Damon’s Christmas Card À-Go-Go FOR 2010

I’ll begin with the now-traditional Tardiness Apology, which I submit herewith in its standard form, even though, admittedly, this one is even tardier than usual. I was (bringing to bear what I can say without a trace of false modesty is something of a special talent of mine) concocting an elaborate excuse to account for this unusual lateness. The scheme was to embark on a long, utterly convincing diatribe on my pointed disregard for the Eurocentric prejudice and hidden history of oppression behind what I was planning to refer to disdainfully as “your precious Gregorian Calendar” and also point out that Pope Gregory XIII - after whom it is called despite the fact that his real name was, of all things, “Ugo”- was, as was the case with several other pontiffs throughout the history of the Apostolic See, a bit of a dick. I would then claim that what I was actually doing was delivering the Card on a different date in an act of protest worthy of Martin Luther himself. Unfortunately, I also missed various other New Year celebrations - Russian, Chinese, Korean – the Hindus might have something coming up but nobody seems to be sure and Rosh Hashanah isn’t for ages yet, if memory serves, so I decided to come clean, own up to being late and get on with it.

What I will say is for a while there, I was unsure whether I would even be writing the Card this time. You see, life’s mixture of highs and lows, which I have referenced fairly regularly over the past few years employing a series of increasingly-tenuous metaphors, was a particularly full-bodied one in 2010 and spilling over into the start of 2011. The smattering of grooviness on offer was almost entirely cancelled out by the fact that my family and extended family seemed to suffer a preposterous amount of loss, heartache and general bad news, leaving me to wonder if the irreverence and - let us be honest – crassness that is typical of the CCAGG (when executed correctly) would be appropriate way to close out such a year.

But after much soul-searching and rumination (like soul-searching - only with rum), I decided that the abandonment of a tradition that now stretches back over a decade would be just one more unfortunate consequence of a year already quite lousy with...unfortunateness and would constitute a cop-out that would do no honour to those we lost, every one of whom would doubtless regard me as a puling sissy of the first water for letting the urge to wallow interfere with...well, life. Therefore, boys and girls, tardy as it may be, I now present to you an apologetically lengthy edition of…

Uncle Damon’s 2010...um...Uncle Damon’s Christmas Card À-Go-Go for 2010.

Now I decided that my one major concession to solemnity would be to strike an attitude of reflection and seemly introspection which, I am given to understand, is what people my age customarily do during the Holiday Season and, in cases where more strenuous metaphysical calisthenics are called for, during the four-month period immediately following the Holiday Season. See what I did there?

Now in spite of the cavalcade of emotional nutshots it delivered, I certainly don’t mean to give the impression that 2010 was an unending conga line of tragedy and ill fortune. It was, as I said a blend of highs and lows. And though the lows seemed far greater in number and tended towards the truly abysmal, some of the highs towered majestically. Towered, like unto a team of Brazilian volleyball players dressed in thigh-high go-go boots, perhaps for some manner of charity fashion event held to raise funds for the purchase of new bespoke short shorts and tank tops, their previous uniform sponsor having gone out of business after the company’s Chief Financial Officer, the painstakingly named Gestas São Nicolau, is indicted on six counts of mail fraud and one count of impersonating...impersonating something that it’s against the law for a guy to impersonate in Brazil…like…let’s see…well, not a woman, certainly...boy, could I tell you some stories there…anyway, look, what I’m saying is that it was, for better or worse, a year of milestones.

For instance, as many of you will know, I turned 40 in 2010, flummoxing the medical and bookmaking communities alike and, having reached this waypost on the journey of life, I scratched the silvering hairs of my beard and also scratched some of the silvering hairs now sprouting, seemingly at random, over the rest of my surface area and reflected on my voyage so far.

All in all, it’s been an enjoyable little ramble to this point. I’m pretty okay with it. Regrets? I’ve had a few. Oh sure, it would have been nice if my adult film career had taken off. Had events played out just a little differently, the world might have thrilled to the saucy exploits of “Buck Negro”. Alas, my films were deemed to be “before their time” (similar words were used to describe many of my performances) and failed to capture the imagination of the notoriously fastidious porn audience and so, tragically, largely unseen and/or unappreciated remain such opuses as “Punanny McPhee”, “Rump Hole of the Bailey”, “Buck Negro: Mandingo Was His Name-O” and, of course, the sensitive but widely misunderstood “Schlong Day’s Journey into Night”.

At one point, I also harboured a dream of playing the cello professionally. As a nimble-fingered stripling, I honed my art and nurtured within my dented breast (occupational hazard) the great notion of one day being the world’s foremost Black-Asian cellist. I was going to call myself Yo Ma Ma. This also was not to be.

And the less said about the short but profoundly unsuccessful run of my Progressive Rock-Klezmer fusion band, Jewfro Tull, the better.

However, these youthful dreams of musical glory were dashed. Dashed like…like so many...cellos upon the heads of toothsome, undersized, music-school dweebs with bowl cuts administered by mothers who believed that ownership of a pair of barber scissors and a plastic smock with a qualified them as hairdressers.

