Gonzo Xmas 2022 -

So, as the sun sets on that memory, I raise a glass of leftover eggnog—which is mostly bourbon—to the Gonzo Christmas. To the year we finally realized that sanity had gone on vacation and we were left to run the asylum. It was loud, it was expensive, it was deeply, profoundly unhinged. But it was ours. And in the fear and the loathing, we were, for a fleeting moment, actually alive.

That is the gonzo truth of Christmas 2022. It was not a silent night. It was a cacophony of supply chain failures, viral respiratory infections (a “mild cold” that felled three cousins), and the ghost of inflation haunting every grocery receipt. It was a nation trying to anesthetize its collective trauma with cinnamon-scented candles. gonzo xmas 2022

It wasn't just consumerism; it was frantic consumerism. People weren't buying the latest PlayStation or a weighted blanket for Aunt Carol; they were buying normalcy . They were throwing credit cards at a wall of supply-chain shortages, hoping something—anything—would stick. The shelves were empty of the specific brand of canned pumpkin, but overflowing with a terrifying anxiety that you could taste in the air, like burnt wiring. We were all trying to decorate a house that was actively on fire. So, as the sun sets on that memory,

Hunter S. Thompson taught us that the only way to capture a deranged reality is to become a part of it. You do not report the fear and loathing; you inject it into your morning coffee. And Christmas 2022 was a prime specimen of national psychosis. The world was limping out of a three-year pandemic that had redefined “isolation.” The economy was a Rube Goldberg machine of inflation and interest rates. War raged in Ukraine, poisoning the energy grids of Europe. And yet, in the shopping malls of middle America, a grotesque pantomime was being performed: the desperate, sweaty insistence that everything was fine . But it was ours

Tuesday. Christmas was Sunday.