Mark Morford's Happy New Year

You Say You Want A Resolution
What to do when the new year invites you in and plies you with drinks and slips you the tongue
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, December 30, 2005


Is this the year? Is this the time you reset your intent and cut a wide swath and upset your preconceptions and infuriate the fearmongers and the fundies and the sexually terrified, even as you disavow your grudges and cleanse your spiritual colon and wave your bitchin' flame of self around like a Bic lighter at a 1984 Journey concert?

Because gosh look, just look outside, right now: Do you see it? It's a whole new year, all lined up and facing into the wind and waiting to play with you like an eager puppy, like a supple French hooker, like a shimmering glass of God's own tequila just sitting on the counter of possibility waiting for you to tip your head back and let that white-hot firewater slide down your throat like a snake of temptation straight into your undernourished id. Are you ready? Because get this: You need to be.

Because here's the bad news: We have three more ungodly and humiliating and colon-curdling years of BushCo. We have three more years of some of the most miserable foreign and environmental and human-rights policy you will see in your lifetime.

We have three more years of brutal unforgivable war and misprision and of the religious right trying to cram its splintered stick of wicked self-righteousness straight up the country's yamdinger, and if I'm here to tell you anything at all I am here to tell you this: Your energy is needed. Right now.

Energy of transformation. Energy of possibility. Energy of intellect and clarity and progress and joy and sex and kiss, of change and growth and defiance. Oh I know, it sounds all swoony and big-brushed and impossibly affected. It might sound all froufrou and New Agey and San Francisco. You know what? Who cares.

For lo, I have seen the great surges of flesh and credit card debt and obesity at the local Wal-Mart, big-box stores erupting like a plague across the land, the relentless American craving for cheap-ass Chinese-made crap and toxic garbage food continuing unabated like some sort of perpetual tsunami that continues to crash against the ravaged shore of common sense.

I have seen major industry steep the landscape in enough unchecked pollution to make the ice caps melt and the animals gag and the forests hack like dying emphysema patients, watched massive Midwestern megachurches maim the notion of the healthy self-defined individual soul, borne witness to the inexplicable success of Ashlee Simpson and Mariah Carey while trying, every single day, to allay the shuddering effect of Tom Cruise and Paris Hilton and the Olsen twins with ointments and salves and fine single-malt scotch.

Against the backdrop of a leering and spiritually depraved leadership, I have witnessed the death of poetry. As my friend Rob Brezny points out in his outstandingly odd and delicious book of divine conspiracy, "Pronoia," an estimated 37 million Americans take antidepressants. By the time they hit age 17, 78 percent of teenage girls are unhappy with their bodies. The United States is the biggest arms dealer in the world, by a long shot. Half of all war casualties are civilians caught in the crossfire. And so on.

I have watched the rise of the morally bankrupt Christian fundamentalist mind-set in America with equal parts disgust and sadness and bemusement, all overlaid with a general sense that just about everything these people do is pretty much the exact opposite of what Jesus had in mind. Which is exactly what makes them so dangerous.

I have seen the big pharmcos work like intestinal worms to create a nation of jittery and confused prescription-drug addicts, Big Auto refuse to improve mpg or cop to the overall abusive idiocy of the monster SUV, heard the president mutter the actual words, "We do not torture," as the United States quickly becomes, in its global actions and disregard for all things humanitarian, little better than the fundamentalist terrorists it claims to despise.

And lo, it is bleak and nasty and gray as death's own gum disease.

On the other hand, I have seen new voices of protest being born straight out of the pious machinery of fundamentalist ignorance. I have seen the coolly blasphemous alt-spirituality segment of the bookstore explode and flourish and make a calm mockery of the belief that godhood is somehow unattainable to calm and open-hearted people right here, right now.

Community is flourishing in new and astounding forms, via 10 thousand blogs and 10 million photo-sharing Web pages and countless bizarre blinking winking communication devices, our frayed human interconnections constantly regenerating in new and unexpected ways, like nerve endings after a traumatic accident.

I have watched the fundamentals of industrial design elegance finally invade the public consciousness (thanks, Apple Computer), watched the organic food movement bloom and catch hold (albeit imperfectly), swooned as Fiona Apple returned to show everyone how the sultry lithe songstress thing is supposed to be done. I have read of the discovery of fiery new stars, odd new planets, unexpected remote galaxies that make your ego spin and your perspective reel and your spirit giggle knowingly.

I have seen the failure of the false gods, of the intelligent design simpletons, the ugly macho kill-'em-all Hummer mentality. I have witnessed the hijacking of the Republican Party by dangerous neocon nutballs and then watched their seemingly impenetrable fortress of war and homophobia and intolerance, one of the most secretive and controlling and dishonest regimes in American history, crack and crumble in a matter of months under the weight of their insufferable deception and duplicity.

And lo, this is cause indeed for rejoicing. Or at least for a modicum of smile, a subcutaneous whisper that, really and truly, all is not lost.

So then, as the new year races to engulf us all, perhaps this is what you can choose, this is what you resolve to understand: that the Great Battle continues. The great surge toward enlightenment and evolution must go on, will go on, can't not go on, as those of us who choose to see it understand that we are already reeking gleaming teeming brimful with all the divine juicy godhead we will ever need. It is merely waiting to be, quite literally, turned on.

It is, after all, all about subtle energy, shifts in awareness, the decision to move forward no matter what. It is all about focusing on micro to affect macro. This much you probably already know. In which case, this year you can simply resolve to, well, continue. To keep on, even when it all seems bleak and fraught and impossibly constricted. Because, sometimes, merely refusing to stop cultivating an unquenchable lust for beauty and truth and orgasmic life is the most profound and important thing you can resolve to do.


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Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate and in the Datebook section of the SF Chronicle. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing. Mark's column also has an RSS feed and an archive of past columns, which includes a tiny photo of Mark probably insufficient for you to recognize him in the street and give him gifts.


As if that weren't enough, Mark also contributes to the hot, spankin' SF Gate Culture Blog.


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2005/12/30/notes123005.DTL