Gonzo Xmas 2022 ((install)) Instant

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 .

The gonzo lesson of that Christmas is this: the consumerist hallucination is dead. It died in a Target parking lot in 2020 and we spent two years trying to resuscitate it. The joy of 2022 wasn't in the flawless execution of the tradition; it was in the glorious, spectacular failure of it. It was in the burnt cookies and the political argument that fizzled out because everyone was too tired to fight. It was in the acceptance that “ho ho ho” is often just a defense mechanism against the abyss. gonzo xmas 2022

Christmas morning arrived not with angels singing, but with the sound of a malfunctioning space heater and the smell of burnt coffee. The family gathered. We performed the rituals: the ripping of foil, the exclamations over socks, the passive-aggressive glances at the uncle who drank the good bourbon before noon. The fluorescent dinosaur was a success—a five-minute dopamine blast followed by a meltdown when the batteries died. Hunter S

But here is where the gonzo lens focuses sharply. Underneath the chaos, under the tired jokes and the indigestion, there was a raw, bleeding tenderness . Because 2022 was the year we stopped pretending we were invincible. My father, who had never cried in front of me, got quiet watching my toddler niece open a stuffed rabbit. He was thinking about the last two years he lost, the visits he couldn't make, the birthdays he watched through a screen. The pandemic had stripped away the buffer of routine, and what was left was just... us. Fragile, broke, exhausted, and desperately holding on. And Christmas 2022 was a prime specimen of

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.

It wasn't just consumerism; it was frantic consumerism. People weren't buying the latest PlayStation or a weighted blanket for Aunt Carol; they were buying normalcy . They were throwing credit cards at a wall of supply-chain shortages, hoping something—anything—would stick. The shelves were empty of the specific brand of canned pumpkin, but overflowing with a terrifying anxiety that you could taste in the air, like burnt wiring. We were all trying to decorate a house that was actively on fire.