That's a fine and frisky moon up there. Reminds me of this:

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP2qJXT3olM]

we are not shy
we're very wide awake
the moon and I

In the Other realm of the fer-sure not-fine, earlier this week I had the news-radio going, for no real legitimate reason, and a chirpy woman comes on to tell me that a thing called "Squatty Potty" is the "perfect Christmas gift," and so I should therefore, and at once, order one or more than several, and ship them post-haste, to People I Know.

Well, thought I, as I switched off the radio, here is a new, and horrific, nadir, in the annals of capitalism.

I had some days before become accidentally acquainted with the "Squatty Potty," when I clicked on a video on a news tube, and was therein assailed by an ad featuring a Robin Hood-like man, and a demented-looking unicorn, the latter ceaselessly shitting, hither and yon, diarrhetic strings of rainbow feces, including onto an ice-cream cone, said coned shit-streams, the Robin-man, then, happily licking up.

Now, I have not listened to the audio of any advertisement on a tube—television or computer—for more than 20 years. Not since the day they played Beethoven's "Ode To Joy" to try to sell me dishwashing detergent. So I was really at sea, as to what I was seeing. I naturally at first assumed that some criminal cohort of Chinese or Mooslem hackers were assaulting the news tube, cackling in glee as people were subjected to a forest-man lapping up unicorn poop. But no. For in future days I caught further glimpses of the depraved poop-pulsating unicorn and its unashamedly coprophiliac companion. And I realized it was all about someone trying to Sell me something.

It was when I was traumatized by the "Squatty Potty" Christmas spiel on the radio that I realized I should respond to something that Shahryar wrote here recently, in which he stated he was tired of being battered and buffeted by bad news, and wondered if, maybe, somewhere out there, could be found something like good news.

The short answer to this last is: no, there is not. For "news" as we know it is a vast and never-ending collection of everything that has gone most wrong in the world—interlarded with commercial demands that we purchase absolute and usually utterly useless anathema, to put into our bodies, homes, loved ones, and minds. Like a de-minded unicorn, that sprays diarrhetic rainbow poop.

A news, by its very nature, is bad and wrong. If it is not bad and wrong, it is not a news.

We know this instinctively, and we see it everywhere, every day. For instance, recently: holiday parties. This month has occurred across the American-land hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, of holiday parties. But the only one such that became a "news" was the one in San Bernardino, where and when the Non-Ordinary Newylweds turned a holiday party into such a killing field the overhead sprinklers came on, because the sprinklers thought there was a fire.

That is basically what a news is: someone who died in a fire. If you don't die in a fire, you are not a news. (If you don't actually physically die in a fire, you can still, sometimes, and especially if you're "famous" enough, be a news if your career or your love-life or your "reputation," dies in a fire.)

Tonight, in this town, as I write, several thousand people are sleeping. None of them will be a news unless they die in a fire. Or get up and stab or smother or shoot someone in the next bed. In the air, above the nation, as I write, fly many planes. None of them will be a news, unless they fall down. The people out there walking home, who get home alright, they will not be a news. The ones who fall down: they will be a news.

It is increasingly my view that it is not necessary, or even desirable, to look at a news. News provides a warped, frustrated picture of the world. One that is not true. It is like a badly distorted funhouse mirror. Except it's not at all, in any way, fun.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJWtwW_H-pE]

The news that becomes "history" suffers from a similar problem. If you wander through the recorded human remembrances of what occurred on this date—December 26—in history, it is like touring an abattoir:

—1481: Battle of Westbroek: Holland defeats troops of Utrecht.
—1793: Second Battle of Wissembourg: France defeats Austria.
—1811: A theater fire in Richmond, Virginia kills the Governor of Virginia George William Smith and the president of the First National Bank of Virginia Abraham B. Venable.
—1846: Trapped in snow in the Sierra Nevadas and without food, members of the Donner Party resort to cannibalism.
—1862: The largest mass-hanging in U.S. history took place in Mankato, Minnesota, 38 Native Americans died.
—1895: New Empire Theatre, in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, England was destroyed by fire
—1943: World War II: German warship Scharnhorst is sunk off of Norway's North Cape after a battle against major Royal Navy forces.
—1972: Vietnam War: As part of Operation Linebacker II, 120 American B-52 Stratofortress bombers attacked Hanoi, including 78 launched from Andersen Air Force Base in Guam, the largest single combat launch in Strategic Air Command history.
—1994: Four Armed Islamic Group hijackers seize control of Air France Flight 8969. When the plane lands at Marseille, a French Gendarmerie assault team boards the aircraft and kills the hijackers.
—1996: Six-year-old beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey is found beaten and strangled in the basement of her family's home in Boulder, Colorado.
—2003: A magnitude 6.6 earthquake devastates southeast Iranian city of Bam, killing tens of thousands and destroying the citadel of Arg-é Bam.
—2004: A 9.3 magnitude earthquake creates a tsunami causing devastation in Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, the Maldives and many other areas around the rim of the Indian Ocean, killing over 230,000.
—2006: An oil pipeline in Lagos, Nigeria explodes, killing at least 260.

