If I were a comic book super villain, my origin story would probably begin sometime around December 1991. I was just a nine-year-old kid back then, but there came a day many Decembers ago when I formed the presence of mind to reliably differentiate fiction from fact. I thought things through during that Christmas season, and I came to the conclusion that Santa Claus is a fraud. All these years later, I’m still not ready to forgive Santa for never having existed.

No Virginia, there is no Santa Claus. This is a truth that every adult in your life has known, yet they’ve all been bullied into silence by some bizarre social norm which requires adults to deceive naive little children for as many Decembers as possible. It’s okay to grieve, child. A part of your innocence and imagination has just been shattered, and you’re left with the unsettling revelation that not only does Santa Claus not exist, but also with the knowledge that the adults you’ve known have been lying to you your entire life. You asked them in earnest to tell you the simple truth about Santa Claus, and they repaid your sincerity with whimsical double-talk and bald-faced lies. Yes, Virginia, it’s okay to cry. Adults are condescending, deceitful pricks.

Fuck Santa Claus, man. From the moment your child discovers Superman from watching television, you begin warning her that there is no such thing as the super power of flight, because you can’t bear the thought of your kid jumping off a roof with a blanket tied around her neck. When your child starts playing video games for the first time, you start reminding her that there is no such thing as a “Reset” button in real life, because every choice and action has a consequence. When your child sees you doing household cleaning chores around the house, and she then asks why you don’t just clean things up by waving a wand like Harry Potter, you sit your kid down and explain to her that magic isn’t real, and that good things come to people who work hard. Make-believe is awesome, but we place boundaries on our children’s imaginations all the time so that they don’t grow up to become ignorant people who wallow in self-delusion.

It’s not my intention to degrade the value of childhood innocence. I just happen to think that the tradition of lying to our children about Santa Claus is the biggest crock of shit of the Holiday season. Maybe I was an abnormal child growing up, but I genuinely felt embarrassed and betrayed once I realized that my parents and teachers had been lying to me about Santa Claus my entire life, and all because they figured it was “for my own good”. At the age of nine, I learned one of the shittiest lessons that a kid could ever learn: “In the end, you can trust nobody else except yourself.” Merry Fucking Christmas, overly-sensitive, nine-year-old KZ.

A couple years have passed since 1991, and I’ve come to terms with the fact that Santa Claus makes for a pretty decent mascot during the Christmas season. The myth of Jolly Old Saint Nick is a fun tale to tell, but why do so many of us consider it a child’s entitlement to be deceived every December? Some might argue that belief in the Santa Claus myth helps stimulate our children’s imaginations, and that it promotes a festive atmosphere filled with fun for the kids. I don’t deny the truth of that argument, but I do have to question its merit.

Christmas has so much more to offer than Santa Claus — so much more than the mere crassness of all that materialism and bribery for good behavior. For Christian parents, Christmas is a time to remember Jesus, and to celebrate all of the values that Jesus held in the highest esteem: love, kindness, friendship, tolerance, and faith not only in God, but faith in the common humanity that binds us to our families, friends, neighbors, and even to our enemies. Even if you’re not a Christian parent, and yet you happen to celebrate Christmas in your own secular or ecumenical way, wouldn’t your children benefit more from an emphasis on the value to be found in the season’s spirit of love, kindness, and peace, versus an emphasis on a silly story about a fat judgmental magic man who trespasses on private properties without remorse, and who spends the majority of his time stuffing his face and judging everybody?

Christmas is the time of year when we celebrate that lofty promise of peace on earth, and good will toward men. I know, that’s some corny shit. I don’t care if it’s corny, though. Every December, I look toward the stars, and I convince myself to believe — if only for a moment — that one day in the future before the end, humanity will finally get things right. I guess you could accuse me of hypocrisy for speaking out against delusions and lies, all the while I place my belief in impossible things. There’s probably some truth to that criticism. But hey, you know what? At least my delusion doesn’t make lame excuses to get your children to sit on its lap. That’s the creepiest shit ever.

