It’s Friday morning, the end of the work week for many—though not for me, this week—and it’s also the first full day of Hanukkah.  I won’t post any more pictures of dreidels and so on, but I may still remind my readers daily while the holiday lasts.

It’s not as though the world is politely restrained about the other upcoming major festival, after all.  Though, of course, Hanukkah isn’t really that major a festival in Judaism, compared to things like Passover or Yom Kippur and such.  It’s just become major in competition, if you will, with Christmas, as a children’s holiday.

I don’t have any issue with that.  The more reasons one can find to celebrate with friends and family and encourage joy in the darker days of the year, the better, as far as I can see.  That growth curve might level off and even dip downward eventually as one piles on more and more such reasons for celebration; reality is rarely governed by truly linear equations, after all.  But I don’t think we’re anywhere near the peak of the curve, so have at it.

Today is also the anniversary of what was, in my memory, the most horrifying news event in my young life:  the murder of John Lennon**.

I’ve said it before, the Beatles were my first true religion, in a sense.  I cannot recall ever not knowing almost all of their songs by heart.  I was the youngest of three children, I was born in 1969, and my sister and brother were big fans (for as long as I can remember, anyway, which is of course, not as far back as they can).  So the Beatles were ever-present.

The number two spot in my list of favorite bands has varied over the years—the Police, Pink Floyd, now Radiohead—but the number one position has never been seriously challenged, even as I’ve heard more bands, even as I’ve heard and played more music of all kinds, from “ancient” to modern, from western to middle-eastern and eastern and so on.

Of course, the Beatles have recently had their latest new number one single, Now and Then, which was grown from the root of a recording John had done on a cheap cassette tape*** in the late ‘70s.  I won’t say it’s on a par with In My Life or I Feel Fine or Come Together, but since John Lennon was stolen from us by an insect—as it’s put in Elton John’s song, Hey, Hey, Johnny—it’s what we have, and it’s not bad at all.

Still, it’s terribly sad to think of what the world may have missed.  Not long before he was murdered, John had gotten back into the recording studio after a long hiatus, releasing his album, Double Fantasy.  Who knows what might have happened had he lived?  A true Beatles reunion of some kind or another might have been in the offing, and in any case, it’s almost certain that John Lennon would have created much more music in the four plus decades since 1980.

One often sees memes with clichés about how, if one has left one person’s life better before one dies, then one’s life has been worth living.  Imagine then the massively negative weighting of the life of the person that stole from the world potentially forty years’ worth of John Lennon’s music.  And that suppurating rectal fistula that did it—who, as far as I know, has never contributed anything to anyone, least of all himself—is still alive.

If I found myself responsible for his medical care, I probably would do my duty and care for him to the best of my ability, since a shit-stain such as he would not be worth violating my medical principles.  But goodness, it would be tempting to give him an IV infusion laced with fluid from a campsite outhouse.

I imagine (sorry, that wasn’t intentional, but I’m leaving it in) that John himself would probably counsel against even the notion of revenge.  Then again, in his cautionary song, Revolution 1—the first version, that is, on the “White Album”—he seemed conflicted, singing, “But when you talk about destruction, don’t you know that you can count me out…in.”  That little second thought doesn’t appear in the more rocking single version of the song, but remember, this is the guy who wrote Norwegian Wood, with shades of perhaps not-entirely-figurative arson, and even Run For Your Life, for crying out loud.  Still, I suspect that he would have wanted to be the sort of person who would not wish to seek revenge, even against his own murderer.

Then again, that snotty-faced heap of parrot droppings that killed him also robbed Sean Lennon of years and years with his father, and robbed John of such years with his wife and his children, and all because that endometrial teratoma that had been mistaken for a human child was so pathetic that he wanted to kill celebrities as a way of becoming famous.

Anyway, that’s enough of that.  I remember John Lennon, and enjoy his music, far more often than I indulge in violent fantasies about what to do with the “man” who killed him, and that’s certainly as it should be.  I will listen to some of that music today.  And I will have a peaceful Friday (probably), and I will work tomorrow.  So I will write a post tomorrow.

Until then, have a good day, if you can.

*This refers to the song by Paul Simon, which commemorated the deaths of blues musician Johnny Ace, and of JFK, and of course of John Lennon.

**I consider the murder of an artist such as John Lennon to be much more repulsive and distasteful than, say, the murder of a political figure or instigator of social change, or even a religious figure (depending on the religion).  The latter types of people are, to borrow a phrase from The Godfather, “in the muscle end of the family”.  Artists are creators, sometimes of breathtaking beauty.  To seek out and deliberately kill an artist (without some extraordinarily good reason) is an insult against the very value of joy and beauty and existence itself.

***It’s quite interesting to remember that my brother and sister and I used to make various recordings of various things, also on standard cassette tapes.  Sometimes we sang, sometimes we did little shows, sometimes we recorded the sound of TV shows such as The Incredible Hulk so we could listen to them when going to bed.