This is why I and the cat-men have in recent weeks begun to eschew a news in favor of a fish tank. We have discovered that fish are more Real and Pacific and Actual and True than any news. I had hoped to write about the fish this week, but I could not in time secure releases from all of them. Some I think are really jealously guarding their privacy, but others, I believe, are just experiencing difficulty signing the releases, because they don't have any hands. Also, the criminal-crabs keep snatching the little pens from the fish-fins and then scrabbling up the fish ladder to store them in their hoarding criminal-crab nests at the top of the tank. I am in intensive negotations with these criminal-crabs, but they thus far remain rude and defiant. Maybe, hopefully, all this will be straightened out by the next time I wade into the waters of these pages.

There did occur on December 26 something recorded in history that did not involve a charnel house. And that is the birth of Henry Miller.

I don't know if people read Miller these days, but it is at least now possible to do so, which for many years it was not. It was in many nations illegal to publish or own most of Miller's works, during the same period when people like James Joyce and D.H Lawrence were likewise outlawed as "obscene." Indeed, in 1946 George Orwell wrote: "It is a pity that some publisher cannot take his courage in his hands and reissue Tropic of Cancer. About a year later he could recoup his losses by publishing a book entitled What I Saw in Prison, or words to that effect, and meanwhile a few copies of the forbidden text would have reached the public before the entire edition was burned by the public hangman, or whoever it is that has the job of burning banned books in this country."

Orwell was an early and enthusiastic Miller advocate—in 1940 he deemed Miller "the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past"—and Orwell doggedly, and unlawfully, set about acquiring, and passing on, Miller's works, whenever he was able. His struggles in acquiring and trafficking in Miller's work, as well as his attempts to review Miller, no doubt attributed to some of the memory-holing and furtive Goldstein-tome hoarding aspects of 1984. The reviewing experience was particularly peculiar: "In criticising him one has to rely on memory, and since the person who reads the criticism may never get a chance to read the books, the whole process is rather like taking a blind man to see a firework display."

The Miller collection The Cosmological Eye did manage to escape the censor's axe, and therein appeared an autobiographical piece called "Via Newhaven-Dieppe," which, as Orwell aptly summarizes it, serves as a reminder that the present is not the only time in which nations have treated churlishly and brutishly those of few-means who seek to cross "borders."

"Via Newhaven-Dieppe" is a truthful and even moving piece of writing. It records an unsuccessful attempt by Miller to pay a short visit to England in 1935. The immigration officials nosed out the fact that he had very little money in his pockets, and he was promptly clapped into a police-court cell and went back across the Channel on the following day, the whole thing being done with the maximum of stupidity and offensiveness. The only person who showed a spark of decency in the whole affair was the simple police constable who had to guard Miller through the night. The book in which this sketch occurs was published in 1938, and I remember reading it just after Munich and reflecting that, though the Munich settlement was not a thing to be proud of, this little episode made me feel more ashamed of my country.

Below is a song by Dan Bern—of Dan Bern & the International Jewish Banking Conspiracy—which posits that Marilyn Monroe would have been happier, if she had married Henry Miller, rather than Arthur Miller.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKEoJ_dHERs]

In other musics, "A-Soalin'" is a song that Paul Stookey says "began as a guitar exercise in the apartment of a Chicago friend. Sitting on the living room floor I was working on this two-voice ascending-descending part and then trying to sing the wassailing tune against it. Peter overheard from the kitchen, added his folk arpeggiated guitar part, and then in rehearsal we realized that the tune of 'God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen' would fit nicely as a counter melody."

Except that songs with similar lyrical material had been using a melody similar to Stookey's, and/or the one that drives what people know today as "God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman," for hundreds, and perhaps more than a thousand, years. Stookey doesn't necessarily have to be misstating or misremembering here, because these melodies, and this subject matter, began burrowing into the bones of northern European peoples back before they even really began counting time.