In closing, Santa Claus can go F himself in the A.

Merry Christmas, kids.

Go on and read it. There’s a good chance you’ll enjoy it even if your name isn’t Joie.

J to the P, the B-Day Supreme
(By KZ, Dawn to the Spence, & D-Pad)

Joie! Joie! She’s a joy to behold
Joie is super awesome
Even though she’s getting old

But not as old as Helen Hunt
I mean have you seen her lately?
She’s not aging so gracefully
Joie is aging better than Double-H
Joie gets old tastefully

Even Joie’s name is super awesome
even with its excess of vowels
Just don’t get too old on us, Super J
And lose control of your bowels
…in the middle of dinner at OSF

Happy birthday, Joie. Go ahead and frame that poem so you can hang it on a wall or something. I wouldn’t blame you for getting caught up in the awesomeness of it all.

I broke my blog late last week while attempting to enhance the layout template. At the lowest point, my homepage was taking twelve agonizing seconds to load, and the comment box would send you to a blank error page when you clicked the submit button. The worst of it, though, came when I rushed through a support forum walkthrough without reading very carefully, and I ended up purging my comments database without taking the proper precautions. My blog comments dropped from 268 to 0 in a matter of clicks. Thursday was a bad night.

Once I realized how badly I had messed things up, I spiraled into a full-on panic. The slow loading time and the comment box errors were minor annoyances, but they were nothing in comparison to the thought of losing all of those comments that I had accumulated over the years from friends, critics, and random well-wishers. Imagine the way you might feel if you had accidentally set your old family photo albums on fire because you left them too close to a gas stove on the kitchen counter. My state of mind was something close to that. After a considerable amount of teeth gnashing, denial, and cathartic swearing, I gathered my thoughts, and I realized that my comments were not completely gone.

Since 2008, when I started blogging on my own dot-com, my WordPress blog settings have been configured so that I receive an e-mail every time somebody leaves me a comment. Thankfully, I’ve had the foresight to save those e-mail notifications, all of which duplicate the full text of every comment I’ve ever received at this domain. I spent the entire weekend manually inputting those comments back onto my page through a long, tedious process of copying text from e-mails, submitting comments to my blog posts while disguised as my own readers, approving those comments through my admin dashboard, and backdating every comment to its proper date and time. Although I was able to salvage all of my readers’ submissions, I did lose all of my own comments since my website never contacts me for admin comment replies. So I improvised as well as I could along the way, inserting the kinds of replies that I remember leaving the first time around. I finally cleaned up my mess by Tuesday night.

All weekend long, I couldn’t help but feel a little silly over the entire ordeal. The whole comment restoration project made me feel a bit like a self-absorbed, inauthentic fraud. There I was, dedicating my entire weekend to the restructuring of the Temple of KZ. To be fair, I was putting a lot of effort into restoring those comments because I didn’t want my outspoken readers’ past generosity and time to have been in vain. Then again, I would be lying if I said that my compulsion to repopulate those comments had nothing to do with self-aggrandizement and vanity. I’m not going to lie — comments are the lifeblood of a blogger’s vanity. That should come as no surprise, though. What’s the point of self-expression if nobody ever takes notice? I didn’t get into the writing game just to hear myself talk, you know. Comments on a blog are an expression of reader interest, a validation of what the author has said, and what the author will continue to say when fueled by the confidence afforded to him by reader feedback. This comment repopulation project has served to remind me that I should never take my blog comments for granted again.

Once I restored my WordPress comments database to nearly its original form, I decided it was time to stop being lazy, and to start transferring over all of those pre-2008 comments from my old home at Blogger.com. This weekend was the first time that I ever made the attempt. As I look back on all of those comments from the past, I have to wonder what took me so long.

