning pig. That’s one. Tugging on a mall Santa’s beard and thinking he was the genuine article, despite the nicotine stains on his mustache. That’s another.

Those only happened once, though. “Rudolph” happens every year; that’s why many of us can quote lines from it by heart. “Didn’t I ever tell you about Bumbles? Bumbles bounce!” Thanks, Yukon Cornelius.

Maybe it’s corny, this infatuation with kids’ specials, but we’re allowed to be a little corny this time of year. That’s why I’m giving these TV specials another go-’round. I can’t watch VHS tapes anymore, since my last working VCR has gone the way of He-Man action figures and slap bracelets, relegated to a musty attic. Technology, however, gives a lot of this ancient programming new life. Many of my childhood favorites are now streaming on video sites, preserved digitally for my viewing enjoyment, and I don’t even have to fast-forward through commercials for Tootsie Pop and My Little Pony. One click, and I’m watching Jon Arbuckle’s grandmother relive past Christmases with housecat Garfield nestled in her lap. Frosty’s innocent exclamation of “Happy Birthday!” is just few keystrokes away, and somewhere, the California Raisins are riffing on funkified carols on an endless loop, from now to eternity.

It’s comforting that they’re all still there, sweetened and made more potent by time. Later in life, Christmas becomes an aggregate of all you’ve seen and experienced, lending it a richness and texture, if you’re lucky.

I used to do the bah-humbug thing. Now I do the Rankin/Bass thing. Call it an homage to their particular brand of genius, but if they can make the holidays a bit brighter, then bring on the reindeer games.

Video vertigo

Television news people are pretty clever. And no, I’m not referring to the yokel-type segments on Bigfoot sightings and dogs so ugly they’re cute.

 

It’s the men and women doing the graphics for those broadcasts who impress me, because they’ve somehow found a way to make viewer-submitted video somewhat watchable. Since the dimensions of these amateur clips rarely match the dimensions of a TV screen, the graphics people have started doing something subtle: filling up the unused part of the screen with either an inoffensive background graphic or a distorted, funhouse-mirror version of the video itself. This latter strategy hems in the actual clip with blurry, hallucinatory  images which provide light and movement without distracting from the central content. It’s great if you’ve been eating tabs of acid for about a month.

 

The preceding paragraph wouldn’t have made a lick of sense 10 years ago. (There’s a chance it still doesn’t; my meds are pretty killer.) These days, though, you can’t flip through the channels for more than five minutes without coming across one of these audience-generated clips, bookended on either side by a graphic artist’s fever dream. It’s a side effect of ubiquitous recording devices – the TV news has appropriated the public as unpaid content providers, and the public, in response, is submitting amateur work. Very amateur work. Work so amateur, much of it can be done by feral chickens with smartphones taped to their heads.

 

The reason these amateur videos don’t fit the TV screen properly is simple. People hold their phones the wrong way.

 

You don’t have to be watching TV to see this happen. Anyone with a Facebook account – meaning everyone except a handful of villagers in Zimbabwe – can see these videos eating up their computer and smartphone screens like flesh-eating bacteria. What happens is that Aunt Maude, sitting peacefully on a rocking chair on her back porch, spots a nearby squirrel juggling acorns in his front paws and banging his head in rhythm to the blast-beats of Slayer’s “Raining Blood.” Maude thinks, “Wait’ll my friends back in Tupelo get a load of this!” She whips out her phone to take video, but because she’s in a hurry, she holds it right-side up. Instead of being shot in a normal, sensible widescreen, the video looks like it was shot through a coffin-shaped keyhole, an off-looking vertical orientation that causes more headaches than the snare drum of a high school marching band.

 

This vertical format does nothing good for the framing. The squirrel is a small blip down at the bottom, barely discernible. Meanwhile, the upper two-thirds of the video consists mainly of power lines and a billboard advertising see-through thermal underwear.

 

Now granted, I’m not a smartphone user. Maybe I’m a Luddite, but I consider them to be an evil technology; though they offer convenience in the form of Internet access and instant photos of genitalia, they sap attention spans and addict their users to hyper-connectedness and “virtual” culture. Until the past couple of years, I resignedly accepted that. It annoyed me to constantly see peoples’ faces lit by the glow of their mobile devices, but as I was not one of them, I let it roll off my back.

 

I can’t do that anymore. Phones are now content-generating machines, and a lot of that content ends up on websites and TV shows. I was surfing through channels a couple of months ago and stumbled across “America’s Funniest Videos,” a show I didn’t know still existed. They were showing a themed clip package – kitten mishaps, adorable – and amidst of a crop of regular videos, there it was, a vertical job that effectively utilized about 15 percent of my available screen space. A cat was jumping off a kitchen counter and landing awkwardly in his water dish. Because of the video’s top-to-bottom aspect ratio, I got a lovely view of peach-colored ceiling tiles, and a spot of water damage just to the left of the refrigerator. Great framing, bub. Spielberg is weeping into an Indiana Jones hat.

 

Sometimes I wonder what will happen after humans go extinct – whether there’ll be any advanced species from our cosmic neighborhood combing through the detritus we’ve left behind. They may not be able to understand our texts, written in alien tongues. But our digital files, including our smartphone videos, are encoded in a binary format – that simple on/off language which should be easily readable by any star-surfing explorers. So let’s envision a hypothetical. Let’s say Poobuns, a humanoid creature from the planet Dyspepsia, touches down on Earth in the year 4872. One of the first things Poobuns encounters upon landing is an ancient smartphone, buried under the rubble of the Early 21st Century Heritage Museum in Hackensack, New Jersey. After puzzling over it for some time, Poobuns figures out how to connect the old phone to a power source and, amazingly, it still works. Since it operates via touchscreen, and Poobuns has 12 fingers on each hand, it’s only a short while before he’s swiping through photos of smiling children and curly fry baskets from Applebee’s.

 

Then he comes across a video. He’s disoriented at first because, like a human Earthling, he’s got two eyes horizontally arranged on his face; his eyesight, therefore, is panoramic in nature, and his instinct is to view the video left-to-right, lengthwise. Poobuns then figures out his mistake and turns the phone on its side.

 

“Why,” he wonders, “would you frame a video in such a manner if your eyesight is naturally panoramic? Judging from this species’ movie projectors and TV screens, that’s how everything else is shot. All you’d have to do is rotate this device a mere 90 degrees. Silly creatures. No wonder they’re extinct.”

 

Bemused, Poobuns tosses the device over one shoulder, where it lands atop a pile of debris, still playing this digital home movie. The rocket boosters on Poobuns’ alien ship drowns out the noise of a raucous Slayer tune issuing from the smartphone’s tinny speakers, and on the screen, a squirrel juggles nuts – banging his little head in the smoldering wasteland of eternity.