I have no will or energy for cooking, so we started calling in a radius out from my home to find a fun place to eat. God knows the family needs festival this year.
The good thing is, we found something close. The bad thing is, I think I could buy a new motorcycle for what it's gonna cost.
What are you folks doing (or if you read this after, what did you do)?
Happy saint paddies day from Horslips:
(Dearg Doom means Red Destroyer)
I'm off tomorrow to fly to Anaheim to visit family and The Mouse. I'd be driving down already, as are half my family, only Olivia and I have tickets tonight to see Mythbusters Live. More on that later, as I've no real idea how they can turn that show into a live thing.
Meanwhile, I'm packing kilts and my Sad Kermit t-shirt to wear to the park, trying to decide which combat boots are best for walking.
Sunday, I fly mouseward, and then wednesday, drive back here, stop quickly to drop my disneyland clothes and pick up my dinner party clothes, and head north for thanksgiving with a friend mine (who is a MILF, and I mean that both literally and personally), in the napa-sonoma area
I won't really be home for a week, and thus blogging is unlikely, unless I decide to live-blog from inside pirates of the caribbean on my iPhone.
Pack head, y'all. That's what this week's holiday is about. The feast of Saint Gluttony.
I don't know much about cinco de mayo
Im never sure what its all about
I say I want you, and you dont believe me
You say you want me, but I've got my doubts
Oh baby, I was bound for mexico
Oh baby, I was bound to let you go
Listen: 
I've talked a few times about stupid, meaningless holidays, and we've just passed another.
Oh, i imagine to those of irish descent and catholic faith this day may actually mean something; and in fact I am of irish descent somewhere back in the family tree (somewhere in the stew along with scottish, french, german, dutch, scandinavian, and even claims of cherokee).
But a any day named for a dubious catholic saint is a hard thing for this life-long atheist to to get worked up over. And a day celebrating the irish that has more to do with green beer and leprechauns strikes me as one of america'a sillier occasions to get stupid drunk.
Still - for some reason this day always leaves me feeling vaguely sad; thoughts of days past and celebrations of various sorts drift vaguely through my mind.
Maybe it's the irish in me; maybe I'm more irish than I thought. Or maybe it's the Jameson and the Pogues I've been listening to for the last few days - I'll be fucked if I know. But I walked around all day yesterday in a funny state of mind, trying to get a billion things done, driving around, running errands; and all day I went from a vague under-current of the desire to cry, to the desire to hit someone.
Plus, the store was sold out of guiness last night. So it was that kind of holiday.
But in any case - Lets say it with song. NOt the most irish of songs, but a song that sorta speaks to me. And it's the fuckin' Pogues, man.
I come old friend from Hell tonight
Across the rotting sea
Nor the nails of the cross
Nor the blood of Christ
Can bring you help this eve
The dead have come to claim a debt from thee
They stand outside your door
Four score and three
I always wish, on this day of the year, that I had something to say; something pithy or eloquent, something philosophical or carnal.
I feel I should talk about love; love of the heart, love of the body. About the celebration - both in a universal sense, LOVE in capital letters, and in the small-scale, personal sense, to celebrate one's love, or loves, as people, as minds, as bodies.
I get lost in it; i wind up ranting about the inherent wrongness of a holiday where we mix up the love of child or parent or friend, with love, love in the filthy, sweaty, carnal, animal sense. We give our kids paper to pass out to classmates, and buy gifts that buy favor. We celebrate, not love, not romance, but commerce and acquisition. We celebrate love by buying things.
And there you see, i've done it again. When I want to talk about love - love in it's purest, most profoundly human, physical, biochemical sense, I wind up angry with our language's failure in words that mean love, and our culture's schizophrenic confusion about what love is, and how it's celebrated.
Celebrate love where you find it. There is nowhere near enough. If you love someone, tell them. If someone you love is with you, do not let them get away. And do not scoff at the word love; it's nowhere near enough, as words go, to define something so huge, important, and varied. Yet it's the word we have. Celebrate it.
My thanksgiving day started big-island-style with a 5.0 earthquake, centered just north of Kailua-Kona on the Kohala coast - same place the last one was, a month ago (though that one was considerably larger).
