32 posts tagged “holidailies”
It is bone season. The trees are finally dressed in their skeletons for the winter, the night has swallowed up the day, and even a blue sky, when it comes, is as menacing as the grave.
Okay, maybe not. But it is winter, for good this time, I am celebrating the traditional first funeral of Advent today, and I'm trying hard not to be a bore as I wake up this dead journal for the month. And even that's not true; I won't really be trying very hard not to be a bore. I've had plenty to say in the past, none of it new and none of it interesting, and I don't expect this latest outing to be much different. But it will be: the echo is never identical to the original sound. This funeral, this Advent, this winter; naturally they will be evocative of the past. My past: it's the only one I know.
But the present is not just the echo of the past. Today, at the funeral, I will be surprised to hear something completely new about someone I thought I knew, and I will touch the particularity of this death in a way that is pretty remote from me right now. The echo becomes a melody all its own, and then is echoed in its turn.
It is
cold out there, cold to the bone, and I don't want to be cold. It's
colder for her, and she doesn't mind. And I must have said that, or
something much like it, more than once before.
It is a dreary day in a seamless series of them; there is no New Year. I didn't go out today; almost literally: I left the house to go out to the street for the paper, and came back in to stay after being out less than a minute. The rain tapered off along about mid-morning, but the fall-out remained. I am looking at a foggy evening through a dirty window, and the landscape is both nondescript and overfamiliar. That's a lot to dig through to get at truth.
Can I get at some Big Truth to bring this Holidailies month to a close, to tie it all up so that all that has come before makes sense? Not likely; not that there is no truth to get at, or that I'm lacking in insight, but there is no "progress" here and there are no endings, either. I put a map up on the wall today. It's only a representation, as are these pages. The map stops at the border, and after that is only emptiness; but only in the representation. That which it represents carries on; without beginning, without ending, neither progressing nor receding. We have a blessed rage for order, perhaps; but the order we make is not the order that we find. Our lives fall out of the sky and come to rest in front of us. We make what we can out of what we've found.
In less than five hours the new year will come in, and I'm not ready. For one thing, i don't have a 2007 calendar, at least not one I like. I have the kind that the municipality issues and that auto repair shops and insurance agents give out. Full of vaguely seasonal, pastoral pictures of generic scenes I've never seen. I ended up using one of those last year but it wasn't any fun, so I put up next to it a 1992 Beverly Hills 90210 phot calendar. It was strange and diverting, but now I'm tired of it.
I suppose that's a task I can set myself for the evening, assembling a calendar page for the month of January 2007. I have to have the days on the wall, but the picture that goes with them is up to me. All I need is some glue and some crap, and I think I've got both.
I know it's a bore, but I'm going to talk about my health. I've been sick the whole month, and it has been more than two weeks since I was diagnosed with bronchitis. It is irritatingly lingering; I can't quite shake it and progress is so slow that sometimes I think I'm imagining it. So of course, three things about illness: It's depressing, it's boring, and it's anti-intellectual. All of these symptoms pass through the portal -- and I end up writing gloomy, dull, obvious stuff and trying to pass it off as readable material. In person I'm worse: a co-worker asks me how I'm doing and I spill out an endless list of ups, downs and steadies, and just barely stop myself before I describe the objectionable goop that I'm coughing up at night. Readers, thank your lucky stars that you only have to put up with the bizarre nonsense I'm wtiting here. When I feel better my natural melancholy will displace this unnatural humor, but by then I'll have no reason to write every day, and you'll have no reason to read.
Hello there. I suppose you want to kiss me. Many people do. You needn't be embarrassed. I want you to be comfortable, although we've just met.
You don't have to say anything. Possibly you are awestruck. Look: when I turn my head so, am I not noble to look upon?
I take your silence to imply assent.
Perhaps you would be more comfortable in the dark. There. Now you have no call to feel self-conscious. Let me move a little closer. That's better.
Some days I don't wear a hat at all. Other days I wear two. That's just the kind of individual I am.
I am very famous, you know. Nobody knows how famous I am. But now you do.
