Saturday, November 29, 2008

It's the Worst Time of the Year.

LiveJournal Tags: ,,

It's that time again: there's the chill in the air, the day's are getting shorter and people are being trampled to death in public shopping malls. Yes, it's the time of year where we switch to dark liquors to drown our sorrow and cuss out our relatives for not living up to our expectations.

In the spirit of the season, retail outlets have once again begun playing non-stop Christmas songs. If you happen to work in one of these retail stores, it means you have to listen to said Christmas songs for the entire duration of your shift. That's eight hours of the same songs over and over again, from different bargain-bin artists.

Having worked retail for about six years now, I estimate I've listened to about 32 to 40 days worth of Christmas songs, with 36 being the more accurate number. I'm talking about 24 hour days. That's over a month of my life in which I've had Christmas songs playing in the background. That's 1/347th of my life, but this is something I have to deal with once every twelve months, like a delayed global super-period about to come bursting out like the tidal wave of blood from the elevator in "The Shining." That's 1/12th of my life being forcefully dedicated to a holiday celebrating the birth of someone else's Lord and Saviour.

Has it affected me at all?

The answer, of course, is yes.

Has it affected me psychologically?

Yes it has.

Has it made me want to kill myself and others around me, including those who may not be around me, say with nuclear arms?

Boy-howdy!

It's basically psychological torture. I'm sure there's some section of the Geneva Convention which lists it as a form of torture, and if not, it should be updated. If you've seen the music video for, "Jeremy," by Pearl Jam, listening to Christmas music endlessly will turn you into Jeremy. You're going to start drawing huge black spirals on pieces of paper scattered around your bedroom with whatever materials make themselves readily available, like your own feces. The spirals will be symbolic of the deep abyss opening up in your soul.

This is what Christmas has become.

Christmas is a holiday designed to make people more giving by nature, but it usually just ends up turning them into shambling monsters, lashing out at everyone in sight. It's an admixture of overspending, credit card debt, awkward family get-togethers, seasonal depression and alcoholism. It invokes each of the seven deadly sins at some point, with gluttony and envy being the most severe. All for some punk kid.

No comments: