[If you just showed up at this post, it's pretty much gone. I'd have deleted it completely, but for the comments.]
What used to be here and probably still exists out there somewhere was your basic How I Think Christmas Makes Me Feel Like Crap rant. It’s rather a huge issue with me, and I’ve never done well with it. It’s actually gotten worse recently, not better, and I honestly don’t know why. Over the years, I’ve cracked up a couple of times each December and made life pretty much a living hell for my dear sweetie. She’s from IOWA, forgodssakes. What kind of worthless, wretched, shit-for-brains freaks out over Christmas every year with a girl from IOWA?!? It’s like I don’t deserve to have a dick. This is not my purpose on the planet, either.
No, she didn’t read the blog post. She didn’t have to, because she said something about Christmas shopping, and within five minutes had all my subtexts down cold, and I wasn’t even saying anything. Damn. Later during the day I was possessed by even greater evil and almost became an involuntary bachelor — that is not something ugly old bastards want to try, believe me. True, you can wear your bathrobe all day and eat sweetened condensed milk with a spoon, but sooner or later you’ll remember how you got that way and drive your truck into the gorge. So it was pretty awful. There wasn’t any yelling or swearing, at least not from me, and no one jumped out of the car, but maybe that would have been more fun.
[Why does riding in a car figure into so much of this kind of thing? Isn't that strange??]
Eight hours later she said it was the worst day of her life. She’d remembered the worst parts of about 30 Christmases From the crypt, and my blood ran cold. (Jesus, you can’t let them remember…) But an interesting thing has been happening with us this year: she tells the truth, and I don’t deny it out of panic I won’t be loved. It just sits there in its awful undeniability, and I say I’m sorry. There’s no argument, because she’s right. If she packs up and leaves, I can eat supermarket pie for supper and shoot myself later. This is the kind of perspective you develop if you’re lucky and live long enough, and it’s a wonderful thing.
“I can’t get away with NOTHIN’ around here anymore,” I told her, poker-faced, at the end of a longish confessional. (A current ironical saying of mine, although risky in the cited context.)
There was a too-long period of silence with locked eyes, and then she lowered her gaze and relaxed a tiny bit. “You’ve had a long run with that one [Christmas], but that run is over,” she said with the faintest lifesaving hint of a smirk.
Officially, I have 365 days to get it right. Not to become a Christmas convert, oh no, but to be a real man when the thing comes biting at my guts next year and keep it clean between us.
Always something else to do on this trip. More on these things later.
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The trouble with you, old compadre, is that you’re too damn pious. Christmas aint about being holistic or spiritual, man, it’s out and out pagan. Lot’s of big-C Christians don’t have any truck with it for that reason. I think Charles Dickens is the guy who really invented the phenomenon. Something about softening of hearts. Yeah, we should do that at every minute of every day of the year, but, being human, we don’t tend to get around to it. I’m O.K. with some forced calisthenics on the subject. Being in Canada, I’m especially O.K. with looking out over the snowdrifts, with a fire going and a scotch in the hand, and thinking whatever benign thoughts I’m capable of. So I say to you, Ebenener Farr, Merry Christmas and God (whoever the hell he is) bless you, I love you, man.
is there a spirit in those hills?
i have always enjoyed the song, ‘sounds of silence’. a beautiful song especially for this time of the year.
i often imagine the Sangre de Cristo Mountain Range and the enchanting high desert area – something attracted the Taos Indians to settled there some 1,000 years ago and perhaps the same something drew you from your home in the eastern shore of the chesapeake bay.
what is it about the ancient culture still surviving in your neck of the high desert area anyway? it draws crowds for millions of reasons, but soon most of them will move on with the next trend. i would like to think there is something very mystical about the light that you capture in your photographs and the words you use to translate what you see. reading between the lines i can see you see and hear more than those people that come and go and never look back. what lures you to rise before the sunrise? is the light full of vibrations – full of sounds of silence? hopefully not those haunting sounds the buffalo make on your roof top!
i won’t be 62 until march of 2010 and someday after that i hope to visit the Sangre de Cristo Mountain Range and the enchanting high desert area and hopefully settle there and listen to those sounds of silence.
enjoy a mystical winter of adventure and share more about your new mexican visions
Beyond bah, humbug may be found here:
Tears and Roebuck
By Dan Neil
http://www.latimes.com/features/magazine/la-tm-neil.30dec9,1,1823679.story?coll=la-headlines-latmagazine