Zombie Santa Goo
I will not even pretend to admit that I understand anything about Santacon. Don’t get me wrong: anything that increases the odds of seeing trashy middle class faux hos and yo bros stumbling and crashing their skulls into the pavement I’m totally in favor of. But the traveling in packs on a 14 hour bar crawl with others dressed identically to you because it’s “fun” is a concept lost on me. Whatevs. Regardless, I did notice several signs this year that Santacon (at least in my corner of the urban world) may have hit its maximum saturation point, if not the tipping point entirely.
A few examples:
1. When the homeless turn on you, it’s time to retreat.
Starbucks bathrooms exist for one reason: to form a network of public restrooms for otherwise itinerant denizens of the streets. They can be used without proof of purchase. They are occasionally cleaned. They theoretically are functional. But people who have other options for seeking out facilities don’t actually use them. I like to think that Starbucks knows this and provides them as a free service to the homeless (it’s their form of giving back to the community). However, when a gaggle of red skirt and black tights wearing barely legal Mrs. Clauses prevent this residence challenged group from availing themselves of what is rightfully theirs: oh hell no. When gentlemen #1 discovered the swarm of females #1-8 on line for the bathroom, he was less than pleased and made this known verbally (quite verbally). And when none of the Starbucks staff seem to stage an intervention to this or even consider staging an intervention, I knew that they had the same thought everyone else in Starbucks did: It’s fine if you girls want to run around the bars in attempt to test out your new HPV vaccine, but stay out of places where the adults are trying to find refuge from your silliness.
2. Shouting out the window of a cab is annoying. Having someone shout back at you is amazing.
Whilst traveling between points A and B today, avoiding the color-coordinated throngs, I was stopped at a street corner. As traffic flew by, one taxi stood out. Not because it itself had donned the appropriate seasonal red and white garb. Not because it was in fact a hovercraft. No, because as it roared by, windows down, the group of four Santa hat wearing males in the car were slurring the chorus to Rihanna’s We Found Love as it blasted on the radio. By slurring I mean they were shouting indistinct phonemes as loud as they could. Already I’m unimpressed because if it’s still daylight and you’re already too tuckered out slash hammered from Santacon to move from place to place without the aid of a car, then you fail both at Stantacon and at life in general. But what makes it even better is that the Male Santa Experience on the other side of the block shouted back “Shut the fuck up you cunt donkeys!” Two points worth parsing out here: 1. “Cunt donkey,” while possibly original, doesn’t necessarily have a chance of having true lexical inclusion. The voiced vs. unvoiced repetition of the same sound cluster just about ensures that. 2. When Santas begin turning on Santas, the days for the movement are limited. In zombie movies, zombies don’t attack other zombies. Why? Because they need human brains to survive, they don’t need zombie brains to survive. We, as consumers of B movie wonderment, watch that in awe. However, when they begin to kill their own, people stop watching, because who the fuck cares if a zombie population kills another zombie population. They’re no threat to us, other than requiring we clean up the puddles of goo afterwards. And people hate cleaning puddles of goo, and so would just enslave the zombies to clean up their own goo. Santacon revelers are just now on the cusp of becoming those puddles of goo cleaners.
Fear not: the meme will soon be over. Just like that whole public pillow fight thing that never really took off. Stupid.
