To The Expositor:
Dear Santa,
I have been very good this year.
It didn’t work.
I am sending 2025 back to Amazon for a full refund. In the “reason for return” section I checked box number seven of nine, to wit: “Product failed to perform according to published specifications.”
I feel this is fair. This product has had eleven months to steer humanity away from its headlong rush into personal gratification and towards the collective survival of the species. Eleven months to elevate my mood, restore my faith in human progress, and cancel The Kardashians. All very reasonable expectations and just rewards for my good behaviour, if you ask me.
But I have endured this most recent flight around the sun with the “fasten seat belt” light permanently and jeeringly lit up. Not only that, but during particularly turbulent stretches when I have been compelled to reach for the little white bag in the seat pouch in front of me, I find instead only a glossy, laminated 8×10 card extolling civilization’s foolproof safety features and instructions on what to do when they all fail. “Breathe normally” will be, I fear, my final failure as I fumble with my oxygen mask while my sanity, in its frantic packaging, hurtles towards the psych ward at the speed of an unpaid parking ticket. With the seat belt light on.
Despite the promise of a buoyant stock market, weight loss breakthroughs, and the release of the Epstein files, 2025 began, and remains, a hissing blowtorch. I can only pull the blanket up over my head for so long before my bladder gets cranky. Stumbling out of bed is, unfortunately, mandatory. And as I wander the empty corridors of my morning brain, sooner or later I will inevitably stub my toe on the threshhold of the doorway marked “Daily Angst” and find myself face-to-face with a well-worn menu of existential threats to mankind in general, and my children specifically, any one of which will proceed to annoy me for the rest of the day.
Last Monday it was music. Our generation, literally, rescued civilisation from “Rama Lama Ding Dong” and “Rubber Ducky”. To which we retaliated with Joni Mitchell, Stan Rogers, Bruce Cockburn, and Bob Dylan. “…to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, silhouette by the sea, waiting only for my boot heels, merely wandering…” Poetic nourishment, visually compelling. Songs which illuminate some hidden, or sometimes forbidden, back pocket of the human condition. “The River” or “The Jeannie C.” And where has popular music brought us in the last 50 years? “You nothin’ but a stupid ho, You nothin’ but a stupid ho, You nuthin’….. and so forth. Have you checked out the top ten downloads on Spotify lately? Wall-to-wall drivel, much of it AI-generated fake music by ghost artists in their employ.
A couple of weeks ago it was science. I understand science. When I was five, I used to incinerate ants on the sidewalk with a magnifying glass. We played with hollow plastic rocket ships that you filled half-way with water, then pumped up with air, and they flew maybe 20 feet in the air. Today they’re filled with nuclear warheads, pumped up with liquid hydrogen, and span continents. Russia is piling them into Belarus these days. Yes, we have Hubble and Webb and Curiosity, but down here, flailing about within this gas envelope, I fear the bad guys have infiltrated just about every avenue of scientific progress intended to make our lives longer and happier. Every time I check my email I scan the header of each and every message at least three times because I know, seriously, that I am one mouse click away from losing my retirement to an AI-empowered hacker in a closet in Beijing.
And what about ladies’ fashion? I can’t say that I have ever paid much attention to trends in ladies’ attire, despite my mother’s profession as a commercial fashion artist back in the days when department stores had art departments. I do, however, lament the fact that women’s evening gowns of any generation fail to include a loop on the side in which to hang your hammer, a shortcoming that the fashion industry should have corrected eons ago. But these days I am truly dumbfounded by how some women present themselves. Last Friday I saw a TV interview with an entertainer of some status in Las Vegas. The lady in question was handsome and articulate, but her head was shaved, her eyelashes were borrowed from a water buffalo, she wore enough chains around her neck to bring Arnold to his knees, and wielded fake fingernails out to HERE. They were shaped like daggers and every one was a different colour. How do you get through each and every day wearing those things? How in heaven’s name do you brush your teeth without winding up like Jack Nicholson in “Chinatown”? And how the hell do you go to the toilet without ending up in the E.R.?
