The Annual Christmas Letter

(My roommates and I mailed out the following Holiday letter I wrote; we feel it's an improvement upon the genre).

Merry Christmas, Chappy Chanukah, a kickin’ Kwanza, a solemn and dignified Ramadan, and Happy Gregorian New Year to all of our loved ones! It’s been a banner year, let us tell ya’ll what we’ve been up to!

David Harris had quite the surprise, when his experimental Quasar-detection-array accidently opened a portal to a parallel universe, one where everything good is evil and evil is good—where the Taliban is a group of pacifist, democratic feminists, and the Salvation Army is a cadre of anarcho-terrorists! Long story short, this portal led to a climactic battle to the death between evil-David and good-David. Fortunately, good-David triumphed, while our David was vanquished.

Brian Fabbi finally put his Middle-Eastern studies degree to use, and traveled to Tunisia to light himself on fire in front of a police station, thus igniting the Arab Spring. Miraculously, he survived, and continued on from country to country, fomenting rebellion in Egypt, Yemen, Libya and Syria, throwing rocks at cops and Molotov cocktails at tanks. He it was who shot an escaping Gaddafi in Libya. He is currently hunting down Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

Jacob Bender took a job teaching at-risk inner-city high-schoolers. Though they were initially suspicious of this “white cracka’,” he won their respect by breaking the arm of a drug-dealer first day of class—and then won their hearts with his inspiring deconstructions of Joyce. Jacob later deconstructed the entire drug operation, in a giant school-yard explosion he calmly walked away from without looking back. His students then all passed the AP exam.

Jon Buck, unsure of a direction in life, took a walk-about spiritual journey through the deserts of southern Utah. There, he stripped naked, lived off the land, smoked mad peyote, and communed with the universe. When a ravaging coyote tried to take him down, he wrestled it with his bare hands and ate its heart. Now a remorseless savage, he attends business school.

Tyler Bronson used his Taiwanese-Kung Fu ninja skills to hunt down Osama bin Laden. He tracked Osama all the way to northern Pakistan, and alerted Seal Team Six to his presence, for which Tyler still inexplicably apologized. Tyler was not he who shot Osama, but he did shoot the dog, which, depending on who you ask, was either kind of a dick move, or pretty awesome.

Eric Melonakos bridged the final frontier, death itself. He re-animated the brain-tissue of a rat that had been clinically dead for seven minutes. Wild with hubris, he used his mad science to bring a girlfriend to life with cadaver parts. Horrified, Eric ran screaming from his mountain laboratory. The monster then tried to kill Eric’s loved ones, but was destroyed in a burning wind-mill by a mob of angry German peasants. So Eric got a real girl-friend instead.

Happy Holidays!

Love, David, Brian, Jacob, Jon, Tyler, and Eric!

Settlers of Catan Sucks

Last night I was hanging with some old college friends. Inevitably One of them wanted to play Settlers of Catan. They talked me into it by insisting that the board game would be but the background, a prop, a mere casual past-time, during which we would engage in pleasant and intellectually-stimulating conversation. Mostly they were hoping enough time had passed since I last played that abomination that I'd forgotten how much I hated it.

And in fact, they were right: I had forgotten how much I hate Settlers of Catan, though I quickly remembered. And this pleasant and intellectually-stimulating conversation of course never materialized--for once Settlers of Catan begins, any remotely intelligent thought grinds to a halt.

This wretched board (bored?) game is the clearest demonstration yet of the stultifying and regressive effects of trade and commerce on the other-wise boundless human intellect, as everyone's entire mental energy becomes completely occupied with trading the requisite stones and sheep for a brick to build a road in order to complete a settlement and attain the requisite "victory points" necessary to bring the whole asinine ordeal to a merciful close.

And yes, the game is as painfully convoluted and dull as that previous sentence.

There's never been an hour of Settlers of Catan that I didn't feel had been inexorably robbed from my finite number of hours on this earth, that I didn't resentfully want back.

How is Settlers of Catan like real settlement, anyways?! What colonizer has ever actually built houses on the conjunctions of randomly distributed, octagonal, mono-agricultural harvesting areas? How is this terra-forming project not determined by armed conflict on competing claims, revolts from indigenous peoples, from your own settlers, pirates, malaria and natural disasters?

