December 12, 2005

• Bah–humbug!

  
  

  Scrooge got it right.  Christmas sucks.  I hate it, and I hate everything else about this benighted season.  (And benighted is le mot juste–winter solstice, the damn sun doesn’t get above the tree line, stays there maybe four hours to tease us, and then coyly drops back below the horizon.  But I digress.  But while I’m digressing, I want to mention one of the neighbors.  They tried to have a pathetic little yard sale amidst all the ice yesterday.  Put out a rack of clothing, propped some stuffed animals on the hood of an old car.  Had a sign–”Please help us have a Christmas.”  Right.  What they meant was, buy some of our useless old shit so we can get money to buy some useless new shit.  And ice beer. And meth.  I know about this stuff–I root through everyone’s trash.  But on with my own rant.)  Man and boy, most of the worst memories of my  life center around this season.

  
  

  Ironically, in 12-step meetings I use Christmas as a metaphor–which is all it is really good for.  I often say that since I got clean and sober and relatively sane, every day of my life is like Chirstmas–that is, filled with a joyous sense of hope and anticipation and sure knowledge that wonderful things are in store.  But  if every day of my life was like the REAL Christmas, I would contemplate suicide.

  
  

  And speaking of suicide–I have been told that folks with the damned disease that Kathy and I share have a much higher rate than average.  Makes sense to me, the ME/CFIS has really been kicking my ass lately, accounts in a large part for my ill humour.  The chronic pain hasn’t been too bad, I’m getting used to the constantly-blurred vision, the muscle spasms have largely been in remission, but the fragility factor seems way worse.  Lately, I can hurt myself putting on my socks or picking up a can of soda.  Due to my hernia, the doc said not to lift over twenty pounds– but the other day I hurt myself badly lifting ten pounds.  TEN fucking pounds.  This would not  be so bad if I had always been puny, but in college, I lifted weights!  And my first full-time job out of college was working as a  laborer in a steel mill–and after eight hours of that, I’d go home and swim laps for a while to soak out  the foundry dust from my pores.  Years after that, until I screwed up a knee, I’d get up at five am and run seven miles.  This business of having to ask a little girl stock clerk to put  ten pounds of kitty litter in my car for me is humilating.  My sympathetic, supportive sweety said “Get over it.”  Sound advice.

  
  

  I mentioned the dark.  Then there is the weather.   A few weeks ago, we had snow, then rain, then a freeze–the result is that the damn footing is so slick around my place, I can’t even open the lid of the dumpster–after inching my way flatfooted to the thing, I just drop my trash on the ground.  It’s kind of scary–if I fell and broke a hip or something, I would be royally screwed, not having any health insurance.  I couldn’t even get in and out of my cabin, much less work.  I have dumped fifteen pounds of kitty litter on the parking lot around my car  in the last two days–now it is all being covered up with fresh snow.   Because lately, if it isn’t bitterly cold, it is snowing.  I am so very darn sick of driving through snowstorms, I could scream  And, as my neighbors could testify, I have.  I do.  Often, and loudly,  and accompanied with profanity.

  
  

  Talking about screaming–take Michael Bolton.  Please.  At my last holiday bazaar, they played Chirstmas music all day–over my vehement objections.  As the show was ending, a Michael Bolton Christmas album was playing–over and over and OVER again.  I got so sick of hearing him scream and moan and mangle Christman music that is just barely tolerable even when it is done properly, I found myself yelling at the loudspeakers teling him to “SHUT UP–SHUT UP!!!”  At one point, when he was wrestling “Oh Holy Night” to the ground, I started to laugh hysterically when he got to “fall on your knees.”  A fellow boothie asked me what was so funny.  I told him, that considering that Bolton had been busted for giving some guy a blow job in a public toilet, “fall on your knees” was a pretty ironic thing for him to be singing.  But I made money at the bazaar and luckily, there was nothing else being sold there that was remotely attractive to me, so I didn’t spend any of my hard-earned money.

  
  

  And speaking of spending my hard-earned money, that brings me to my family, God bless their pointy little heads.  Soemtimes I get so sick of being the bread-winner, so weary of feeling the weight of responsibility, I almost wish they would all just die so I wouldn’t have to deal with any of them.  Instead of pissing away money on groceries and firewood and pet food, I could spend it on important things like a Casio G-Shock Solar-powered Atomic Watch–I REALLY need one of these, I only have five or six watches now.   Or a twenty-inch LCD  HDTV with built-in progressive scan DVD player–shit, my eyesight is so bad, I probably couldn’t tell the difference between that and the old fifteen-inch  TV/VCR I have now. And speaking of groceries, my sweety can’t drink normal milk like the rest of us–nooo, she has to have goat milk at $3.49 a QUART!  I am sure she is just being lactose-intolerant to spite me!

  
  

  And grocery shopping–what a nightmare!  I feel like one of those woman who goes through the excruciating pain of childbirth and vows never to go through it again–then memory loss and the nurturing thing  sets in and  she decides to have another kid anyway.  The last two times I put myself through this, when it was all over I vowed–okay this is it–never again–then a few weeks later, I am limping and gimping through a box store the size of Vermont looking for this one specific brand of salsa and that one specific brand of peanut butter. Sigh.

  
  

  I let this whole thing get to me pretty badly this morning while I was wide awake from four to five am–I talked to God about it.  The following is His reply, as well as I can recall:

  
  

  The way of the householder IS difficult, always trying, often challenging.  And many men and woman do indeed secretly resent their dependents, sometimes to the poin that they kill them.  And even if they don’t act out,  they come to hate themselves as well as their families, and get caught up in guilt and shame.  It is far healthier to own that resentment and let it go. 

  
  

  But let’s look back at the time before you had this family, when you had the fancy town house filled with toys, the high-paying job that was debasing your soul and destroying  your health. Your life was a veritible orgy of self-indulgence.  Were you happy?  No.  In your more awake moments now, you acknowledge that you have never had less money or more happiness.

  
  

  In your darkest, saddest moments now, you may think of your family as a dead  weight. but truely, it is both an anchor and a rudder.  It gives your life stability and direction. For all your individual and collective quirks and eccentricities, you have a family unit that is to be envied.  Need I really remind you, how lost you would be without them?  Do you really think you have all the inner resources you need to live without their inspiration and support?  Not a chance.–

  
  

  Okay, it’s me again.  The Greyfox guy.  The Old Fart.  You know, the guy who is even now blinded with tears of happiness and gratitude.

  
  

  Life is good. 

  
  

  Or at least, as good as I choose to make it.

  • 5:31 pm
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