Phoebe Kate

I’m not a big fan of nursery rhymes, largely because they terrified me as a child.  Little Miss Muffet’s meal rudely interrupted by a giant arachnid.  Rock-a-bye Baby plummeting to death because Mother Dearest (who must have been an ancestress of Britney Spears) put the cradle at the top of a tree.  Nimble Jack, whose pyromania earned him a burnt bum.  Worst of all, though, was Wee Willie Winkie, who ran around at night in his nightgown peeking through keyholes and lurking outside the bedroom windows of children.  Yikes!  No wonder I was infantile insomniac.  That abominable personage was a Peeping Tom, a second-story man, probably guilty of indecent exposure and potentially a child abductor. 

This holiday season, it occurred to me that Santa Claus is no better than the deviant young Master Winkie.  Now, I know no one really listens to the inane lyrics of the ubiquitous Christmas songs that assail us everywhere we go.  But pause a moment and consider what ”Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” actually says about the supposedly jolly man in red:  ”He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows if you’re awake, he knows if you’ve been bad or good so be good for goodness sake.”  That makes him a Peeping Tom, too, but he bests Wee Willie by being a stalker and a delusional psychopath with a God complex who’s determined to imperiously mete out his own homegrown style of justice. Hardly surprising the song starts out the warning, “You better watch out.”  With a maniac like that loose in the neighborhood, everybody should.          

I think we need to rethink Christmas.  Kids in a high-tech, sophisticated world don’t believe in Santa Claus anyway.  We’re all sick of the same old sappy holiday songs because we know in our heart that there’s no real magic in the air, only the sound of a million cash registers going ca-ching.  There’s no peace on earth and not much good will toward men to be found anywhere — and the chances of this situation changing soon are virtually nil.  Even feasting has lost its significance.  In Dickensian England, where the average Bob Cratchit and his family lived mostly on porridge and went hungry a lot of the time, a sizable piece of meat on the table was a major event.  Today, it’s just one more super-sized meal we quickly consume before we dash off to find something more exciting to do.  As for the spiritual aspect of the season, that’s dicey in a pluralistic society such as ours.  What we might or might not believe is bound to step on somebody else’s religious toes.  We can’t agree on God anymore than we can agree on anything else.

In ”A Christmas Carol,” Scrooge vowed to keep Christmas in his heart the other 364 days a year.  Unless we can do that, too, all the hoopla and hype and hard sell and Hallmark sentimentality on the 25th day of December just won’t make up for what we really lack.

–phoebe kate                               

Some people start feeling Christmas-y right after Thanksgiving (a few even before that, but I don’t hang around them.  Too scary.)   Others when they buy presents and wrap them.  Some when they get their tree or start baking those ubiquitous fruitcakes (which will continue to be gifted and re-gifted long after the bakers have gone on to their eternal reward) or decorating the house or festooning every viable object in their yard (including the dog) with ornaments and lights. 

Me, I don’t feel an inkling of the traditional seasonal spirit until “A Christmas Story” begins its traditional 24-hour TV marathon on one or another TV station. 

You all know it and watch it, don’t you?  (Shame on you if you don’t.)  What’s the Yuletide without Ralphie and his Red Ryder BB gun and grand fantasies?  And his weird little brother Randy who refuses to eat and hides under the kitchen sink?  And his emotive and volatile father who wars against the infernal furnace and Bumpus’s hounds from hell? 

If you love the movie, you need to read books from which it was derived, In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash and Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories by raconteur and radio/TV personality Jean Shepherd (1921-1999.)  Though his memoirs about his dysfunctional  Midwestern family in the 1930s are considerably darker (although no less humorous), the flick retains enough of Shepherd’s ironic detachment and satiric wit to rise above the usual treacly holiday fare of entertainment.  And if you look really closely, you’ll see flashes of the real Shepherd family – alcohol abuse, denial, anger, paranoia, alienation and a whole psychology textbook of other symptoms.

The way I look at it, the movie is like a homemade sugar cookie.  Sure, it’s sweet and tasty, but then there’s those burnt edges and underside.  And that’s the way it is with family, and holidays, and most everything else in life, as far as I can tell.

–phoebe kate                                

Jesus said that by their fruits shall you know them, but I think that may be one of the great mistranslations of scripture.  It’s what comprises our trash cans that give us away and tell the story of our lives.