I rediscovered a lot of forgotten history in those earlier submissions. The first comment I ever received as a blogger came from my good friend, Carlos, on September 30, 2002, in response to a blog entry titled, A Tribute to Her. “Kevin, you are a fucking genius”, Carlos had said. I’d like to think that he said that without a trace of irony. I was gratified that he had thought so highly of my writing, but I didn’t feel much like a genius at the time for having allowed myself to fall for a girl who was already in a committed relationship.

I remember those early days in 2002 and 2003, when Carlos, Conrado, and Francisco would rock the comment box on nearly every post. I’m pretty sure they were my only readers back then. It really meant a lot to me that they kept coming back.

I remember receiving those incendiary challenges from “Charlie the Possum” and “The Spider” back when I posted Possum Attack in February 2003. Those anonymous comments still makes me laugh when I think about them today. Nice, Conrado. Speaking of irreverent replies, I fondly remember the time when my discussion of The Deer Hunter in my Movie Titles post from 2002 elicited the following response from an old friend, mild-mannered Ed:

“hey ASSHOLE… that’s not cool!”

That’s the only time when Ed ever felt compelled to leave a comment. It was a good one.

Looking back to June 2003 in Fast Food Humor, I think that was the first time when a reader called me out for taking artistic license during the retelling of actual events. As you can see, seven years later, not very much has changed.

I remember those days in 2004, back when my girlfriend, Diana, and I were still in the earliest stages of our courtship. She sat down one night and read the entire contents of my blog, and then proceeded to pepper my site with comments on entries that were over a year old. I was touched that anybody would ever bother to do such a thing. It was a wonderful thing to know that somebody like Diana could find something of value in this modest little site of mine. I think that was around the time when I really started to fall for her.

March 2005 was the first time when one of my blog entries ever broke the tenth comment mark. Maybe it had something to do with all of the sex talk. It was around that time in general, I think, when my writing made a noticeable turn for the better.

And how can I forget November 2009, back when my buddy, Casey, supplemented one of my denser posts with a lengthy, insightful diatribe? That comment was an amazing gift to this blog. It hardly feels like something I deserve.

Since 2002 and beyond, right to this very day, I have been humbled by the outpouring of support that my small band of loyal readers has shown me. I’m not entirely sure why I started to write a blog back in 2002, but I know today why I continue to do it. As I look back on my modest collection of reader comments, I feel a great sense of gratitude for anybody, and everybody who ever took notice of my meager little voice amid the shrieking wind. I am a better writer today because of all the things you’ve said, my friends. All of you.

So . . . can anybody teach me how to back up a comments database? Because that would be super.

While common wisdom would suggest that the best way to deliver a toast is to speak extemporaneously and directly from the heart, I took the exact opposite approach and drafted a script that I intended to memorize and deliver. I was so honored that Josh had entrusted me to say something meaningful and to help set the right tone for the night. I prepared as much as I could in order to reciprocate that honor to Josh.

Being one of the Best Men at Josh’s wedding was an experience that I will always remember with great fondness. I’m so glad I was a Best Man at least once in my life, but once is frankly enough. I was a nervous wreck two weeks prior to the wedding reception. I’m a writer, not a an orator.

Special props go out to the other Best Man, Carlos Oliveira, for his support and encouragement while I was on the brink of hyperventilation during the minutes leading up to my speech. I’d also like to mention Conrado Oliveira, who started clapping and chanting “KZ” to help me through that awkward pause when I forgot my next line. This act came from a place of love, and I won’t soon forget it. Special thanks go out to Tommy for heckling me from the guest tables as I was setting up one of my jokes. It’s all love, Tommy, I know. Wiseguy. Finally, thank you to my wonderful girlfriend, Diana, whom I love deeply, and whose loving support gave me the courage to believe that I could do the speech my way, and succeed in doing so.

If you’ll please forgive me this indulgence, I have posted below the original script of my Best Man’s speech.