Fortunately, “regret” is but one of the many words of which your Uncle Damon does not know the meaning and one which, I suggest, as I warm to what I now recognise to be the theme of this edition of the CCAGG, that you all endeavour to eliminate from your respective lexicons. For you see, if I may embark upon possibly the single most mixed metaphor ever endeavoured in a holiday card format, one of the maybe five things that I have actually learned during my four-decade alcohol-fuelled chicken dance through this Curate’s Egg of a come-as-you-are fishbowl party we call “Life”, is that the way you deal with its capriciousness and its vicissitudes and its insistence on serving you Roquefort dressing when its knows just as well as you do that you ordered the vinaigrette, is that perhaps the single most important factor in deciding whether you will be a happy, fulfilled person or a stubbly fruitcake in a smelly housecoat slurping lukewarm tea laced with cooking sherry from a chipped mug that you got free from your bank or building society 23 years ago, living in a house with peeling paint and overgrown front yard and a dozen half-dead cats draped over the soiled, threadbare furniture like so many fleabitten doilies, that even the Jehovah’s Witnesses have learned to avoid because you ramble on incessantly about shit that happened to you ages ago that still chaps your sagging, liver-spotted heinie.

To quote the Eternal Bard, life is like a carnival. Full of wonder and majesty and pageantry which, upon closer inspection, can seem a bit motheaten and creepy, elephants who would clearly rather be somewhere else and seedy dudes with greasy hair and wispy moustaches and what look suspiciously like prison tats selling you unrecognisable food on sticks. Yes, it’s a carnival and the obnoxious Chubby Kid of Fate will spend the whole time burning through a seemingly endless supply of pocket money hurling the grimy softballs of...Happenstance, at a buck for three shies, at a plyboard bullseye dunking you over and over into a tank of stagnant, unchlorinated water commingled with your own urine and bitter, bitter tears. This is pretty much inevitable. It’s up to you to decide whether you just slosh about forlornly, letting exotic animal-borne microbes swim into your orifices with the intention of holding some kind of spontaneous bacterial jamboree in your lower intestines, or if you climb defiantly back up onto the dunking stool, look the little fucker in the eye and dare him to plonk down another dollar, assuring him that he’ll get tired before you do and pointing out that his mother looks like a leopard seal in orthopaedic shoes.

Aside from the fact that a life of remorse necessitates an ability to conjugate verbs in the subjunctive, an ability that no one actually possesses and anyone who says they do is a liar, another good reason not to abandon ourselves to melancholy hypothesis is that this may well be our last full year of existence. According to the ancient Maya, anyway.

2012, as you may have learned from the recent cinematic carbuncle of the same name, is the year pre-Columbian science geeks calculated that the world would come to an end.

Now the ancient Maya were centuries ahead of their time in their comprehension of many concepts and phenomena, except for, rather crucially “white dudes with guns”. But aside from that one blemish on their intellectual record, they were, by and large, a pretty sharp bunch of cats. These days we tend to denounce their prognostications as primitive superstition, simply because their sacrifice-heavy religious practices seem barbaric to our modern sensibilities and because they employed a logographic writing style as opposed a more phonemic one, which we can more easily relate to and because they generally dressed like a Mesoamerican version of the Village People who, parenthetically, would be “El Pueblo del Pueblo” in Spanish. There is also the matter of the relative vagueness of the prophecy itself, which has left it open to differing interpretations. Well, for all we know, they might have been meaning to get around to clarifying their prediction but we may never learn the truth as, just as they were about to elaborate, the Europeans rocked up and started fucking, beheading and sneezing on everything in sight and that was pretty much that.

I myself, being what you might call something of an apocalypse buff, have perused the ancient manuscripts and tried to ascertain whether they were really onto something or whether their brains had just been frazzled from chewing coca leaves all the time without the benefit of the baby-laxative chaser favoured by more sophisticated contemporary societies. After all, they did have a God whose specific portfolio was tattoo artists, which doesn’t really inspire confidence in their scientific credentials. Then again, perhaps after they had all given each other tramp stamps and boob roses and ersatz tribal symbols from tribes they did not belong to and were sitting around waiting for the invention of the motorcycle, they really did put a lot of thought into the shelf life of the Universe.

My findings were, I am sorry to report, inconclusive, but there are indicators that lead me to think that the Mayas assertions of The End and its relative nighness, as it were, may not be totally groundless. Think about it, what are the odds that the Universe will allow England, as hapless and luckless as it has been since close of play in Dubya-Dubya Two, to bask in the glory of hosting the Olympics?

And…yeah, that’s pretty much all I’ve got. But I think you will all agree that that by itself is pretty a compelling reason to think that we’re all out of here some time during the opening act of 2012.

Look, all I’m saying is, as we swan about, flush with modern man’s mastery of all we survey, with our supercolliders and our seedless watermelons and our hydrogen-burning automobiles and our hypoallergenic cats and our three-dimensional picture shows and our Adam’s-apple-less transsexuals and such, it might be a good idea to keep one eye on this whole end-of-the-world situation, just in case.

In fact, maybe we should just proceed on the assumption that the Maya were completely on the mark. Maybe we should go about the next year as if the world really is about to end and we need to do everything we want to do and say everything we want to say before this whole thing goes kablooey and we suddenly find ourselves face to face with our Maker only to find out, I suspect, that the vast majority of us have been quite, quite wrong about how He or She had been expecting us to comport ourselves upon finding ourselves the recipients of the quiggiziggidillion-to-one shot golden ticket to spend a fleeting moment riding this tiny glowing speck rocketing through the boundless expanse of, let’s face it, mostly nothing and experience what, you may recall, I previously referred to as this Curate’s Egg of a come-as-you-are fishbowl party we call “Life”.

If not for ourselves, then for those who are not around to finish the ride with us.