My condo was rattling and shaking - though i am from California so earthquakes are nothing new. I thought my kids were doing some sort of smackdown wrestling on the stairs above my head, until I realized the shaking was in waves, and coming from behind me, not above.
Later, sipping coffee on my lanai, I heard the woman in the condo below me calling home; she was describing the 'quake to someone on the mainland, and said '...and at first I thought, what are those people upstairs doing now?'
'Quakes are not a big deal around here; it's a volcanic island, some of the newest land in the world. But still, it got people's attention. If got mine, certainly.
My original plan for this holiday included my in-laws (you remember, in-law vs outlaw), though they wound up having to cancel for medical reasons, and a luau though we found that no one seems to run a luau for thanksgiving (imu roasted turkey sounds like a great idea to me, but what do I know.) When we didn't find a thanksgiving luau, we consulted the in-laws and chose an island-style thanksgiving buffet at the Mauna Lani Orchid to satisfy the in-laws desire for something traditional.
Let's hear it for stupid, pointless holidays.
You know, it's funny; one of the things that's weird about america is our lack of a native culture. The native in native culture includes rain dances and chants; but that really hasn't seeped into american popular culture due to the, you know, genocide and culture-cide of a century and a half ago.
The bottom line is, we're not from around here. We're gumbo. We're stone soup. We're fusion cuisine, a weird mis-mash of elements that don't always work together as a cohesive whole. We're a fuckin' mashup.
What that means is that our traditions, our holidays, our cultural fests and ceremonies, one and all, are borrowed, brought in with a baggage by immigrants from a thousand other places. Our native culture is a shaken cocktail of cultures from other places, most of which is celebrate in a shallow, surface sort of way for no real reason but to celebrate.
Now, I'm not putting down celebration for celebration's sake. Not in the least. However, it's a funny thing we do here in america.
Think of our major holidays; easter, christmas, independence day, thanksgiving. Our minor ones; st patrick's day, halloween, valentine's day. O these, two - thanksgiving and independence day - have relevant cultural meaning. One's a harvest festival, both celebrate our nation's birth.
The others though; all of them borrowings from religions, yet sanitized, stripped of meaning. Who are st patrick and st valentine? Who actually knows, if not raised catholic? Our christmas is a cultural fest of reindeer and santa and candy-canes, our easter is a festival of sunny debauchery for some, candy and colored eggs for others. Oh, sure, we know its connected in some way to some guy who died and came back, but that's not what the holiday's about.
Even Halloween is a mish-mash for us, ancient celtic/druid/pagen traditions, arcane and dark, weirdly mixed with catholic saint's festival days. This one is closer to a native holiday that most others, at least the modern way of celebrating it seems to be. But still, it's a blender-whirl of traditions from other places and other times.
But the ones that most stand out to be as stupid are those which still bear the names of saints. I've talked about valentine's day before, and though I never finished writing it, has another piece on it this year; about the absurd sanitization of a holiday that's all about the beauty of physical, carnal love. About how we've turned it into a sugar-and-flowers day where hallmark makes bank and kids exchange meaningless bits of paper. A day that's intended to celebrate love in it's most physical, carnal sense has the blood and sweat and come drained out of it, replaced with a glucose drip.
And then there's st patricks day. A day that's all about a saint that means little to the modern american experience. Some guy named Paddy. So we celebrate it by pretending to be irish, putting fucking green food coloring in our beer, drinking irish whisky and irish coffee, and eating corn beef n' cabbage, and who the fuck cares? Sure, it celebrates one immigrant group, but why that one? Why not the italians, the french, the scots, the africans, the chinese? Why not the pacific islanders? Why not the people who owned this land before we swept in and slaughtered them?
I am irish. Way back, when the ancestors started coming over here from the horrific conditions an ocean away, my ancestors came from scotland, ireland, england, wales, holland, germany, france, and for all I know every other weird little country in europe. All you need to do is look at me to know I'm a celt. Go look at Mary Queen of Scots and you'll see has my nose. Go look at those doughy boys fighting wars in europe and you can see my heritage.
That's my culture, part of it; yet I look at the nonsense of america drinking green beer and singing danny boy and wonder why we all care. Why will we all go out tonight and drink and drive and celebrate when we're not celebrating anything?
It's because we don't have anything real to celebrate. It's because our culture lacks real, resonant holidays. It's because our country, with that cursed work ethic we're founded on, has to damned few holidays at all.