Right now, in our garbage, you will find: 3 television packing boxes, cartons for a blender, a hair dryer, a coffee maker, an electric wok and a juicer.  From this, you can easily deduce that many of our appliances conspired to crap out on us simultaneously (as they are highly prone to doing — anybody else noticed this peculiar phenomenon?) and they must be our most needed ones because they were replaced immediately if not sooner.  Obviously, we are couch potatoes who like constant amusement easily convenient in any room, frozen cocktails, perfect coiffures, caffeine and Asian cuisine who happen to have a health nut living with us who wants everything all natural.  We sound like a damn fun crowd, if you ask me.  Even our health nut – especially when her juices are spiked with vodka.   

There are numerous cartons from a national moving company.  As all our neighbors know, we’ve been living here for years and will be continuing to do so for a good many more, so clearly somebody new has joined us.

You’ll also see the box in which a 22-quart tamale pot came.  For a woman named Foster?  Not likely.  Aha!  One or more of the new arrivals must be Latin.  Ole! – and pass the frijoles. 

Then your gaze will rest on the remarkable collection of beverage bottles awaiting the sanitation truck.  Hornsby.  Heineken.  Blue Moon.  Saranac.  Samuel Adams.  And an assortment of wine cooler bottles as well.  Elementary, my dear Watson!  There are some young people on the premises who have just passed the legal drinking age, male AND female, and are taking advantage of it. 

See?  I don’t need to write this blog.  You just need to read my garbage!

–phoebe kate       

Google’s Zeitgeist has compiled its annual Most Popular Searches for 2007.   The results are broken down by category, and needless to say, I won’t sully myself or waste your time by discussing who’s hottest in the political scene, pop culture or the sports world.  Instead, let’s go right to the heart of the matter and reveal the 3 most frequently asked questions on Google.

(Drumroll, please.)  

“Who is God?”

“What is love?”

“How to kiss?”

The first two aren’t surprises, but the third puzzles me.  

Re: the first question.  It’s almost impossible for people – even atheists from time to time, I suppose – not to conjecture about the spiritual or supernatural realm.  Writers and thinkers from Blaise Pascal in the 17th century to Jean-Paul Sartre, U2’s Bono and Salmon Rushdie in the 20th speak of the “God-shaped hole” or void in the human soul that we tend to fill with inferior substitutes.  Unfortunately, finding truth with a capital “T” via a search engine is likely to lead us to thousands of highly eclectic pages of other people’s personal opinions, superstitions, dogmas and diatribes.  It’s valuable to understand the width and breadth of spiritual thought, but in the end it’s up to the individual to sort it all out for oneself and decide what to believe and what not to believe.         

The second question deals with a mystery almost as enigmatic as the Divine Itself.  The word is used so casually and so constantly in contemporary society that it’s virtually lost any real meaning or significance it might once have had.  Judging from the annals of history and this morning’s news, however, there’s been precious little of it around from the dawn of man right up to the present day and I don’t hold out much hope of that sorry situation improving any time in the near future.

The third one’s rather curious, at least to me.  I always thought kissing was pretty much instinctive and got perfected with practice.  Moreover, I can’t help but wonder: who are all these thousands upon thousands typing in this question?  Pre-teens looking for a romantic skills Head Start Program? (in keeping with our national “no kid left behind” policy, you know.)  Adults whose love lives aren’t as sizzly as those on ”Sex and the City” or “Desperate Housewives” or “Grey’s Anatomy”?  Or have we become a society so riddled with insecurities and obsessed with perfection that we now need step-by-step tutorials for actions that used to come naturally to us?                               

FYI, the Most Popular Recipe Search for 2007 was (get the barf bag ready, folks) for a scary concoction ominously called “Master Cleanse,” made from maple syrup and lemon juice seasoned liberally with cayenne pepper.  Ewwww.  

Can’t we just have a new idea for meatloaf instead?  Please? 

–phoebe kate          

One of my passions is writing flash fiction, generally defined as being no more than 1000 (or 500, depending on who you’re asking) words long.  Can you tell a complete story in such a compressed and confining format?  Most definitely, I think.  You just need to remember what your old high school English teacher told you – Make every word count!   And keep in mind that what you don’t say is every bit as important as what you do say.

I’ve become addicted to 2 websites that prove that less is more.  PostSecret has become well known thanks to morning talk show publicity and four popular books.  I don’t know if I’d look forward to going to my mailbox every day if I knew over 1,ooo postcards with anonymous people’s private thoughts, hopes, dreams, fears, horrors, humiliations and sins would be there waiting for me, but I’m glad Frank Warren doesn’t mind being the world’s official Father Confessor.  The results of his 4-year project are fascinating, both from a psychological and an artistic perspective.

Similarly, One Sentence publishes, in its own words, ”True Stories, Told in One Sentence,” again consistently demonstrating that brevity is not only the soul of wit, as the old saying goes, but the essence of engaging, insightful writing.

–phoebe kate