The Other Best Man – by KZ

Believe it or not, ladies and gentlemen, I am the other Best Man. We’re kind of doing the People Magazine thing where they name the sexiest man alive every year, but oddly enough, every year it’s always a different dude. It kind of cheapens the honor, don’t you think? Well, whatever, there’s two best men now, and one indecisive groom. The way Josh explained it to us, he couldn’t decide between me or Carlos, so he decided to honor us both as his Best Men. That’s a cute explanation, but if you really want to know the truth, I just think Josh has problems with commitment.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re sitting there in your chair, folding your arms and thinking to yourself, “Oi! How can you say such a terrible thing at the bloke’s wedding reception?” First of all, please drop the terrible cockney English accent because it is not working for you. But secondly, relax. I emailed this very speech to Josh this afternoon at 2 PM. I assume since he never got back to me with a reply or a complaint, that everything I’m doing up here is fully sanctioned by Josh.

Having said that, I would like to read a poem I wrote specifically for this occasion. I wasn’t sure whether I should read this poem tonight. I’ll try to keep it short, but it’s about seven…seven…seventeen pages long. But again, Josh gave me his “silent OK”, so anything goes. Four letter words and all. And…it’s in my other tux. Thank you very much Diana for reminding me on the way out of the house today. Let’s give her a round of applause, ladies and gentlemen. She has ruined my entire speech.

At this point, Josh probably hates me, and he’s regretting that he ever asked me to come up here and say something nice about him.

Truth be told, Josh and I have known each other for twenty years now, and we have never been able to get rid of each other. We met at the age of seven at Five Wounds Elementary School. Then we went on to Bellarmine College Prep for high school. Then finally, for undergrad, we both ended up going to Santa Clara University. We’ve remained friends long after graduation. For twenty years, I’ve had the privilege of calling Josh my friend. And for the past four years, I’ve had the delight of getting to know Sarah, and I now consider her one of my closest friends. It makes my heart sing to know that these two have found so much happiness together. After twenty years of friendship, I am proud to witness these moments, the time in my good friend’s life when he starts a new life with his wonderful bride. Josh has gotten married before I have, by the way, and my girlfriend Diana won’t let me hear the end of it. “Oi! Josh and Sarah did it. When are you and me getting married?” Diana’s English accent is terrible. Why does she talk to me like that? She’s not even British.

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about love, and what I can say about it without sounding redundant. What can you really say about love that hasn’t been said literally thousands of times before? What more can I say when so many inspired philosophers, authors, poets, and playwrights have already weighed in on the subject with far more eloquence than I’m capable of? Just as humankind has always done for centuries, we are born, we grow, we learn, and we fade away. But in between, there are some beautiful moments where, with a little luck, we find love, we get married, and we celebrate with grand parties just like this one. It’s happened billions of times before throughout the ages, and I should think that it will happen billions of times more in the future. When you begin thinking of anything on that grand a scale, you begin to wonder, “So what?” Love? It’s all been done before, so what’s all the fuss about? What a tidy little rut we find ourselves in.

But love is no rut, not in any form. Love is the grand experiment of life that constantly surprises us by joy, one generation after the next, and always with the same old bag of tricks. The human dance wouldn’t be the same without love to guide us with all of its familiar refrains. Robert Frost once said, “Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.” That innate desire lives inside all of us, and it begs us to dream, challenges us to grow, and dares us to care about someone other than ourselves. Love is that immutable constant of the human spirit that invariably keeps us all human. Love is our guarantee that the human spirit, for all of its frailties, will always have something worth celebrating. Tonight, my human spirit soars with gratitude and joy because two people whom I love very much have dedicated their lives to loving each other. I can think of no better reason to celebrate.

Tonight, my friends, let’s all raise our glasses in celebration to Josh and Sarah.

SB was a huge hit.  He was invited to every party and to almost every outing. There’s something oddly liberating about hugging a teddy bear in public, and I think my friends understood that.  So I dragged my stuffed bear to places where he never expected to go, and my friends enthusiastically posed for pictures with SB — stuffing drinks in his face, making goofy faces, and dreaming up preposterous poses, all for the benefit of SantaBearCam.