"A-Soalin'" is a wassailing song. Wassailing is a pre-Christian, pagan tradition, during which what might be described as the peasantry would attend the homes of what might be described as lords, to there seek offerings of food and drink. In return, the wassailers offered good fortune. Theirs were what is called "luck visits." The word "wassail" is from the Anglo-Saxon "wæs þu hæl," which translates to "be thou hale," which translates to "be in good health." Lords, in distributing food and drink to the wassailers, sought thereby to assure themselves bodily prosperity during the coming year. The wassailers, meanwhile, would arrive with luck and song, and depart with fruit, nuts, meat, ale, and the like. Wassailing occurred each year around this time we have right now here.

Some people seek to claim that wassailing arrived in the British Isles with the Normans. But that can't be right, because the English wassailing song "Somerset Wassail" contains a reference to the sacking of the town of Longport by the Danes, which occurred in the 8th Century, a couple hundred years before the Normans rowed over. The Normans—"Northmen"—were themselves originally Viking pirates and plunderers; they became "Normans" only when the Franks, weary of their attentions upon what is today known as France, bought them off by offering to cede to them the territory of Normandy, if they would only agree to leave off. The newly christened "Normans" did so; but, after a hundred years or so, some of them got restless, and so crossed the Channel, and there took over England.

So all the Norman theory does is indicate that wassailing was an ancient custom prevalent not only in the British Isles, but also across the water on the continent, and up in Scandinavia, too.

When Christianity began gobbling up the souls of the inhabitants of the British Isles, wassailing became associated with Christmas. Still, a number of the wassailing songs delivered by supposedly Christianized carolers retained decidedly secular content. The British composer R. Vaughan Williams, in compiling the several books that arose from his interest in traditional English folk songs, cautioned, in The Oxford Book of Carols, that three of the eight verses of "Wassail Song" "are not suitable when the carol is sung in church." Stookey's "A-Soalin" lyrically most resembles this wassailing variant, which Williams theorized Shakespeare probably heard sung outside his house on a winter's night.

Stookey dumped more god into the lyrics that he removed from "Wassail Song" than were present there in Shakespeare's time—some of these goddisms he lifted from "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen"—but then Stookey was already trending then towards the born-againism that would seize him seriously in the late 1960s, and help to break up his act: which was Peter, Paul, & Mary.

Stookey's "A-Soalin'" tune resembles most closely what Williams rendered in his Book of Carols as "Gloucestershire Wassail," which itself utilizes what is known among British music people as the "London tune"—the same tune that carries "Here We Come A Wassailing," "While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night," "Somerset Wassail" (a.k.a, the exuberantly titled "Wassail and Wassail All Over The Town"), and "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen." The latter, the editor of The Penguin Book of Carols fussily insists, should be rendered "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen," as for want of the comma, so says he, the meaning is lost.

Though the Abrahamic deity and his various friends and associates may at times have crept into these old pagan wassailing songs, wassailers out and about in England still engage in behaviors that would give good churchfolk the vapors. In Devon, for instance: "local wassailers go through the orchards singing loudly and banging pots and pans to wake the trees from their winter slumbers and drive out the evil spirits that stop the boughs from fruiting. Copious amounts of cider are poured over the trees' roots and slices of cider-soaked toast are thrust high into their branches with long-handled forks."

Strong drink has long been associated with wassailing . . . which makes perfect sense when you are asking people to wander around outside in frigid northern Europe in late December. Nicholas Culpeper lists in his 1653 Herbal the then-current contents of the wassail cup: two cinnamon sticks, four cloves, two blades of mace, one ginger root, four apples, a teaspoon of nutmeg, four ounces of sugar, and a half-pint each of brown ale and hard cider.

Wassailing survived even when the British went utterly mad and so started crazily clumping in cities. Young wassailers may be seen in the true-life documentary film Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol: it is when Scrooge rudely slams his door in the faces of tiny wassailing tots that he ensures that night be will be visited by Ghosts. For, spurning wassailers: that runs, all your luck, right down all drains.

Anyway. From the first time I heard it, as a very young lad, I liked "A-Soalin'." I was a California person, I had no experience with wassailing, or snow, or bitter cold . . . much less dirty streets or thin shoes or pockets without a penny. But I felt out in the cold with these people, every time. And, later, as the vicissitudes of life made their occasional passes at me, I drew comfort and strength from the fact that these wassailers of old, worse off than I, could sing "meat nor drink nor money have I none/yet shall we be merry" . . . and presumably mean it. And, therefore, so could I.

