Creatio Ex Nihilo

A Christmas Rant: But Wait! There's More!

I hate road construction.  Why is it that states and counties only seem to do roadwork when I am in a rush to get somewhere?  Why is it that the pothole which I repeatedly hit and damaged my car’s suspension goes unrepaired for months until the day I need to get to an appointment and am running ten minutes late to begin with?  Most of all, I hate that awkward situation, when after yelling in my car about the roadblock ahead, I move to front of the line and have to sit with my window open, just a few feet away from the guy with the sign at whom I was yelling just a few minutes earlier.   That’s when I do that little sheepish hand wave gesture of “Hi. Nice day.”

 My opposition to road construction goes way back to when I was a child.  On family vacations, when we would get stuck in construction traffic, I would whine from the back seat.  My childhood whines were not the usual ones of “Are we there yet?” I’m proud to say.  My whines consisted of what I thought was a brilliant question, “How come they’re still working on the roads?  When is everything in the world going to be finished?”   I had all these books as a child about how things were built and how they worked.  So I couldn’t understand why once something like a road was built, that wasn’t the end of it.  Why did they have to keep working on it?  When was everything going to be finished?

Even as adults, I believe we express that same frustration. Before we own a home, we look forward to it. We picture moving in, renovating the rooms we want to change and just settling in.  Then as homeowners, we quickly discover that age-old axiom that the house is never done.  There’s always something left to do.  There’s always a project that needs doing, or re-doing.  There’s always a repair to be made.  Just when you feel you’re catching up, you or your spouse get the idea to add-on something new, a deck, a room, a pool.  It seems it never ends.  Like a whining child, we may well ask, “When is the world going to be done?” 

A Christmas Rant: What Are We Waiting For?

This Christmas, I have reached an important conclusion.  The conclusion is this; Paul McCartney’s “Simply Having A Wonderful Christmastime” is the most likely the worst Christmas song ever.  What makes it so bad is the fact that Paul wrote it.  What do I mean by that?  This is the man who wrote “Hey Jude”.  He wrote “Let it Be”.  He wrote “Yesterday”.  How could the same person write  “Simply Having A Wonderful Christmastime”?

 It would be like meeting Michelangelo and asking him, “What’s that over there in the hallway?”

“Why, that’s my statue of David,” he would answer.

“It’s beautiful. And what’s up above us?”

“That’s my ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,” he says.

“Amazing.  What is that hanging on the wall over there?” you would ask.

“I call that dogs playing pool with Elvis on black velvet.”

Artists have ups and downs in their careers.  They have high points and low points.  The same is true of celebrities.  We’ve certainly seen that in the news the past few weeks.  During the low points, the key is to turn your image around.

I am neither a celebrity nor a public relations expert, but I think I know the secret to boosting the sagging career of a celebrity.  It’s simple.  Say or do something offensive.  Insult an ethnic or racial group, a city or a religion.  Have an affair. Get in trouble with the law.  Take a look at some recent examples; Kanye West, Michael Richards, David Letterman, or Chris Brown.  It’s not so much the insult or misdeed that will boost your career.  It’s the apology.

A Christmas Rant: You Better Watch Out!

As children, many of my generation grew up in a time when our mothers stayed at home while our father’s worked.  So it usually fell to our moms to watch us and care for us after school.  It was a great time, back when you could just wander your neighborhood, playing with friends or riding your bike to explore new ares of your block.  You could be on your own until dinner time.  Every once and a while though, the afternoon didn’t go so well.  Sometimes we would get in trouble, maybe a fight with a friend or an experimentation with scissors and hair.  When we were older, perhaps we went from  playing with our GI Joe’s to burning our GI Joe’s.  For all its innocence, it was a time when getting in trouble was always just around the corner.

 When that trouble came, our moms were not so happy.  Usually our misdeeds would happen late in the afternoon while dinner was being prepared.  After a long day of housework and now cooking, our moms had little patience and even less time for discipline.  Usually, our infractions led to us being sent to our room by a now frazzled mother.  That was bad enough, but what put fear in our hearts was when our mothers said those magic words, “Wait till your father gets home.”

That was the worst.  What was Dad going to do?  For some people, those words were just Mom’s way of putting off dealing with the problem and were usually followed by a perplexed Dad coming home and wondering what was going on.  In other households, those words still evoke terror, especially among those who grew up with physical abuse.   “Wait till your father gets home” was a just a euphemism for “Dad’s going to knock the crap out of you.”

Unfortunately, many of us think of God in that same way.  We turn God into the abusive father who is going to come home and kick the crap out of us.  When someone says, “God is coming” or “Jesus is coming back again,” we think, “Well that can’t be good.”  It sounds eerily like “wait till your father gets home” all over again. We have learned to associate the coming of God with destruction, violence, and revenge.  At the same time, we are told that this wrathful God coming into the world is good news.   “How can that be?” we wonder.