Don’t get me started on global warming. I remember years when there was three feet of snow in the bush for deer season. This year I was debating whether or not I should cut the grass. Many hunters have given up on bow season because it’s too warm to hang a deer in the shed even if they shot one. Last week it was warmer in Anchorage than it was in Atlanta. And speaking of Anchorage, the snow crabs have disappeared, starved to death by a heat wave in the Bering Sea. Four billion of them. Kaput. Sayonara.
I had hoped we were getting smarter. We’re not. Want proof? Go look in your glove compartment. When you bought a new Ford in the seventies you got a set of feeler gauges with instructions in the owners’ manual on how to adjust the engine’s valve lash. Today’s manuals have big warnings in bold print with red borders not to drink the battery acid.
But most alarming of all is the global embrace of social media. The village idiot has taken the throne. Back in my day we had this moldy, old-school practice called “critical thinking”. Each individual would gather facts (we had facts back then), evidence, and opposing arguments from various sources and then question assumptions, identify biases, and recognize logical connections before coming to a conclusion that informed our moral values and helped shape what Dr. Martin Luther King called “the content of our character.”
Today we needn’t go through all that bother. Critical thinking has gone the way of the mastodon, the Columbia House Record Club, and customer service. Just fire up TikTok or Instagram and Presto! There’s a social media influencer with millions of minions who will explain to you, at no charge, exactly what your opinion should be on any given topic. For every subtly nuanced, complicated, and intricate moral dilemma that might pose some internal quandry, you can now instantly call up a smiling, perfectly coiffed support guru who will provide you with a simple, robust, easy-to-understand wrong answer.
I fully accept the fact that I am responsible for my own happiness, and have taken action accordingly. I joined a trainspotting club, for example, but the movement of trains here on the Island is rather sparse, and I was expelled after having made no contributions whatsoever for six months. More successful was the correspondence course I took on Witchcraft and Sorcery, which has provided me with endless hours of enjoyment and my ex-mother-in-law with a nice case of barnacles.
I am also bracing myself for the onslaught of 2026. I recently bought a large, sturdy, solid oak desk that will not collapse when I beat my head against it.
But I fear I have not done enough. I need a perspective shift of the highest order. I require a radical re-plumbing of the interior of my skull.
And so, dear Santa, I have but one item on my wish list this year. I want my optimism back. I don’t want to wind up a sad, embittered old grouch, escorted from the staff Christmas party and put on a watch list.
This might not be impossible. I am fortunate to live in a place where we still take pretty good care of each other. And we are finally starting to fumble our way towards some kind of reconciliation with our neighbors, who we nearly exterminated four hundred years ago.
But I want more.
I want responsible journalism back. We had Barbara Frum and Walter Cronkite and Lister Sinclair. Now we get Tucker Carlson. Give us back Peter Gzowski. May Alex Jones burn in hell.
I need more of what brings me joy. I want to pour another round of cognac for Joe Pass and Stephane Grapelli as they play “Sweet Lorraine” at my kitchen table. I want the inner peace of a Peter Baumgarten sunrise when feet glide into my slippers in the morning. I want Rocky and Bullwinkle back, not so much because they are a touchstone from my youth, but because they represent a certain kind of excellence that modern entertainment has abandoned in favor of shockingly bad taste.
I want the sizzle of a taut fishing line as it shreds the surface of Sturgeon Cove at sunset. I want the clairity of insight of an Ivan Wheale split-rail fence beneath a blanket of sunlit snow and sky. I want the smell of frying bacon floating up the staircase in any place, on any day.
And not just for me. For us all. Bring us an antidote to the sheer blinding idiocy propelling us into a future that is so easily, and so alarmingly foretold. Promise me that 2026 will bring us the tools to make it right. Promise me that my children will not be incinerated on the sidewalk. And ease the troubled mind of this ancient soul as I totter into antiquity.
Your friend,
Dave
Mindemoya
