American Fez

'Why bother?' That old, persistent, uncomfortable question that faces the keepers of many flames, especially those obscure flames, like this blog, American Fez, that only flicker in the darkest crevices of the most obscure caverns of ye olde World Wide Web. I've employed the phrase 'uninterested majority' in the title of this post, but that implies there actually exists a minority that is interested. But there isn't.  There is only me, the keeper of the blog flame, mumbling these verbose screeds to myself while I type, hoping there are more books of matches somewhere in the pockets of my cloak to relight the fire when it self-extinguishes from lack of inspiration. And that happens more often than not these days. What is there to write about, anyway, that isn't already written and rewritten as a meme then adapted into an TikTok video. Too much quantity, too little quality. Everything is consumed and regurgitated at an alarming rate by an insatiable audience ...

'A house is not a home' is particularly true in my neighborhood, where developers are demolishing old, shingled Victorians and building functional boxes instead. These new constructions are two bedroom hamster cages where the inhabitants subsist rather than live; spaces designed for binge-watching Netflix and doom-scrolling through social media. It seems we have expanded the concept of TV Dinners into total Flat Screen Residential Existence. Le Corbusier's Machine for Living has become a CPAP Machine for Living. We are more concerned with streaming platforms on our devices than books in our bookcases. The family room is now an area where directionless individuals impersonate the vegetable of their choice until bedtime.  Sometimes, when walking the dog down my street, I see someone staring out of a window with a worried expression on their face. I used to know who lived in that house when it was a home. But now I have no idea who those anxious features belong to. Could be an...

Walking past my neighbor's seasonally decorated house last night, I noticed that the illuminated nativity scene in the front yard was reduced to the Three Kings of Orient only. I'm pretty certain their lowly-cattle-shed diorama included a full complement of characters last year, so what has happened to the holy family, attendant angels, shepherds and oxen? Moreover, the actual cattle shed itself is missing, and the Three Kings consequently exiled to an unkempt forest of privet hedges and boxwoods, their only guiding star being a nearby street lamp that shines over an illegally parked Honda CRV instead of the birth of baby Jesus.  Apparently, this year's nativity scene is set around December 20th or 21st, when the Three Kings are still traipsing across nowheresville Judea via plastic camel. No room at the Inn or on the lawn either it seems. But such minimalism is not a bad idea, especially if you want some sort of nativity scene display but lack the energy to build the whole...

Lunch with Ugly Alan is always a B-movie horror film experience. I'm seated across the table from a low-budget Frankenstein's monster, who needs several extra bolts of lightning to become fully animate. Any normal person would require ten hours of heavy green make-up application and a prosthetic nose to look as hideous as he does. Just look at him as he throttles an entire bottle of vinegar onto his plate with gorilla-sized hands. Ugly Alan's body is an awkward assemblage of cut-price parts: graveyard eyes, discount legs, second-hand feet, torso found in the back of a junk shop. And his huge, misshapen head appears glued onto a broken neck, precariously balanced on his shoulders, about to fall off at any moment and roll across the restaurant's linoleum floor in the final, spine-chilling scene. Then the credits would roll as a busboy brings more napkins to mop up the mess and the waitress arrives with my check. Fortunately, Ugly Alan's head somehow manages to remain ...

Imagine your prayer is answered, but only by 'the first available angel,' and you are put on hold.  The hold music: an angelic choir accompanied by plucked harps interrupted by an ethereal voice, "We are currently experiencing higher than usual call volume. Please stay on the line. Your prayer is important to us."  How long will you wait? Perhaps your connection to the divine can be made hands-free, so you can go about other business while you wait, instead of kneeling beside your bed for an interminable amount of time, listening to the angelic choir, harps and ethereal voice on loop. But what if it can't, and you lose your place in the celestial queue, or worse, you hear the dreaded dial tone from a cloud as the line goes dead? What then? And what if Heaven has outsourced its prayer-call-center to Purgatory, so even when your call is eventually picked-up, your prayer is answered by a soul-in-Limbo who can only speak incomprehensible, heavily accented English.  ...

Despite the wailing of soapbox Chicken Littles, we do not live in a "post-truth society." We've never been told any truth in any era. Politicians have always been bald-faced liars and promoters of historical fiction. Where we actually live is a post-literate society: a world of sound-bytes, out-of-context quotation, and the gamification of government. We can no longer read between the lines, which is admittedly difficult to do when the lines all converge into a meaningless scribble of platitudes and empty promises, but we don't try anymore.  After so many centuries of bitter disappointment and profound frustration, we've finally given up hoping for integrity and honesty in our public figures and settled for simply taking sides, no matter how odious are the teams we choose. 'We won that round' is all that matters, even if it's the most Pyrrhic of Pyrrhic victories; even if the hustings and polling stations are reduced to a wasteland of fear and paranoia...