Gonzo Xmas 2022 -

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.

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 . gonzo xmas 2022

This is the moment the fear and loathing sets in. You realize the entire apparatus of cheer is a fragile house of cards. Without the dinosaur, Christmas is ruined. Without the ham, the family will fracture. Without the right lighting for the TikTok video, the memory is invalid. We had turned the celebration of incarnation and goodwill into a logistics nightmare, and the real horror was that we all knew it. We were Sisyphus, but the boulder was a spiral-cut honey-baked ham and the hill was an icy driveway. That is the gonzo truth of Christmas 2022