Search This Blog

12/24/2007

T'was the day before Christmas...

And all through the house; Nothing was stirring; Not even a mouse.

*******************

What a crock of horse biscuits.

Which when I was younger, (When things were simpler, when summer days seemed to last a month, the sun always shone, the ice cream truck was never more than twenty yards away and kids from your neighbourhood were never in any danger of being snapped up by pedophile rings or eaten by insane Rottweilers lusting for human blood.) I ate up like a homeless person who is offered a half eaten McDonalds by a drunk who thinks that their generosity will far outweigh a life spent pissing into the wind when it comes to the day when they are balanced on the scales of life.

Seriously... I bought into all that "Be-good-boy-and-Santa-will-bring-you-nice-things, Misbehave-and-Santa-will-bring-you-a-lump-of-coal" bullshit and acted accordingly. [1]

I was so badly suckered into the whole Lies To Children thing I was even pulled into the Charles and Diana wedding affair.

Hey, whoa there Bubba, back that truck up a bit and don't be so damn hasty in your judgement of a young lad getting involved in the one-day-a-princess-will-come-along story, I was after all only ten years old at the time, my parents were going through the early stage motions of divorce proceedings by killing each other with words and I was desperate for a happy ending of some kind.

So, having established that it wasn't my fault that I fell for all the lies that are told to children we'll move on. I won't mention the fact that for about a year I had pictures of Charles and Diana on my bedroom wall and you won't take the piss out of me for being so gullible.

(I'm serious. Don't even think about taking the piss or I'll hunt you down and exact revenge on you in as many horrible ways as I can think of... Wiring your reproductive organs to the mains, pulling your fingernails out with pliers, taking an industrial sander to your knees, having your eyelids held open while I squeeze lemon juice into them or making you watch the Spice Girls reunion tour concerts on a permanent loop; Need I go on? No. Good...)

In fact I fell for the whole lies to children thing so much so that to this day I still wonder "What would my mum say if she knew I was about to do this?" just before I get into any kind of high jinks. (Generally involving booze, drugs and on occasion fireworks.) I don't think too long though. Should the thought linger for more than a few seconds I end up going home, putting my feet up and reading the Scriptures instead.

Yeah, sure. The Scriptures. My fingers burn upon contact with any holy text and I'm overcome by the Devils tongue and begin screaming horrible, vicious things about Jeebus being nothing more than a gifted magician and Moses being an evil beardy cunt who had plans on enslaving the world...

Now though, I realise that my parents told me these lies in order to help them fashion me into the upstanding pillar of the community I am today. (How long do you think anyone will believe that one?)

They told me that if I was good Santa would bring me nice things to instill the belief that if I do nice things nice things will happen to me, they told me that God was omnipotent to make me heedful of the possible consequences of being caught doing something I shouldn't to teach me... I dunno. The only possible thing that I can think of right now that that lesson was meant to instill was; If you're gonna do something bad make sure you don't get caught.

It is my firm belief that generally people don't need these lessons beaten into them at such a young age. We're a clever race of beings [2] and most of us realise that there is a difference between right and wrong and we generally know which is which.

Foisting the whole Santa bit on kids isn't nearly as bad in my eyes as the whole GOD thing.

What kind of a person puts that kind of shit into a mind that can't fathom the idea that goldfish die easily if you overfeed them? I'll tell you what kind. The kind that seeks mindless conformity and unearned respect, the kind that seeks to control you from afar, the kind that insists you OBEY unquestioningly the demands of your elders, the kind that makes you say nice things when you really want to be honest and let loose. In short... Parents.

To end I would like to say this. Please pay no heed to this rambling screed denouncing parents and their strange ways. They do it because they love you and want you to be a good person.

Either that or they're an alien race bent on the overthrow of the human race one soul at a time...

You decide.

Oh, yeah. One last thing... Happy Christmas and all that guff.

[1] (At least until I figured out that Santa didn't actually exist and the whole gig was a fable made up by parents so that they could get peace in the months approaching Christmas.)
[2] (Occasionally we do fuck up. For an example see WW1 WW2 and every other conflict since man first stumbled out of the cave and decided to see what was out there.)

No comments: