It's Gonna Be a Weird Christmas

What does this holiday hold for a washed up, washed out guy in the process of reinvention?

For an awful lot of people this holiday is incredibly depressing. I’ve never really understood why except, with billions celebrating everything from the birth of their chosen deity to the spirit of giving to one another under a tree and reminders to basically be better people the rest of the year, some may feel more left out than at other times of the year.

My Christmas’s are wrapped up in a couple of totems that I love with a great fervor: family, reflection, and the soft caress of time pushing forward at the end of a cycle.

Family

I’m almost always home for Christmas. For the past thirty-eight years I’ve been the peripheral uncle swinging into town, the prodigal son returning for a week, the temporary family member who brings home a wife or girlfriend to put pressure on the rest of my family to make sure this stranger feels welcome.

This year I’ll be home because I’m living in my parents’ house right now. I’ll be juggling job possibilities (including working a grave yard shift in surveillance at a local casino because I gotta get on with things and I need the scratch to do that) and sleeping odd hours. I get the distinct feeling that most of my family (except my mom) prefer the blow-in brother and son rather than the perpetual presence and that isn’t a big surprise. Thirty-eight years is plenty of time to get used to that specific model.

No wife or girlfriend this year but my best friend for most of that thirty-eight is flying in for a week. My mom is worried Joe won’t have enough to do but I’m pretty sure just relaxing is going to be a good holiday for him. I’m pretty sure we’ll have some holiday fun—Wichita does have a few microbreweries and at least one bar that features blues.

Reflection

There are two sorts of reflection I’ll engage in this season. The first is the more recent kind, on the state of my disunion. I wrote a piece for Literate Ape that covers it pretty well. Here’s a bit of that:

On the day after we decided to divorce but the day before she confessed she'd been working as a prostitute for nearly three years, I told her that, while things didn't work the way we thought it would, ours was the best marriage and the most loved I'd ever lived. I meant it, it apparently meant a lot to her, and we both cried. The next day she unveiled the unthinkable and all of that sentiment was forgotten.

That's the thing about shock. If you're at least a little bit emotionally healthy, it wears off. Sure, it takes time to heal up, to get those bloody cuts to scab over and eventually scar, but it does wear off. "It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."

What I see was what everyone else saw. A strange but lovely couple. I was ridiculously and wholly in love with this woman. For five years in Chicago, we had an extraordinary partnership even with the personal quirks and curveballs thrown by life. What I see is a man in love and a woman doing her best to love him back. I see joy and laughter. I see mutual support. I see my family embrace her and she embrace them.

I see, for five years, between 2014 and 2019, the best marriage I'd ever had.

When my nephew died, I put together a video in memoriam for my sister. It included pictures of him from birth until shortly before he passed. One of the awful things I noticed in putting it together was that as his life got closer to the day of his death, his eyes started changing. He looked like someone going downhill. It was stark and obvious when no one really saw it at the time.

The Google Photos from the time we arrived in Vegas until the day I knew she decided to live her lie and then until we split reveal something similar. There are fewer pictures of her and the ones that were taken show her flipping the camera off or looking annoyed that I'm taking a picture at all. She starts wearing more and more makeup. Her clothing, which was always sort of a grunge 90's aesthetic, became more tattered and trashy. We took a day trip to Rhyolite, NV and there are forty pictures of the place and only three of her, six of me, and one of the two of us together. She looks unhappy in the four she's posing in.

Another quirk of hers was to subtly adopt the local accent of any place we visited. I first noticed it when we honeymooned in Jamaica. As soon as we got off the plane, her normal speech was suddenly musical in that Jamaican way. When she spoke to locals it became more pronounced. She did this in France and in London, too. Perhaps this assimilation was deeper than the accents but with the place. Las Vegas is a place of easy money, flexible morality, and an influx of tourists coming to have a fine, filthy time before going back to their homes and cubicles.

I'll never know what the truth was and it likely doesn't matter if I do. Getting rid of her photos from this specific digital dump felt more like packing up the clothing of someone who died to go to Goodwill. The woman for whom I collected hundreds of excerpts from Pablo Neruda and lovesick sayings died in February of 2020—I just didn't know until much later. I'll confess that I miss her but who she was rather than who she is and that's some Grade A mindfuckery.

I didn't see the change in her until it was long past the expiration date. I was looking but wasn't seeing what is now completely obvious through the photographs through our time together. I wouldn’t change a day with her for those first five years because I was in love and was with the person I was in love with. The person she chose to be once we got to Vegas is no one I ever wish to see again and so I delete all memory of her as completely as I can. I suppose that’s how all split ups are and the duality of our memories pervades the path forward.

The other sort of reflection is more holiday-centered. I love A Christmas Carol in almost every version of it. The story has many layers but the aspect that tends to get me in the gut is Jacob Marley and his chains:

"I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost.

"I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?"

Scrooge trembled more and more.

"Or would you know," pursued the Ghost, "the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago. You have laboured on it, since. It is a ponderous chain!"

Scrooge glanced about him on the floor, in the expectation of finding himself surrounded by some fifty or sixty fathoms of iron cable: but he could see nothing.

— A Christmas Carol

I think a lot about those links on my own chain.

Endings/Beginnings

2022 was an qualified shitshow for yours truly. The end of my marriage, the end of my time in Vegas. Bad endings that left scars. As I write this, I’m looking forward to some 2023 beginnings. A new job that may or may not involved working from 10pm-6am OR creating promotions and events for radio stations in Wichita. A new apartment. Some books to write. People to meet. Some solo travel.

In fifty-six years, I can point to only a few that royally sucked. 2022 is top of that short list but the rose color is that it is a short list. Most of the years were pretty damn good and a few were spectacular. I’m not so eager as to hope for 2023 to be spectacular but in comparison to this past one, I’d like to expect something better.

In the end, I’ll enjoy this holiday. I’ll be with people I love. I’ll be watching my favorite Christmas movies. I’ll drink egg nog with spiced rum and have freaking cookies until my blood runs thick with dough. It’ll be weird but weird is often quite good.