And just like that, I became the de facto historian for my circle of friends.  In the days before the popularity of Flickr, Photobucket, and convenient photo sharing through those social networking sites, I was documenting the happiest times of our shared experiences and logging the chronology with Santa Bear’s galleries.

Time went on, as it does, and the landscape began to change.  Some of us moved away to cities barely within driving distance of the rest of us.  Some of us left the state entirely.  Some of us ended our relationships on bad terms.  Some of us bickered and ended long-standing friendships over trivialities.  So it goes.  There are some things in life that not even the unifying force of Santa Bear’s grin can change.

Quietly and unceremoniously, SantaBearCam faded away.  I have all of the site’s data stored locally on my computer hard drive, and I click through it on occasion with great fondness.  Santa Bear may have been the focal point of the project, but I had always seen the website as a celebration of friendship.  I look back at the countless smiles, the echoes of laughter, the couples who once were, the friends who had yet to part ways, and my heart aches to think of the possibilities that gave way to stubborn improbabilities.

My circle of friends still remains.  Our ranks have thinned and replenished over time, and the air feels different now, which actually isn’t such a bad thing.  Even so, sometimes I feel myself longing for the days when friendship seemed like a much simpler thing.

One of the sad truths about friendship is that proximity often defines it. While humans can be loyal and communal creatures at best, there’s no getting around the fact that our minds and our hearts perceive the world through crude, imperfect increments of measurement, like distance and time. A friendship is a fairly simple thing to maintain when your friend plays a role in your daily, weekly, or even monthly routine. But if one of you should ever pick up and move halfway across the country, you’ll eventually notice your mutual affections tilting on a gradual decline. It’s an inadvertent kind of slip, which somehow excuses the callous inclination to live on and forget.

There’s no use taking it all too personally, though. The hardness of the world has conditioned us all to become emotional mercenaries. We’ll love passionately, listen attentively, and care with all sincerity, just so long as our lovers and friends reside within driving distance. We spend our entire lives in transit between one uncomfortable context after another. Consequently, we’ve developed this urgent desire to seek out relief at every opportunity. And so we’ve devised clever devices like ergonomic chairs, easy-grip handlebars, rubber and foam wrist supports, and, of course, convenient relationships. We’re only human, I guess.

No, I don’t honestly believe that every long-distance relationship is doomed to failure. I do have to wonder, though, why we allow such a trivial thing like distance to end so many of our friendships. Every relationship hinges on common ground, whether it’s common interests, common sensibilities, or merely common affections. When distance suddenly divides you from a loved one, the common ground that brought you together doesn’t magically disappear. So why should distance matter? We all know it shouldn’t. But ultimately, we all know it does.

And yet we lie to each other’s faces during our final goodbyes, pretending as if we’re above such corporeal contrivances like distance and time. And that, my friends, is why I’m not a fan of final goodbyes. We’ve reduced our parting words to the caliber of soulless, disingenuous greeting cards. Real friends don’t tell each other to “keep in touch.” Communication is the sort of thing that’s implied when you find yourself in a genuine friendship. At the end of the road, I prefer sincerity over pretense and tact–a heartfelt hug or a sturdy handshake, and an exchange of stoic words like, “Good luck out there, man. Take care of yourself.” And if I feel like phoning or sending the occasional email sometime afterwards, I’ll make sure to carry through–just the way a real friend should.

It’s been gratifying receiving so much support from friends and internet strangers alike. Even random strangers out in the real world have been especially kind to me. A few weeks ago, I was studying for my Property final on the train ride home from school when my car was boarded by a class of eighth graders. They were loud, juvenile, and obnoxiously ebullient. They packed into the cabin and spilled into center aisle. At every stop, their adult chaperone, a man named Mr. Wilson, raised his voice and reminded the students to stand aside and allow people on and off the train. After thirty minutes of hearing him bark his orders, I was starting to like the guy. The train finally reached South Hayward, and the kids started filing out onto the platform. Before Mr. Wilson stepped off, he walked over to my seat, leaned down, and said, “Hey, good luck.” I looked up with a puzzled expression and thanked him. “Property, right?” he asked me. “Yeah,” I responded, hardly able to mask my surprise. Mr. Wilson smiled and walked off the train.

