And Then a Light Bulb Didn't Come On

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

And Then a Light Bulb Didn’t Come On

The Christmas casualties have hardly been processed through triage in time for the next offensive, New Year’s.

The odd thing about New Year’s is that it probably isn’t. January 1st as the beginning of the year is a late Roman tradition honoring Julius Caesar and his reformed calendar as well as Janus, the pagan god of doors, gates, and beginnings. Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism recognize other dates, as does China. For Christians the new year begins with the first day of Advent, and the U.S. government recognizes a fiscal year that does not correspond to the calendar year.

These considerations mean little to the thousands who will lemming together in New York’s Times Square (undoubtedly the Center of the World) on what may or may not be new year’s to be patted, probed, interrogated, and inspected in anticipation of yet another semi-obligatory jollification followed by casualty lists on the next day’s news, surrounded by pictures of Chinese-front millionaires in Chinese-made camouflage and strange young women posing naked on cannonballs which perhaps were not made in China.

We won’t be reading our morning newspapers with the aid of light bulbs for much longer, since with the new year almost all light bulbs will be forbidden by edict in the land of the free. By order, our mandated light sources will be strange helical constructions filled with toxins. We have been instructed to believe that these Buck Rogers gadgets last many years longer than the beastly old global-warming light bulbs in spite of the demonstrated reality that they don’t. The brilliant excuse made after the glowing fact is that the new squiggly things will emit rays on the visual spectrum for longer if the base is down. So, foolish people that we are, we didn’t build our houses with the light fixtures on the floor. What were we thinking?

The old joke about this being President Bush’s fault doesn’t work here since (we must throw some light on the source of the light source) President Bush really did sign off on the people’s permitted illumination on December 19, 2007.

Some people, perhaps well-lit themselves, celebrate what might or might not be a new year by discharging firearms into the air. A real problem with this is the old law of gravity, which really isn’t a law, the fact that whatever goes up must come down: tennis balls, birds, arrows, airplanes, your retirement investments, and bullets. A bullet fired into the air begins to slow, and then to slowly slow, and then to stop. Following its brief pause to check out the scenery ‘way up in the sky, the bullet begins slowly falling back to earth. Then it begins to fall faster and faster, following the acceleration constant as taught in 6th grade. When that little bullet falls back to earth, its small weight is propelled so fast by gravity that it will with ease penetrate a human. One moment someone’s outside celebrating a new year that might or might not be new, an artificial date on an artificial calendar that exists with or without one’s celebration, and the next moment that someone is dead from someone else’s falling bullet. What fun.

This is why for years (however they are measured on this irregular spheroid wobbling around along an elliptical orbit) the New Orleans police have parked beneath highway overpasses at midnight. Indeed, the beginning of 2013 was marked by the astonishing news that no one in America’s Most European City was struck by a falling bullet for three years running (http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2012/01/no_one_hit_by_falling_bullets.html).

Well, here’s a wish that your new year (if this is a new year) is happy in every way, that no bullets fall on you or your family, that your democratically-elected toilets flush, and that your democratically-elected squiggly lights emit enough light to permit you to read without being poisoned or irradiated.

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