Bob Dylan is from another planet, a distant heavenly sphere on which it is always Christmas. He earns an Honourable Badge of Merit for this festive gem of festive gems, a very merry polka-zydeco chase sequence:

Now back to my regularly scheduled fare of Shostakovich, hip hop, and electro from other dimensions. Advised listening:

“Hold the Line” - Major Lazer

“Deadbeat Summer” - Neon Indian

Flying Lotus’s impeccable remixes of Lil Wayne

“Popular Demand” - Lupe Fiasco

Happy Festivus from Atlanta.

Tis that time of year when solitude creeps in and can’t be kicked out. The warm fuzzies of holiday parties, exchanges of knacks and knicks, downings of buttered rums and unbuttered, crapulently spiced seasonal beers—all these do little stave off the feeling that the short cold days are not on your side, and that all your fellows, as wonderful as they may be, are ultimately kept secret and distant from you by an unseen wall of selfish cells, spent time, differing routines, and twisting, unrelenting private thoughts.

Teh winter, ZOMG, is here.

And yet that’s no reason to despair. We have a dude named Maria to help us through, for he has written many dope verses about the human spirit, its singularity and lonesomeness, and how it can interact with other spirits—like a chipper terrier at a sometimes-empty dog run (only, you know, a terrier made all ectoplasmic and goopy-divine and whatnot).

Kick back, and let Maria (Rainer _____ von Rilke) jam on human interactions, and why sometimes a little winter of the spirit is a good thang:

It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

A person isn’t who they are during the last conversation you had with them—they’re who they’ve been throughout your whole relationship.

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

There are no classes in life for beginners. Right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.

Word.

Related and also worth considering is this Gordon Marino essay on the difference between depression and despair. According to Marino, Kierkegaard defines despair as a self’s inability to live as… itself. Anybody, even a happy person, can know a deep sense of despair. Simply, if you can’t be content being you, and being stuck alone being you, then winning the lottery and impressing millions of people mean nothing.

Perhaps some people—the lucky few, the Lamas, the Buddhas, the Neil Youngs—just know who they are, straight up, no fakery. Most of us, however, are locked in a battle with ourselves, autumnal cannibals. We are our own uncharted hinterlands. We know less, we worry, as we learn about ourselves, and the dead of night jumps on us like a cat, forcing us awake with a start: Who am I? (Think Jackie Chan now.) What do I want?

Recently, in my solitude, I have just barely limned in dreams the edges of my spirit. I have seen the holy mountain, as it were—but I have astigmatism, and my glasses were nowhere in sight.

The following is the totality of my understanding of my own spirit, as of this night, Tuesday, December the First, MMIX:

• Want: [ ], blue mint birds, books written, everyone clapping, rapping music, shaving more excellently, solitude is like Rilke, cat will be flying, winter is making cat turn invisible-white and make noise from horns mysterious to grow on its brain-head, plus all the beer at the bar really red wine and I am not even drinking it.

• Do not want: books writing, making bad verse recordings, shavings bump, solitude is like Beavis and Butthead in later years when first member of duo passes due to lung cancer (very sad never aired episode), winter is not ending, cat is awake even though I am thrown all of Roma library at him until he is bleeding Gibbon, plus never anything to drink but beer.

The NYTimes reports on our ongoing war against the grotesque—and consequently against fun, against childhood, and against the imagination. The war’s a pity, since it will never be won.

By excising Scream masks from public schools, officials will only encourage children to go home and experiment in the “Satanic” (as Halloween is described in the Times piece by one Illinois school district spokesman) on their lonesomes. Sales of Left For Dead and True Blood DVDs will rise. The truly maladjusted will continue to torture housepets and use depth charges to destroy their parents’ bowls of Grape Nuts. When all is said and micromanaged, keeping schools free of darknesses, real and imagined, will not drive those darknesses from the world.

Meanwhile, children will miss out on a wonderful holiday, a non-religious day of atonement on which reckless merrymaking, sugar-consumption, and grotesque miming lead us down too-often unexplored paths in our minds.

Grotesque miming does us a real mythological service, I think: It allows us to confront our demons in the daylight, in the shapes of our friends and frenemies. A dance party full of Franken-people, vamps, James Browns, cosmonauts, Elvises, and unicorns becomes a vivid, tangible dream wherein before there was an empty floor and a pair of speakers. (Nightmares serve a similar function and can be similarly cathartic.)

A classroom full of Kanyes and zombies (oh my) asks children to externalize their own fantasies and terrors, and to confront those of their peers. The pooled child-mind purges itself of gorillas, Beyoncés, pirates, and ghosts. Darkness is made grotesque, overwrought, impossible, silly—in a word, real. And thus its power vanishes.

I wonder what is to be learned in a realm of positive costumes, where approved archetypes (unicorns) and the mimesis of role models (Beyoncés) are okay, but confrontations with fears real (pirates) or imagined (zombies) are not. On a day of what should be cathartic, real-problems-preventing rule-breaking, the enforcing of vague rules of costume-etiquette and pseudo-taste strikes me as imagination-hamstringing, at best.

I hope the children all go as Anonymous this year.

It’s apparently the end of baseball season: Even as I write, millions of Americans are gearing up to watch the World Series [Of America Only], during which rival cohorts of swollen, tights-clad men with cudgels will parade around sandy rhombi.

One last hurrah these quasi-gentle giants will have, before they all catch H1N1 and are reduced to ague-wracked skeletons. But what a hurrah t’will be. The winners will literally eat the losers alive, and, if we’re lucky, the Gods Of The Games will be pleased enough to let Susan Boyle sing our National Anthem, perhaps alongside T-Pain…

I lose myself in reverie. The point of this essaylette is that John “Touched The Sky” Updike was the only person whose words have ever made me truly give a dang about sports.

Now, I may have railed against Updike sometimes for focusing too intently on the more boring facets of life in America, such as sports and tedious divorces. But Mr. Updike was truly a wonderworker, all told, as his cornucopic corpus of soul-lifting fiction, nonfiction, sportswriting, and poetry attests. He even wrote a story about prehistoric mammals (and divorce).

What’s more, he even made me love baseball. For about five seconds.

So now, Gentle Reader, in honor of baseball’s icy death at the hands of November, in honor of its various color-coordinated, beer-sodden teams & players, and most of all in honor of Mr. Updike, who is (presumably still) dead, I present a snippet from King Kaufman’s lovely Salon.com encomium of John-Updike-The-Sportswriter:

Six-thousand words later he’d summed up Williams’ career and that final day at Fenway, capped, of course, by the Splendid Splinter hitting a home run in his final at-bat. That inspired Updike to write the most famous thing ever written about the Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived. It’s the last sentence of this passage describing the aftermath of Williams’ final swing:

Though we thumped, wept, and chanted “We want Ted” for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.