I have no idea how he knew I was a law student, or how he even guessed what I was studying based on my type-written notes. Maybe the man has legal experience himself, and he was able to smell a 1L from 200 yards away. Or maybe the guy just has a remarkable gift for observation. Whatever the case may be, I choose to look back on that exchange as an omen of good fortune. There’s a very real possibility that I didn’t make the academic cut this year. Of course I’m hoping for the best, and of course I can be satisfied in knowing that I gave it my all, but I’m also realistic enough to know that I’ve rarely been the smartest person in the room. But even if this law thing doesn’t work out for me, Mr. Wilson’s words will always hold some meaning. Good luck, kid. Things will be all right. Thank you, Mr. Wilson. Thank you, everybody. I made it through.

!!! You’re the man KZ !!! Remember thataru.

And in response, Francisco had this to say:

This is the end my friends. the last blog entry from kz any of us will read for a long time. Here’s why. you see, our friend josh bought a video game about a month and a half ago. he thought it would be a good idea if i bought it but, i thought it would be better to buy a bunch of booze so i never had enough money. and deep down inside i didn’t want to purchase the game either. conrado bought this game shortly after josh’s purchase and they started playing it together online.

Here’s the point of the story, kz has recently bought the game and i have not seen nor communicated with him since. my three friends have fallen into a world of time-consuming geekiness known as “final fantasy xi.” conrado’s comment is just a brief glimpse of the geeky horror that my dear friends have fallen into. plz, help them if you can.

I just wanted to say that no, I haven’t become a recluse due to Final Fantasy XI…yet. The real reason that I’ve been so hard to find lately is because I’ve been reading The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide by Douglas Adams. I started reading the book in August. But seeing as how I’m a slow reader, coupled with the fact that I had also been dragging my feet on law school applications, it took me until last night to read through all 815 pages of that book. Pretty sad, I know. Maybe I should look into one of those speed reading courses.

Anyway, I dearly loved the book, and I highly recommend it to anybody who isn’t too put off by dry English humor. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll disappear again until I’m struck with another poignant revelation that I feel like recording. For now, I’m off to read shorter books and to level up like crazy in the world of Vana’diel. Fear the mighty TaruTaru!

Sometimes living for the present isn’t as simple as only thinking about today or about what’s coming within the next few weeks. Sometimes living for the present compels you to confront the “far,” uncertain future and all of the hard times that it has in store for you. At this particular instance in my life, during a time that most would still consider to be my “early years,” I choose to think about death. It’s the one wrong turn that we all see coming from miles away, and yet it never fails to break your heart when somebody in your life finally rounds that corner. Freaking mortality.

Anyway, the thought of death doesn’t occur to me because I’m particularly sad at the moment. Nor, for that matter, does it cross my mind because I’m actively trying to suck the joy out of my own life. No. I contemplate death because it reminds me that now, at this stage in my life, I have as much as I could ever want.

Maybe my friends have noticed something. Maybe they’ve sensed me smiling at them from my silent corner while they carry on. As fun and as vital as we all are when we get together, I can’t help but think that one day, we’ll all be gone. And though my heart stings slightly from the thought of losing any of those guys, I know that there’s little good in mourning prematurely. So my heart swells, and I’m filled with warmth and an irrepressible joy for having ever found friends who make me laugh as hard, and who make me feel as loved. Mind you, I’m writing all this without having tasted a single drop of alcohol tonight. I tend to be a weepy drunk, as you might imagine.

I guess all I’m saying is, joy doesn’t have to be an ephemeral thing. It is a condition that you must constantly insist upon in order to have it — even if that means occasionally bumming yourself out with thoughts on the inevitability of loss and suffering. Joy isn’t so bad once you get the hang of it.