Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

3 a.m. Christmas Morning 2015. Acrylic on canvas board, 16 x 12”

I am finishing up a great book by the recently departed David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years. It’s got me thinking about money, credit, power, violence, separation, duress, mental illness, imperialism, thought control, anarchy, volunteer poverty, books by Charles Dickens—It’s got me thinking out loud too, to the chagrin of Rose, since she’s the only person who accepts my musings without filter, in the moment, off the cuff, instantaneous leaps from brain out mouth. I would feel so lost and alone, intellectually, without her incredible patience, creative feedback, and reluctancy to judge me. It helps that I cook and serve her dinner, although oftentimes my reaction to her “please pass the salt” is another rant about dire straits and the end of the world.

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine

—Bob, the Dylan

I won’t do a review of Graeber’s book. Why rehash with more publishing what has already been published? Should one even need to persuade a population to read words that will help reclaim honor and reconnect with neighbors? The book is out there, and it’s better than NPR—a lot less propaganda and more truth about the history of money and credit than any Intro to Macroeconomics or CIA Factbook would ever allow. It will goad you to seek ways to self-absolve debt maintained via threats and violence, quite literally from a point of a gun in some fiefdoms around the world. It might instigate a revolution of care-providers who have known all along that capitalism is the devil, that usury is evil, and money to make money is the invitation to Armageddon. Whether we admit it or not, we middle classers are the mom and pop money-grubbers with dirty capitalist dreams holding the system together with the greed glue of pensions and 401Ks. All our adult lives we deny the obvious, while whistling past the screams of the mugging in the park. Then it’s Fast Times at Condo High, picking out our plucked chicken and marsala wine for the night’s romantic boredom. Lock the doors twice and put a baseball bat under the bed, and if you’re a fear-drenched lickspittle in America, lock a loaded gun in the house. Rose’s and my retirement bribe bundle is hosted by TIAA Cref, making sound investments in nuclear arms, credit card companies, and high interest real estate deals to contract our only neighbors into a death pledge (mortgage) with a bank of nobody’s choice.

It’s a good book. If you read it, I’ll give you a painting.

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Now for the Christmas card I would send if I wasn’t terrified of rejection…

You open it up and this is what it says inside:

I’m going to bring more craic into my life. It will involve putting my physical body before you, or yours in front of mine, and usually with good humor and a glass of wine. We have got to kill Facebook, step away from the backlit screen hells on the desks and in our hands, and walk out of our singular dark caves to look after each other again. Like we used to when we churned butter and hung our laundry on a line. Goofy men, ditch the trucks. Wise women, kick the goofy truck men up the nuts. None of us deserve the materials we have. If we aren’t working for love and camaraderie after the necessaries of life have been had, then we are not working at all. We are stuck parasites on the back of a frantic beast that is gobbling up the world. Loosen the grip, to finally let go. I want to know you all again, like I did when I was ten.

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Waxing Nostalgic On Time and Spirit

These are my parents, Keitha and David, on their wedding day. His brother Bill and her sister Toni Marie. I won’t be born for five years, yet I already know this place very well in my future dreams. The Seneca Inn. It is the restaurant my grandparents own on route 5, before the time of the great atomization, and the construction of the corporate-friendly, human-hating thoroughfare called the New York State Thruway. The bride cleaned rental cottages since she was eleven. The groom would hitchhike across town to visit with her during courtship. She liked courtship. He liked cars and duck’s asses. My grandfather offered to buy Keitha a 1963 Jaguar if she would postpone marriage and go to Cazenovia College where she was accepted. She would have no part in that heartbreaking scheme! After a frozen honeymoon in Gettysburg (the groom’s bad idea), they set up housekeeping in a rented pink trailer a few hundred yards up the road from the restaurant.

I have been gorging myself on their memories for a lifetime, yet am unable to receive any digestive satisfaction. I am not yet born. I am only spirit of Christmases yet to come. In this future there exists a fullness from the unknown memory I have of the Seneca Inn, the patrons, the staff, my grandfather who died before I am born to write this... Aunts and uncles will exodus—the two in the photo would be the first in the family to leave Central New York for private and economic reasons. Before that, beyond the call of war, there was only localism. It was life, c’est la vie, and you made of it what you could where you were born. Family was slow and purposeful. Children met and fell in love in high school, and were married. Each could throw a rock to the family home of the other, and monstrosities like Ted Turner had no eternal claim to any living room in the county.

Christmas shopping downtown at the Busy Corner and Boston Store. Then the settling in of rock n’ roll, when the village shoe store moves to the shopping center, and then to the mall. My generation born and raised without knowing the joys of liquid lunch, nor the motel tales of traveling salesmen. Never the solace of loneliness bolstered by the rock of community trust that welcomes all travelers back to their sense of place.

I am still a sojourner in life. I am not home even in this town where I have lived for thirty years, 90 miles from the Seneca Inn. I go back to New Hartford and Utica for a visit and wax nostalgic over a time that never was, but will come again, soon after the Industrial Revolution explodes its local Chinese and Vietnamese families into the oblivion of an improving economy. Our generation has been transitional, instructed to follow economy, to look up to it like some admired uncle, and even most diligently, to send the next generation (our children) away to the better paying jobs of our imagination. The best paying jobs will always rob your sons and daughters of a future. College became a hate crime after the existence of the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement. And the Seneca Inn, for all it represents to me in my mind’s nostalgic lust, died the day Ray Kroc bewitched his first customer with a milkshake machine. I know and feel most unfortunately, that without the Seneca Inn, over half the population of my town and yours suffer some form of chronic psychosis.

Don’t believe me? Just look at the arms on that waitress serving the cookies. She knows no joy but in the here today, here tomorrow.

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Last Christmas I hastily put together a book of holiday essays and gave a free download to readers. Here it is again:

The Cover

The Meat

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And for this year I present to you a link to the image below in high resolution that can be printed and displayed in the parlor. The title will bring you closer to all whom you love.

YOU listen to Coltrane’s “Father, Son and the Holy Ghost’” and Then Tell Me That Soon All That You Love WON’T Be Taken Away! 2018. Acrylic on canvas, 12 x 16"

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Finally,

Almost Serially Monogamous Ron and Rose Cardinal 2016. Acrylic on wood, 24 x 24”

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!