See, this is how you know that this sorry excuse for entertainment was created by Germans! Please note that the Germans have never settled anything. Oh, sure, they've conquered--oh so briefly--a few long-settled neighbors; the Germans have been efficient, oh so efficient, pulling out their slide-rules and compasses in order to organize oh so precisely their modes of conquest--that is, they've treated conquest like a game of Settlers of Catan.

And the result? Failure, repeated and resounding failure, time and time again. The rest of Western Europe--England, France, Spain, Portugal, the Dutch--have all long understood that colonization is a messy, dirty, morally-ambiguous, at-times reprehensible affair. It would never occur to them to produce such a reductive, clean, insultingly-over-simplified and naive game about settlement.

At least Risk gets some blood on your hands; and Monopoly, if nothing else, acknowledges the naked and horrible avarice that guides commerce. Settlers of Catan won't even own up to its own naive convictions--it's a bland and uninspiring wish-fulfillment that doesn't even pathetically offer the vicarious thrill of global conquest.

I met this girl once who claimed that she was undefeated at Settlers of Catan. I offered my condolences that she wasn't undefeated at something that matters.

Angels: They Are Scary

They are not fat little naked babies beaming beatifically along the ceilings of late-rococo French frescoes. They are not air-brushed, honor-code compliant BYU students bouncing on a trampoline in white skirts for some dude's Deseret-book approved photo project. They are not Photoshopped underwear models digitally tweaked for the Victoria Secret Christmas ad campaign. And they certainly are not Precious Moments (tm) caricatures of that photocopied (and copyrighted) blonde-and-exaggerated-puppy-blue-eyes head sitting atop stock-photo wings-robe-and-halo #147.

They are nothing so safe, contained, and commercial as that.

No, according to every scriptural record extant, when an angel appears, they are described as brighter than the noon-day sun, with a "countenance like lightning," and when they speak, the Earth shakes. The first words off their lips are always "Fear not," for even the righteous Prophets fall to their faces in utter terror at the awful and horrible sight of a full-fledged angel in glory. You do not squee "awwww," you don't ask its number, you don't take a picture--at best you are drained of all your strength and consider your own nothingness; at worst the first-born in all of Egypt is slain, and/or you lie in a coma for three days.

I merely bring this up because Christmas is upon us, and there will be lights, and tinsel, and Virgin Mary Maternity Cards, and Michael Buble gently crooning "Fall on your knees/hear the angel's voices..." and Michael McLean having lil' Handel running Celestial choir practice the night of the Nativity for "The Forgotten Carols."

No, no, when Luke 2 reports of the Shepherds, "And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men," that was absolutely terrifying. These were praise choruses of such overwhelming power and brilliance quite beyond our own comprehension, let alone those of Late-Classical semi-nomadic illiterates. I don't mean that as a knock on the Shepherds, I'm mostly sure an encounter with a single angel, let alone a multitude, would be enough to send me to my knees. And not because it was so peaceful that it lulled me to sleep. Quite the opposite.

I love Christmas, I really do, commercialism and cult-of-Mithra-origins and warts and all. But I just know, I can feel it in my bones, that we're about to suffer through yet another round of "War on Christmas" Culture-War op-eds in the papers and blogs (as part of the season now as carolers and Charlie Brown specials), and all I got to say is, if we're going to put the Christ back in Christmas, if we're going to call attention to the fact that this was once a religious holiday, then seriously, let's make this religious.

And I don't just mean sitting quietly in the chapel (though I fully concede that that can be a religious experience too)--no, I mean that sense of overwhelming awe that comes at realizing that there are a trillion trillion stars beyond our own meager night-sky, that there are forces quite above our meager comprehension, that overwhelming sense of the sublime that briefly shatters your mind and illuminates your soul. Joy to the World, not Silent Night, was always my favorite Christmas hymn--this is Mary in travail without anesthesia, screaming into the night, these were choruses of angels whose cries of Peace on Earth Good Will to men were all that kept the Shepherds from running and crying in holy terror.

I want a sense of awe back in the Christmas season, and an acknowledgment of the grandeur and awful glory of God. I want even atheists and agnostics to gaze into the cold sky of a Christmas Eve, peer through the fog of their own frigid breath and feel the awesome wonder of creation, of our own nothingness and exaltation, and feel that awe bring them closer together, not farther apart.

I want to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and mean it. I want angels to frighten you. And I want to feel a Peace that comes because of the Post-Sublime shattering, of that reconciliation with God and nature and the movements of the stars in the sky, and not merely because we're all exhausted from yet another ugly-sweater party.