It would be easy to assume I connected to the song through some sort of northern European genetic memory or experience. But that doesn't explain the peoples in South and Central America who the tubes show going wild for the thing as presented via Sting's transfigured version "Soul Cakes." I mean, down there in those parts, they do not have a helluva lot of experience with things like snow and cider and Somerset. Nor does it explain the all-Asian men's chorus in British Columbia rendering Stookey's version, there below. The plain truth of it is that the same globalization that allows predatory capital and AK-47s and Kardashians without number to roil all round the world, also allows things that are good and right and true to flash round the planet. "A-Soalin'" is a good song, and so it connects well everywhere. Because this is all one world, and we are all one people. No matter what they will lie and lie and lie to you. In a news.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8VlVYoIViE]

I sorta feel like going out and wassailing right now. But that would probably just mean I would become a news. Headline: "Neighborhood Nutbar In Custody After Disturbing Residents With Moonlit Braying, Pleas For 'Mead'."

Oh well.

A seasonal tradition I have never at all liked is NORAD tracking Santa Claus. I mean, can't these people leave anyone alone? The NORAD people, they are all serial killers, every one—that is, so sorry, their job description—and I just knew that, someday, one or more of them, would not be able to resist the slavering Thanatos temptation to blow the fat man, right out of the sky.

But this year, I read the true story of the genesis of this tradition. And so now I have changed my mind.

It seems that in 1955 a Colorado Springs newspaper printed a Sears ad that featured a photo of Santa, together with the invite: "Call me on my private phone and I will talk to you personally any time day or night." However, either the Sears people, or the newspaper people, buggered up the phone number, and so, when said number rang, it rang not at the North Pole, but instead among the serial killers at the Continental Air Defense Command (NORAD's predecessor).

The first call came in from a little girl . . . and another x-chrome, the daughter of the man who received this first call, relates what happened next.

The call had come in on one of the top secret lines inside CONAD that only rang in the case of a crisis.

Grabbing the phone, Shoup must have expected the worst. Instead, a tiny voice asked, "Is this Santa Claus?"

"Dad's pretty annoyed," said Terri Van Keuren, Shoup's daughter, recalling the legend of that day in 1955. "He barks into the phone," demanding to know who's calling.

"The little voice is now crying," Van Keuren continued. "'Is this one of Santa's elves, then?'"

So far, Shoup is behaving exactly as he would. He has succeeded in the absolute one true essential inescapable task of all members, of all militaries, everywhere on the planet, through all time: to make a child cry.

But then, as the calls continue to come in, Shoup, somehow, evolves into something resembling a human.

Before long, the phone was ringing off the hook, and, softening up, Shoup grabbed a nearby airman and told him to answer the calls and, Van Keuren said, "'just pretend you're Santa.'"

Indeed, rather than having the newspaper pull the Sears ad, Shoup decided to offer the countless kids calling in something useful: information about Santa's progress from the North Pole. To quote the official NORAD Santa site, "a tradition was born."

What this story, about the "wrong number" (wink-wink), tells me, is that the universe here quite clearly and strongly indicated that the true and only purpose of NORAD is to track the flight of Santa Claus. All the horseshit about "air defense"—that is wrong thinking, wrong behavior. And therefore it is all going to go. NORAD is meant but to track Santa Claus, and assure children the world over that he is indeed coming. For everything else, the NORAD people need to down tools. And they will. You watch.

A man in Florida this week became a news when he crashed his car into two businesses and then told responding officers that "he was driving at high speeds on the interstate in an attempt to enter a time portal, and that he did not leave the time portal until the crash occurred."

This man clearly did not heed the wisdom of the true-life documentary series of Back to the Future films, in which it is set forth that automotive time-travel may be accomplished only in a DeLorean. (This fellow, in a Dodge Challenger: he had no hope of success.)

Now, it is well-known, that the DeLorean company was put out of business by the lizard people, who did not want any humans challenging their sneering highstepping mastery of time and space.

Which is why the time machine for some years under construction down there in this basement abjures the DeLorean design. Instead employed has been such humble detritus as a diamondback skin, a Fringe needle, a whiff of comet, and Winslow, Arizona. There are nine additional ingredients, but these I am debarred from here revealing, without clearance from my colleague.

Yesterday morning, a cat down there tripped a switch—the cat tired of waiting on me—and turned the thing on. And: lo: the device seemed, at long last, to be humming into true life. And so I figured: why not? I had always suspected we had been fed something less, and other, than the actual story, about this Christmas thing. And so, I set sail, into the very first Christmas. To learn what really had happened, back then. And, there, then, I Saw, and I Knew. And I returned with a photograph. Of what then, and always has, been. Which I share, with you all, right here, below.

Let, now, the revisionism, begin.

hey ho nobody home
meat nor drink nor money have I none
yet shall we be merry

hey ho nobody home

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1qbYgNfDHI]