Look at other cultures and start counting the holidays. Asia, Europe, latin America; you can't seem to look at a calendar page without finding a holiday. Holidays where businesses close, where kids are set free from school. Holidays where people parade and dance.
Here in the USA, we get a bizarre, small handful of holidays where people actually stop working, and apart from that, holidays that are meaningless in terms of our never-ending work calendar. No break for carnival; no break for columbus day or MLK day. No break to celebrate the new wine or the fresh october beer, no break to celebrate our founding fathers. No break to celebrate the native cultures we obliterated in founding this country.
So we make our own. Some saint? Let's drink. Some other saint? Let's buy candy. Someone got nailed to a cross? Let's dye eggs. Birth of a prophet? Let's cut a tree down and put it in our living rooms and exchange wrapped gifts. End of summer? Let's put on costumes and beg for candy house-to-house.
Now, understand I'm not in any way lamenting the existence of stupid, pointless, made-up holidays. What I'm getting at is this - we do it because we have to, because we as a culture lack a common framework of background, religion, genetic origin. We have no cultural common ground, so we make one up; and choose the most pointless holidays as our focus points.
St valentine means nothing to modern america. Likely there was no st valentine, or at least not one we can point to as the st valentine. St. Patrick means little more, unless you're a generation or so from Ireland. He's just another guy with an 'st' in front of his name, or another name on the list of saints to pray to for help in case of snake bite.
I'm trying to think of memorable st paddy's days in my past. It's a blur; green beer and irish whiskey, huge steaming pots of corn beef (and how many of us have yacked corn beef post st paddy's day over the years?). as a child, getting pinched because I wouldn't wear green ("But I have green eyes I don't have to," I'd say, and of course now, I have green tattoos). Drunk, is mostly what I remember; drunk in a forced we're supposed to get drunk way, not because I actually felt any will to celebrate. Drunk, and listening to Horslips and the Pogues, the Crusaders, the Clancy Brothers, the Chieftains. Drunk on beer and Jamison and waking up not knowing where I was.
It's a funny collage of blurry memory, And with few key exceptions, the memories come with a shrug. Eh, whatever.
I'd like to say I'll be going out tonight to listen to fiddles and pipes and dancing a jig in my best kilt; more likely I'll be sitting home watching Deadwood. No dancing, no piping, no waking up bruised and confused.
Maybe it's just that I'm getting to be an old fucker, but celebrating nothing just seems empty.
I wish I could find a tape, or a torrent, or a script, or something, for the criminally overlooked show Cupid's Valentine's Day episode.
The show itself was brilliant, and hardly anyone watched it.
But this episode managed to verbalize something; the difference between the storybook, candy-hearts and hallmark cards valentine's day and a true celebration of physical, carnal love. This show captured that thought with humor and intensity.
Because the hallmark cards are a load of crap. Another holiday based on purchased sentiment and trite, meaningless exchanges of printed paper.
Love is physical. Love is carnal. Love is sweaty, and red-faced. Love hurts. Love is about bodies and sensuality and pleasure and caring. It's about passion and desire. It's about fucking, and making love, and kissing, and biting.
A day that celebrates love without sexuality is meaningless and empty.
Forget St Valentine, some pointless martyr of dubious authenticity. This day, any day that claims to celebrate love, should celebrate Cupid, Eros, Aphrodite, Venus, a hundred others. It should celebrate the real love, the physical love, the outward manifestation of the gut-wrenching intensity within.
Love isn't lacy and pretty. Love isn't tidy and easy and neat. Love isn't contained on a candy heart or a paper envelope.
Love bleeds. Love aches. Love is a knife, not a feather, a bruise, not a red crayon.
Love is what moves us and drives us, sustains us. What brings us together, drives us apart. People kill for love, die for love.
Celebrate this carnal, physical, real love. This day, or any other, choose your own. But chaste kisses and paper do not celebrate the love I'm talking about.
Now, with all that said, let me further note that for two weeks I've thought this Valentine's was a tuesday. I of course then planned to do my shopping for pointless cards and candy hearts on monday, being that spontaneous, last-minute kind of guy. So of course, I'm late as usual.
Ah well. Better late than never. Even for vapid, pointless gestures.
