My Science Fiction Christmas

With every season of good will
and expression of joy to the world
I wish it was the last,
less because I want the world to end
and more because I can't cope
with the brain-dead cliches
that media manufactures think
are a fit commercial celebration
for the living to own the event.

The flatness that follows the kitsch and the empty 'hale fellow and well met' type greetings hollow me out, beyond belief.

What I would like to read is the Christmas science fiction story where Martians mimic what rich earthlings do at Christmas, and badly mangle the theology and get the event utterly wrong.

The nearest to such an account I have found is in the following unsentimental work by William Burroughs 'The Junky's Christmas'... 

Your Halloween Friend For Life

Because for William Burroughs (1917-97)
when 'Nothing is true [then] everything is permitted'
- a phrase which describes to describes the present,
and maybe departing, President of the USA
who, whatever he does, is going to cast a long shadow.   

 

The Hope Of Silence

'The word is now a virus.
The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. 
It is now a parasitic organism that invades,
and damages the central nervous system. 

Modern man has lost the option of silence. 
Try halting sub-vocal speech. 
Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. 
You will encounter a resisting organism
that forces you to talk. 

That organism is the word..... '.

From 'The Ticket That Exploded'(1962) -William Burroughs

Four noisy words that make quietness harder.