holiday

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The year is dead; long live the year. Whatever.

It’s Tuesday, December 31st, 2024‒New Year’s Eve.  Of course, as I’ve written before, every day is the first day of a new year, in a trivial but nevertheless true way.  The day to mark the new year is an arbitrary choice.  We could have had the new year begin “officially” on the first of any month.  Indeed, we could have started it in the middle of a month, or perhaps on the winter solstice.  Or we could have 12 months of thirty days, leaving a 5 day extra period which we could use as a long holiday and an official new year celebration, with an extra day every leap year.  We could do this around the winter solstice, or even around the summer one, like hobbits do.

Oh, well.  It’s not as though people are going to collectively change, any more than people are going to go back to really celebrating holidays:  with most workplaces closed except for hospitals and police and fire stations and the like, with people spending the holidays with loved ones.  Once one business stays open on those extra days, competitors (direct and indirect ones) will stay open, too, or suffer a disadvantage that may lead them to be more likely to go out of business.

The world of commerce is red in tooth, claw, and debt, so after a while, only those who push every edge they can without getting more negative marginal returns, will dominate.  And that will become the norm.

No one made it happen, no one planned it.  Everyone’s caught in the currents of chaos, but those able to use the flows to their advantage‒chaos surfing, as I call it‒will thrive, at least temporarily, even if they don’t realize why they are succeeding, which they usually don’t.

It’s similar with the workers:  once some small subgroup is willing to eschew holidays and to work longer hours, they will have advantages over other workers, at least as long as working more proves advantageous to them and their workplaces.  Soon, the marketplace of workers will skew toward people being willing to work longer hours in worse conditions, as long as it provides a relative, local advantage.  Those who cannot match this will fall by the wayside, perhaps becoming homeless, getting addicted to drugs, going to jail or prison‒self-destructing directly or indirectly.

This is not a conspiracy by employers or governments or anyone else.  No one is that clever, and they are all beset by their own local pressures and competitions.  Why else would the very wealthy do anything but sit back and eat ice cream until they die (figuratively speaking)?  They are no more happy or satisfied than most other people.

It’s analogous to the situation with trees and forests.  It takes a lot of effort and resources for trees to grow tall.  Why do they do it?  Because other trees do it, and any tree that doesn’t want the sun blocked out had better do the same*.  If all trees could agree somehow to stay short, they could all thrive and get adequate sunlight and nutrition and water and air at a fraction of their usual height and resource usage.

But once one tree grows taller, the arms race begins.  Such is the way of economies and ecologies.  They cannot be planned, they cannot even really be controlled or constrained (at least not without disastrous results).  At best, they can be “herded”.  That’s a metaphorical herding, by the way‒a careful nudging of things to keep the eddies in the phase space currents from driving the system toward deteriorating returns, along whatever axes one may use to measure such things.

None of this happens due to some malicious plot, and it is not generally evil.  This competitive jockeying and self-abnegation while seeking seemingly locally selfish ends, or at least responding to local pressures (internal and external), has led to all the many scientific and technological advances that we have, from improved farming techniques that allow the world to sustain billions, to better healthcare, better sanitation, better transportation, greater safety from the elements, greater understanding of the universe at large…and the sometimes-cesspool that is the world of electronics, computers, smartphones, tablets, and digital interactions.

No, this shit all just happens “on its own”.  Natural selection works in places other than biology, and it is a ruthless, blind, and amoral driver, here in the region of spacetime where increasing entropy is in the stage where that increase leads to local complexity rather than uniformity.

Whether or not the local manifestation of it will last long remains to be seen.  There are many ways for any particular state of a system to be obliterated, or for that system itself to decay and disintegrate.  It requires constant effort to maintain anything like homeostasis and growth, but not just any effort will do.  One must constantly reassess, course correct, look for mistakes from which to learn, adapt to all the new, varying states of the system, or perish.

I don’t know about you, but I’m very unsure that it’s worth it.  In all honesty, I did not want to see 2025, and really, I still don’t.  I want to find the courage just to check out.  There’s very little for me here, and of all the things in the world that frustrate and irritate and disgust me, I’m the worst.

I guess if I write a blog post on Thursday, you’ll know that I am still around to see 2025.  If so, please don’t congratulate me.  It is not a good thing; it’s yet another failure in my long string of them.

Anyway, I hope you all have a Happy New Year.

*I’m anthropomorphizing here, but don’t get confused.  The individual trees don’t get to choose, evolution just favors the tall in this situation, ceteris paribus.

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Candles and tears and songs and memories of the late, great “Johnny Ace”*

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.

johnlennon-RIP without words

*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.