Getting the Goat
Well, they got the goat.
Couldn’t see that one coming a mile away, eh? And it happened just as the webcams were knocked offline by a denial of service attack so there’s no evidence. Convenient, eh?
It was inevitable, I suppose, just as inevitable as the arrival of the hoards of tourists in midtown Manhattan yesterday. I left my office last night and there they were, thousands of slow-walkers, picture-takers and kid-toters. Giant Christmas lights! On Sixth Avenue! (Sorry, they probably call it “Avenue of the Americas” like the tourist guides say). “Garsh maw, we needs a pitcher of dat one!” echoes in fifty different languages through the freezing wind, bouncing and skipping across frigid concrete and stuttering cars.
The older one gets the more one realizes that certain events are inevitable at this time of year. The burning of straw goats in Sweden is just another one of those. The bundled tourist masses are another. Self-mythologizing is still another. Self-delusion abounds at the turn of the year. The days start to get longer once again and as an arbitrary benchmark is passed at midnight on December 31 people convince themselves that this year is going to be different. This is the year when they’re finally going to (insert unattainable goal here). Yep, “(insert year here) is the year when I’m finally going to (insert pipe dream here)” is what is said millions upon millions of times at this time of year in every language imaginable.
Of course what gives one hope is that a small sliver of those promises are kept each year. Some people actually do change their lives or reach their goal. Some years the goat doesn’t burn. It’s rare but it happens. For most of us it won’t, but we have to pretend it will, fooling ourselves the same way we fool everyone else to get by. What choice is there? To hope is human, and the absence of hope leads to dire consequences. It makes one wonder who, if anyone, constructed a system (for lack of a better word) where in order to survive a creature must fool itself. What quirk of evolution made that our fate, or if you prefer what Supreme Being decided that this must be so?
Oh, I ask a lot of questions for a poorly-educated middle class middle aged man shuffling through the first decade of the Twenty-First Century. That, my friends, is my own cycle. It is my own inevitable ritual at this time of year, the biggest holiday we have that is concerned with marking the passage of time. I celebrate it now because I made it through another cycle. Not everyone does. It seems that every year I know more people who don’t make it from pole to pole, from January to December, through an entire circuit of the sun. The biggest fan of this stupid little site of mine didn’t make it as a matter of fact. The one guy who kept encouraging me even when I was bereft of ideas (which in case nobody has noticed is most of the time despite the four hundred and whatever entries I have inflicted on the poor, innocent Internet). The guy who inspired me to keep tabs on the mundane aspects of everyday life that most people overlook that he found somehow amusing and enlightening. He once said that he imagined me on the Staten Island ferry looking over the rim of a can of beer at the characters around me, chuckling and getting it all down for posterity. That was one of the nicest ways I have ever been portrayed in my life. Now I like to imagine him in a better place, hopefully still able to see what I’m doing here and taking some pleasure from it. Is that hope or self-delusion? Whatever it is, it’s all I have. It’s all any of us have, so use it up now because we have reached that point in the cycle again. Happy new year.
Couldn’t see that one coming a mile away, eh? And it happened just as the webcams were knocked offline by a denial of service attack so there’s no evidence. Convenient, eh?
It was inevitable, I suppose, just as inevitable as the arrival of the hoards of tourists in midtown Manhattan yesterday. I left my office last night and there they were, thousands of slow-walkers, picture-takers and kid-toters. Giant Christmas lights! On Sixth Avenue! (Sorry, they probably call it “Avenue of the Americas” like the tourist guides say). “Garsh maw, we needs a pitcher of dat one!” echoes in fifty different languages through the freezing wind, bouncing and skipping across frigid concrete and stuttering cars.
The older one gets the more one realizes that certain events are inevitable at this time of year. The burning of straw goats in Sweden is just another one of those. The bundled tourist masses are another. Self-mythologizing is still another. Self-delusion abounds at the turn of the year. The days start to get longer once again and as an arbitrary benchmark is passed at midnight on December 31 people convince themselves that this year is going to be different. This is the year when they’re finally going to (insert unattainable goal here). Yep, “(insert year here) is the year when I’m finally going to (insert pipe dream here)” is what is said millions upon millions of times at this time of year in every language imaginable.
Of course what gives one hope is that a small sliver of those promises are kept each year. Some people actually do change their lives or reach their goal. Some years the goat doesn’t burn. It’s rare but it happens. For most of us it won’t, but we have to pretend it will, fooling ourselves the same way we fool everyone else to get by. What choice is there? To hope is human, and the absence of hope leads to dire consequences. It makes one wonder who, if anyone, constructed a system (for lack of a better word) where in order to survive a creature must fool itself. What quirk of evolution made that our fate, or if you prefer what Supreme Being decided that this must be so?
Oh, I ask a lot of questions for a poorly-educated middle class middle aged man shuffling through the first decade of the Twenty-First Century. That, my friends, is my own cycle. It is my own inevitable ritual at this time of year, the biggest holiday we have that is concerned with marking the passage of time. I celebrate it now because I made it through another cycle. Not everyone does. It seems that every year I know more people who don’t make it from pole to pole, from January to December, through an entire circuit of the sun. The biggest fan of this stupid little site of mine didn’t make it as a matter of fact. The one guy who kept encouraging me even when I was bereft of ideas (which in case nobody has noticed is most of the time despite the four hundred and whatever entries I have inflicted on the poor, innocent Internet). The guy who inspired me to keep tabs on the mundane aspects of everyday life that most people overlook that he found somehow amusing and enlightening. He once said that he imagined me on the Staten Island ferry looking over the rim of a can of beer at the characters around me, chuckling and getting it all down for posterity. That was one of the nicest ways I have ever been portrayed in my life. Now I like to imagine him in a better place, hopefully still able to see what I’m doing here and taking some pleasure from it. Is that hope or self-delusion? Whatever it is, it’s all I have. It’s all any of us have, so use it up now because we have reached that point in the cycle again. Happy new year.
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