Oh, the holidays...i

Snapshots:

On the way back, stopping in Ravine, PA, for a Double Whopper (no cheese), french fries, a chocolate shake.  I have fries, and potatoes in general, very rarely, wanting not to get that aches in the joints of the extremities, as happens with blood type O.  But they offer some form of salty comfort, and I eat the Whopper whole, the bun included, though I normally, for the sake of my waistline, indulge in bread.  A chocolate shake, like the hot chocolate I got at the last rest stop in New York, will keep me alert.  I've driven up to get Mom, days before Christmas, driven her back to DC on Christmas Eve, going straight to work after dropping her off at my brother's, and the day after the day after Christmas, getting off of work, I drove her back to Oswego, to the three feet of snow that fell the night before, and this, after helping her with a new car battery, her furnace, her groceries, cat food and wine, this is the last leg.  I have to be back for work New Years Eve, and I don't feel up to that drive, two hours too long, and going straight to the wine bar for a long night.  I like Whoppers, but there is not much happiness and joy in my system as I pull back onto Route 81, getting lucky with the traffic in the short merging lane, for the final three hours, Harrisburg, Route 11/15 through the Gettysburg farmland, down to Frederick, 270 to the Beltway, lanes of traffic to cut across to get onto River Road...  Not much joy at all.  The Mid-Atlantic has always felt a bit foreign to my brain.   My place will be a bit of a mess, with all the holidays, and not much time to take care of the usual things.

And let's face it.  I have failed.  I am a loser, a fuck-up.  A nice guy, sure, sometimes, a decent barman, friendly neighborhood guy, but as far as my own life goes, an ongoing disaster.  An artist, frustrated, I suppose I'm not the only one.

In times less stressed, you know, you tell yourself and your therapist, in one of those positive attempts toward living life, that you are over your obsession, that you aren't still mentally fixated upon that object that in the therapist terms is a situation of wanting a different outcome from the same old behavior, from expecting an end of the pattern of misery.  But in the rare mix of the Christmas holiday and the pagan Solstice, in that rare blend of soulful good spirit toward all things human, including yourself, including those you've trespassed against, the spiritual nature of the holiday, and the negatives like the days of short daylight, stressful shifts when you feel the rest of the world relaxed and on holiday, stressful travels of nine hour drives into unknowns of weather and traffic, endurance of muscle, stressed-out passengers clenched as whiteouts fall upon Route 81 around Lafayette, south of Syracuse, the finances, in the nighttime, this is the perfect recipe, the perfect recipe to remember all the instances of regretful behavior and actions from some thirty years ago.

Yes, you thought, or you sort of hoped, that you could turn a page and be over whatever you'd call them, feelings, sentiments, physical reactions, memories, remembered reactions, images of the brain. You might have thought, 'enough,' or "I'm over her," but you come upon the rub that this is really not true.  Do you really want to admit this to yourself?  It sneaks up upon you, again, now again, and it tells you the bad news that you have, quite simply, and in bold letters, not lived your own dreams.

It's like, the crowd told you to shut-up, just about everyone, and rather than making the effort of fighting back, you slinked off, feeling ashamed of yourself.

But why?  Why, the shame?  And this is hard to unpack.  It seems a complex issue is at play, involving just about everything, a totality.

Like all people, within, you have a great personality.  Everything you could hope for.  Wit, friendliness, a real happiness around other people, selfless wishes for them to do well.  Well-spoked, once reasonably well-read, informed, with a good basic sense of things, and not too shy to make the effort to speak your mind.

But what happened?  What the fuck happened?  Why did you retreat, and get all private about things?  The musical elements, skilled enough, the talents of the stand-up, in the native intelligence?   Why did you chose the haunted house up on the hill away from campus, rather than your best friend's room group down on campus that senior year?  Some stupid ill-advised wish to be overly introspective, thus not using your great gifts of friendliness and engagement...   And there was the drinking, encouragement to the supposed romance of it...

These are not the thoughts one is supposed to have on New Years Day.  The conventional wisdom is, think positive, healthy, freedom from regrets...

But is the artist right, the collective of U2, "nothing changes/ on New Years Day..."

You can never really get that far away from your true nature, and this philosopher, through experience, speaks that you can never turn away from your good wishes to fellow humanity.  You cannot stop that, turn it off, when the perfect girl perfectly meant for you gets completely frustrated with you, had enough disgust in your own general direction and your "lonely thinking heart that is to a woman/ but a kind of ghost" (John Donne) that she went and married some other guy, some other guy who admittedly would be a far better provider than the disorganized Buddhist Jude-Christian overly sensitive depressive coward who did not follow his own heart even as he promised himself he was making every effort to...

So now what?  As they say.

This life as it is, based on some sort of endurance, the heartbroken misery of carrying on, as the Irish soul seems drawn to, out of instincts of great candor and self-honesty, some fascination with the human condition, set off from the attempt to being encouraged to doing better for yourself.  Life a matter of hard work, endurance, the low life of someone less capable of planning  for the morrow, a belief in quiet toughness, coupled with some sort of monastic spirituality ingrained deep in the DNA as much as the desire to sin.


I take the rental car back to the parking garage.  It's black body is covered with white salt roadspray.  I walk back over the Connecticut Avenue bridge, back to the house, take a hot shower, SNL and off to bed.

Recollections of NPR, interview with Broadway Producer, of Rent, Hamilton...  The new form of musical, telling our stories, with our music..  I missed that line of work somehow.  And entertainment is important, keeping us distracted and positive.  Never underestimate.  The ability of the made up world, day dreaming, to keep us insulated from the horrors of our own lives, to distract us during long drives.

New Years Eve shift leaves me tired.  The boss says, kill the balloons before you go, and while I relay it on to my co-workers, take some home to your kids, I don't have the energy, pulling them free and tying them in the corner.  To pop them all seems like a waste.

And New Years Day, not much energy.  I get out for groceries, just enough to make a chili for dinner and cold cuts, gluten free bread, fresh eggs, to keep me going into the workweek.  It is cold here too, and seems like a danker kind of a cold than up there in New York State, and it hurts.  Pay my American Express bill.  The new Brooks Brothers shirt worn on New Years Eve has red wine and blood stains on it, foil cuts from opening wine, is treated with Shout and soda water, preparations for a load of whites, work shirts.