Do you like the quiet? The greatest battles ever fought were waged in silence. It reminds me of how important I am. It is only the little people who chatter so. Greatness need no explanation.
My fingernails and toenails have no smell. They just are.
Must you go so soon? All right then. You may kiss me next time.
It's funny but the main thing I remember about President Ford's administration is the WIN button. Whip Inflation Now. The idea that economic troubles could be overcome by the wearing of lapel badges seemed to me at the time unbelievably ludicrous. Of course I was a high school student then, full of scorn for all occasions, but I have to say, even now, decades hence: Are you kidding me? What the fuck?
Of course, I can't say that the WIN button was President Ford's personal idea, but he did endorse it on TV. I know now that the whole campaign crumbled in weeks as other economic problems took precedence over inflation, but at the time I figureed the reason I never saw a WIN button was that no one had the nerve to wear one. Maybe distribution was a problem, too; outside of the political season the main places you got these badges were head shops, and inflation was not the foremost concern of the patrons thereof. Now there are no WIN buttons, and no head shops, and no President Ford. I suppose my views have moderated in most areas, and I admit the man was of greater stature than we knew at the time, but WIN buttons? Stupidest damned thing I ever heard of.
Tex Ritter John Ritter "Three's Company" Joyce Dewitt James Joyce "Ulysses" Ulysses S. Grant Who Is buried in Grant's Tomb? "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee" Dee Brown Sandra Dee "Gidget" Sally Field Potter's Field Mr. Potter "It's a Wonderful Life" Frank Capra "Meet John Doe" Gary Cooper "High Noon" Grace Kelly Walt Kelly "Pogo" Albert Alligator Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass "A Taste of Honey" "Honeycomb" Jimmy Rodgers The Yodelin 'Brakeman "California Blues" Randy California Spirit "The Model Shop" "The Shop Around the Corner" Ernst Lubitsch Max Ernst Loplop Presente...
I wonder what other people are writing about on "Holidailies". I wonder, but I'm not actually curious enough to click through. Could anyone actually be so desperate for entertainment that they would read a journal called ... well, best not to go there. I love the portal, and I'm sure there's lots of excellent material available through it. I just don't really read this kind of stuff any more. Which presents a problem, because I sure will produce this kind of stuff. Assuming, of course, that what I'm producing is typical Holidailies stuff; and there's no way to be sure that it is, since, as I said, I rarely click through.
I accept the authenticity of those other narratives, I guess, without being moved to admit their relevance. The people I know (and I use the word "know" very broadly, in an internet-age sense) have proved the relevance of their narratives to me. And frankly, if I don't know you, I don't care if your cat is sick -- I might, in time, learn to care about it, but I can't get interested in it straight out of the blocks. Should I be more sympathetic? Probably. But I need a thread in my labyrinth; most of the time the thread is prior knowledge, but occasionally excellence of observation or style are sufficient. But finding these attributes is a tedious task, too tedious, I'm afraid, for me any more. I'll take my hat off every time a hearse passes by, but I won't cry over the poor sod inside.
I got through it all yesterday; five worship services over fourteen hours that all required different physical and technical support. It's supposed to be something like a birthday party, I guess, with the candles and everything. But there's something grim about it too. Of course, I have been walking around half-dead all month, and the bronchitis returned with a vengeance this morning when I finally got home and tried to sleep. Today I have been good for nothing, weak and tired and cold and confused; for contrast I explode every once in a while into a wretched fit of coughing. I dragged myself down to the church for the Christmas Day service (I am excused from it professionally but try to attend for personal reasons), and managed to make it through, but I cancelled out of my dinner invitation and came home to be alone. To spend the day dozing, coughing, and listening to the rain fall against the siding.
In a few minutes it begins again. I become the surface upon which the night's holiness is pounded, until it is an instrument of white-hot beauty. Lord, make ME an instrument, I have prayed: and in answer I have been made the means through which His instruments are made. I do not go out into the world, but rest forever in the unbearable heat of the forge, always burning, never transformed. Then the fire goes out, and all that reains is smoke and embers. And me.
