Writer Unboxed

When Black Friday comes
I’ll stand down by the door
Watch they grey men as they dive from the fourteenth floor
When Black Friday comes
I’ll collect everything I’m owed
And before my friends find out I’ll be on the road
- Steely Dan

Submitted for your approval, ladies and gentlemen: the human being as lemming.

Insanity rolls out of the doorways and hallways of plastic suburban America, filling the streets with greed. Scufflers and hustlers will roll you for the silver in your teeth. Scammers will abduct the lollipop from your lovely tot’s mouth.

And some poor, browbeaten, stressed out mother will knock the crap out of you if you even think about taking the last Nintendo Wii off that Best Buy store shelf.

The Christmas season is upon us, gentle people. And we will pay for it in blood.

I’ve been reading a lot of Ginsberg lately. Does it show?

All right, all right, off the pulpit. Truth be told, I know plenty of people who actually look forward to Black Friday. The excitement, people everywhere, the official start of the holiday season, getting up crazy early in the morning to line up in front of a store that opens at 4am …

Notice I said I know plenty of people who dig it. I am not among them. I will stay indoors at my brother’s condo, listen to Miles and Thelonius, and chill.

I probably won’t be doing too much writing over the holiday weekend. Visits with family are the perfect excuse to put down the pen, sit back, and soak up some life.

You know. Life. That stuff you write about?

That said, there is a good stretch of weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas which is ideal for people watching. Last week’s feature at write-your-short-story.com was an exercise in character sketches, based on the idea of plonking yourself down on a bench at the mall and writing about people as they walk by.

There is no better time of year to get out and see what we’re all about. Even complete recluses escape their homes and pound the streets for Christmas shopping (unless, like me, they take care of their entire Christmas list with Amazon). It’s fascinating to watch the dance. Some people will be happy, infused with Christmas spirit, enjoying the one time of year when it seems okay to be happy for no reason.

Others stride out like homicidal robots, eyes flashing with determination. You can almost hear their thoughts: I WILL get that set of Oxford Sleepwear for Horace, or Old Navy will be sorely grieved that I did not.

And everything in between. Kids still grooving on Santa. Older kids bummed because they just found out that there is no Santa. (I personally still believe in Santa.) Even older kids stoked because their parents are getting them Halo 3 and an Xbox 360 Elite. Couples, grooving on each other. Couples, distant, driven further apart by the holiday madness.

And what about you, your personal situation? As writers and record-keepers, we sometimes unintentionally place our own emotional agendas a distant third beneath work, family, more work, the needs of our friends, agents and editors.

And then of course there’s always more work.

But how do you really feel about the whole thing? As responsible reporters, it is our civic duty to take personal inventory now and again. How do I feel about my characters, their dramas, their actions and reactions? Am I freewheeling, spider-spinning, caring only about truth? Or am I courting Year’s Best Fantasy for the fourteenth year in a row?

The obvious answer: read my work. The truth is there. But it isn’t always that simple. We strive for the truth, scream for it and struggle for it. Sometimes, it eludes us.

And sometimes very personal truths simply won’t be revealed until they are observed and reported by someone else.

So what’s Christmas like for you? Do you jump and skip, fill your Florida hallways with tinsel and snowflakes and sprigs of artificial mistletoe? Put a big plastic Santa on your front lawn, lit from the inside, a giant glowing space visitor greeting passersby?

What does it all mean to you? I make no value judgments. I keep my own attitudes to myself (just like Christmas, it happens but once a year, so don’t get used to it). I merely ask the question.

Does the holiday season make you feel differently about yourself? The world? Is Black Friday a symptom of bleak, soulless mass mind overload? Or just a fun frolic for the shopping set?

It’s all relative. It points you in a particular direction. That’s important, see. That’s the direction your writing will take.

The direction you are facing for the coming year.

This is not a political op-ed piece, but you’d be blind not to notice: there’s a lot of bad stuff going on right now. If there was ever need to find empirical proof of evil, here it is. Read a newspaper. Any newspaper.

There are also those who posit that human kind is on the verge of what’s called Whole Theory Evolution – discoveries that inseparably meld science and the spiritual, revelations that will change the way we think about our world forever.

Is there still hope? Joy? Promise of a brilliant future for mankind? A spiritual turning point?

As the artist Moebius asked in those classic 1970’s issues of Heavy Metal magazine: Is Man Good?

Clint Eastwood wants to know if you feel lucky.

Jung wants to remind you that there’s no such thing as luck.

Comments, please.

But maybe this is a lot to take in this time of year. That’s okay. Kick back. Watch the game. Eat some bird. I get a little heavy-handed at times. My wife says it’s the holidays. She says it brings out the Shatner in me. She’s probably right. She is about most things.

Anyway, it’s all there, bubbling out of those people standing in front of FAO Schwartz at three in the morning. Drama. Happiness. Sadness. Madness.

Lots of happy people walking around, but the suicide rates skyrocket around the holidays. For every wide-eyed Cindy Lou Who, there is a gray man standing on a ledge fourteen stories above a very unforgiving pavement.

Soak it up. Take it in. See it all, without reservation. Make sure there are plenty of blank sheets in your notebook and sharpen your pencil.

‘Tis the season.

Image by =kayne.

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