A Charlie Brown Depression

I realized a few years ago that I'm subject to wintertime seasonal depression, and when I felt it coming on this year around Thanksgiving, I decided that exercising every day would help fight it. And sure enough, it is helping.

This evening on the treadmill, though, I was flipping channels as usual and happened upon the annual broadcast of "A Charlie Brown Christmas." Several years ago I wrote about how I loved "Peanuts" when I was a kid, but later became repelled by its unrelenting pessimism, which all too well captured what life was like for me as a child. To that I can only add the opening words of the script, which echoed tonight like the prelude to a recurring bad dream:

CHARLIE BROWN: I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus. Christmas is coming, but I'm not happy. I don't feel the way I'm supposed to feel.

I just don't understand Christmas, I guess. I like getting presents, and sending Christmas cards, and decorating trees and all that, but I'm still not happy. I always end up feeling depressed.

LINUS: Charlie Brown! You're the only person I know who can take a wonderful season like Christmas, and turn it into a problem.

Breaks my heart every time.

What's cool lasts

Forty years ago today, on 9 Dec. 1965, "A Charlie Brown Christmas" premiered on CBS.

The "Peanuts" comic strip showed kids in all their geekiness, anger, joy and rage, their weird fantasies (in this case projected onto the dog), their insularity from adults. As a kid I totally identified with Charlie Brown, and I was thrilled that there was an adult out there, somewhere, who didn't have to pretend that life was perfect for kids, who understood that childhood was sometimes simply miserable.

Don't forget to check out the immortal mash-up of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" with Outkast's "Hey Ya!"

Morning of wondrous beginnings

I feel so charged this morning. I got an idea for a new story, thanks to Alexis, who is proving a helpful muse, and I'm blogging like a mozzerfucker. Just look at this NYT article from Sunday on maximalist novels which I like so much I'm archiving it on my site. (So click the second link if you run into a registration page. I rarely do this, because I think the Times has a right to control its content, but certain articles cry out to be read over and over, so if they don't like it they can tell me.)

If I start block-quoting it I'll never stop, so let me just say how thrilled and gratified I am by the endoresement of long, complex books. Not that I've ever read any of the novel cited, but I did write a 490-page novel that I've been afraid for years is "too long" -- and 490 pages is peanuts compared to the books cited.

Imagine a boot stamping on a human face for all eternity

Amnesty International says women and children get the worst of war. The Chilean government has admitted that torture was its official policy during the 1970s and 80s. A U.S. Army Reservist who tried to blow the whistle on the abuse of Iraqi detainees was declared delusional, strapped onto a gurney and flown out of the country.

And that brings us to "Peanuts."

It seems that St. Paul has become home to a multitude of statues of characters from the "Peanuts" comic strip -- the iconic, weirdly ironic daily feature that, like a growing number of others, lives on in syndication long after its creator died. The link is to a nicely cranky op-ed protesting the presence of Peanuts in a park.

When I was a little kid, geting bullied in school and continually humiliated on the sports field, I was so tired of adults patronizing kids and pretending kids had it so great, when my life and that of most of the other kids I knew was more or less a boring grind in a crypto-fascist small town: the strongest lorded it over the weakest, and anyone who didn't fit the definition of "normal" was viciously mocked. I loved the "Peanuts" strip because I felt it revealed American childhood for what it really was.

But when I grew older, I got creeped out by the strip repeating this message decade after decade. I wanted Charlie Brown to somehow finally get over. About a year before his death, I even wrote a fan letter to Charles M. Schultz, the strip's creator, asking him to grant Charlie Brown some sort of redemption. After all, Schultz was the richest cartoonist the world had ever known (though Matt Groenig might have surpassed him by now, I dunno) -- what investment did he have in his character continuing to fail over and over again? What did he have to lose?

I never got an answer, and Schultz died without ever changing the strip's central message: that life was having a football being yanked away from you, over and over again, for eternity. Nice strip for kids!