Yuletide Lament
Christmas Day, 2006. The end of the year is nigh. My mother is puttering around the kitchen making greenbean casserole. My dad is beached out in the living room, watching television. Somewhere in the house, my schizophrenic brother has his hand on a doorknob - the drugs he's on give him OCD. I'm dressed for dinner, waiting for it all to be over.
Comfort makes me anxious; idleness...depressing. I've been stuck in this house for days, unable to drive because I left my license in New York. Not that there's anyplace to go, the choices being Wal-Mart, Target, or Best Buy. I've been spending unholy amounts of time on Myspace, YouTube, and Radioblogclub, catching up on my pop culture. It's all the same damn cycle of scandal, satire, and airbrushed success. It makes me nauseous.
So, I started reading a few books I brought, but they're all badly written. Mind you, this is Jeanette Winterson and John Buchan. I scoured National Geographic and Scientific America, but my usual enthusiasm for all things science seems to have fallen out of my chest along with my broken heart. The things I do love about the Midwest, its highways and big sky, have fallen over the fine line between overwhelming and irritating.
I asked my Mom to take me to a movie, Little Miss Sunshine. It's playing at the second run theatre over in Independence - $2.00 tickets. The movie is clearly hilarious. I hardly cracked a smile. Instead, I started crying when the teenage brother ran screaming from the car after he learned he was colorblind. I want to pull over a car and run out of it screaming. Damn leaving that license.
I tried to jot some thoughts down in a journal, but its mostly self-serving, achingly personal, and as badly written as a Jeanette Winterson cookbook. They says its not suppose to matter, a journal is for you. I can't fathom writing for anything other than an audience. I can't imagine DOING anything for other than an audience. I always feel watched, looked at, shafted. Perhaps it is the God in me that won't go away no matter how many times I proclaim my new found atheism.
Back in my pseudo-religious, spiritual days I seemed to be happier only because I felt like I was being watched, graded, studying for the PAT - Paradise Aptitude Test. My actions and thoughts were carefully made, wrong and right dissected like a pair of Siamese frogs.
I'm not happier without God, but I feel free. Or, rather, loose, unstrung, slightly hollow. Less like a bird, and more like a clay pigeon. I can't turn back, belief at this point would be for belief's sake, and belief isn't like art - there's nothing free association about it, nothing mammalian or spontaneous. It just hugs you all your days like a strange picture book from your childhood you can't forgot.
In a few days, the year will be over. It was my tenth in New York City, my tenth since I started college, my 28th on this rotating ball of green gases. I spent the first half of the year building my bridges, and the second half burning them down. The year began with promise, middled with a pleasure, and ended with my essence drained through a sieve. I'm starting 2007 a whole new person, I person I can't stand.
Happy Holidays.
Comfort makes me anxious; idleness...depressing. I've been stuck in this house for days, unable to drive because I left my license in New York. Not that there's anyplace to go, the choices being Wal-Mart, Target, or Best Buy. I've been spending unholy amounts of time on Myspace, YouTube, and Radioblogclub, catching up on my pop culture. It's all the same damn cycle of scandal, satire, and airbrushed success. It makes me nauseous.
So, I started reading a few books I brought, but they're all badly written. Mind you, this is Jeanette Winterson and John Buchan. I scoured National Geographic and Scientific America, but my usual enthusiasm for all things science seems to have fallen out of my chest along with my broken heart. The things I do love about the Midwest, its highways and big sky, have fallen over the fine line between overwhelming and irritating.
I asked my Mom to take me to a movie, Little Miss Sunshine. It's playing at the second run theatre over in Independence - $2.00 tickets. The movie is clearly hilarious. I hardly cracked a smile. Instead, I started crying when the teenage brother ran screaming from the car after he learned he was colorblind. I want to pull over a car and run out of it screaming. Damn leaving that license.
I tried to jot some thoughts down in a journal, but its mostly self-serving, achingly personal, and as badly written as a Jeanette Winterson cookbook. They says its not suppose to matter, a journal is for you. I can't fathom writing for anything other than an audience. I can't imagine DOING anything for other than an audience. I always feel watched, looked at, shafted. Perhaps it is the God in me that won't go away no matter how many times I proclaim my new found atheism.
Back in my pseudo-religious, spiritual days I seemed to be happier only because I felt like I was being watched, graded, studying for the PAT - Paradise Aptitude Test. My actions and thoughts were carefully made, wrong and right dissected like a pair of Siamese frogs.
I'm not happier without God, but I feel free. Or, rather, loose, unstrung, slightly hollow. Less like a bird, and more like a clay pigeon. I can't turn back, belief at this point would be for belief's sake, and belief isn't like art - there's nothing free association about it, nothing mammalian or spontaneous. It just hugs you all your days like a strange picture book from your childhood you can't forgot.
In a few days, the year will be over. It was my tenth in New York City, my tenth since I started college, my 28th on this rotating ball of green gases. I spent the first half of the year building my bridges, and the second half burning them down. The year began with promise, middled with a pleasure, and ended with my essence drained through a sieve. I'm starting 2007 a whole new person, I person I can't stand.
Happy Holidays.
posted by Kelly Haydonat 11:56 AM
2 Comments:
nice write. You had subtle humor with interesting observations of your percieved reality. Your experiences have brought you into your clay molding and i wonder for the new year of 2007, will you be feeling less hollow or more hollow. I hope to keep reading future posts from you.
you caught my eye..
keep em comin.
Sincerely
Sinceer
I love you, honey. Keep your chin up - it's one of the strongest chins I've ever seen.
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