As a kid, I used to get more excited about Christmas. As I got older, I got less excited, mainly as I realized what an empty and kind repetive holiday it really was. Now it’s just another day, with some turkey and food at the family’s house. It’s great, but now it’s gone once again.
Sure there will be New Years, the celebration, the food, and watching the ball drop. But then the Christmas lights will go dark. The tree and all that Christmas trash will get hauled out to curb in city, or burned in the country. It will be all gone.
The colorful lights that lit the outside of buildings will be dimmed and dismantled. The season’s joy will either go in the trash or into the attic to be hid away for another year. It will be all over but the cold of winter. We can keep the smiles on our faces for another week, but then we are facing the most brutal month of the year.
Albany doesn’t get a lot of snow. But it gets a lot of cold. January’s heating bills promise to be high. There will be ice and snow, miserable days standing out in the bus stop as we work our way into a new year. It’s going to be winter. There will be no more lights or holiday cheer. Christmas is over!
There is some things that particularly suck about urban areas. One of them is simply the lack of places to take a piss, particularly after doing a fair bit of drinking.
I don’t know about you, but at least for me after drinking, I usually need to take a piss. When I’m in the woods, it’s not a big deal — every tree works just fine for me. And when I get even more piss drunk, then basically everywhere outside of my pickup is just fine, including the campfire.
It’s kind of nasty, when your sleeping in your bed of your pickup, and you piss on the tailgate. So even in the sticks, you want to aim outside of the pickup. But in urban areas you have to be much more careful where and when you piss.
It’s normally not a big deal. Especially in rural areas, where they’re be nobody smelling it, and the rain will quickly wash the piss and the nitrogen-loaded compounds away. Nobody complains about when a horse or a cow lifts up their tail to spray out gallons of urine in a pasture.
I realize there may be problems with letting people take a piss in urban areas. High levels of nitrogen in one spot will cause the grass to die, as my dog ever so articulately demonstrated with his favorite winter pissing spots, where the snow isn’t so deep.
Then there is whole problem with all those perverted folks, who don’t want to piss but just show off their equipment in our puritan society, which gets people upset when somebody has fake plastic truck nuts on their pickup. We are too much of a honey society that’s paranoid about any reference of sexuality. Don’t let the kids near the pasture when the bull’s out there doing his thing! They might just get idears about what farm animals do.
Yet, I’m sure the major problem with urban pissing, it would just make everything smell like a beef feedlot. As they say, a few gallons of urine being pissed into the pasture, doesn’t really smell like much. Yet, you go to a feedlot, and you know there are lot of cows there, as they are getting fatten up to make your steak tasty.
Cities suck. America should be rural and free, and be a place where people can piss wherever and whenever people want to do such an important activity. This is why we as a society need more acres of pasture, and less of asphalt.
The other day I cued up this song by the Rascals on my old record player. One of my favorite songs, it lyrics quote from the bible and other sources on the topic of freedom. “It’s a natural situation for man to be free.” Indeed, it is.
“You should see, what a wonderful world it would be, if everybody learned to live together.” Such good advice, living in a world that sometimes seems to have so much hatred of our fellow man. We all live on one small planet, and we have to learn to live together and respect our fellow man.
“Seems to me that we got to solve it individuality. I’ll do what you to you what you do to me.” Our world’s great problems won’t be solved by an single individual’s actions, but that of many Americans. We must learn to respect one and other, and realize how we treat one individual will reflect back on how we are treated by others.
The greatest Christmas gift is something that lasts forever. It’s not something whose wrapper you chuck in that 55 gallon drum and celebrate by breathing in that thick black toxic plastic smoke. That is far from happiness. It has to be something far greater then material stuff.
To me it is Patridge Run. Every Christmas morning I go out to that place, going for a nice long walk in the snow, and ride around on snow covered roads with my 4×4 truck and my dog on my side. This is a place of true greatness, of natural happiness far more then what one consumer gift might be. It’s about being natural.
The gift of Christmas is also about being with your family and eating together. It might be a factory farm turkey, or it might be something more natural like venison if your lucky enough at your hunt. The important thing is to be together, to reflect, to be truly part of our earth. The gift is about love.
It’s also the candlelight service and church. It’s about the hope that such a service instills upon us, as a baby more then 2000 years who was born to help us forever cope without weaknesses. A baby not unlike you and I, a king no richer then the typical person on the street.
Christmas should forever last in our minds. It should not be about trash preserved forever in a landfill or toxic smoke produced by our consumerism. We all like stuff, but we should try to dig deeper then plastic bags, and go back out in the same nature that created all of us including Jesus Christ.
