Christmas sprinted onto the scene faster than I was prepared for and, much like the whole of 2009, slipped away in the blink of an eye. It seems like only a month or so ago that I was driving back from NY after my New Year's extravaganza last year, 20 miles from home just after dawn, talking to a friend in LA who was out for a late night stroll to grab a burrito at 5am. 2009 is the year, baby, he'd said. I protested, citing the greatness that was 2007. My trip to London. My touring. 2009 is going to make 2007 look like a pile of dogshit, he assured me. I believed him. Partly because I wanted to and partially because he'd never been wrong when he used that sort of inflection. He wasn't wrong. 2009 was the best year of my life thus far, and though I've been guilty of saying that for other years, this year really set the bar above and beyond my expectations for what a great year should be. I sat down and toted up which months were good and which were bad and came up with maybe three months that were awful, five or so that were fairly average and four months that were absolutely breathtaking with the scope of the greatness. Moments I still look back on and smile. Grin, really. I didn't just walk in the sun, I cruised down a blinding strip. I blazed a wide blackened path through this year and amazed myself with what I accomplished, what I saw, what happened to me.
On the other hand, that black path has a darker side, and as the year draws to a close I'm also taking inventory of what I lost. Often with equally profound meaning and a devastation that sucked the air from my lungs and the strength from my legs. I didn't soar through 2009. Several months in here, I crawled, and I can see the smears of blood along the way where I passed. There's still a huge, huge hole where Lukas used to be. I've gauzed it over pretty well. Sometimes the wind whistles a tune when it slips between my ribs, where my heart once hung. A lot of the time it just aches. Things will remind me of him, events won't seem quite right without his hand in things somehow. I dialed his number today. Listened to the double purr of UK ringing. Hung up. I don't even know if he'd answer, if it's still his number or someone else's, don't know what I'd have said if he'd answered but I had to try, he's not forgotten, my number on the caller ID should be enough for him to know. This is the first Christmas in ten years when I didn't have a special someone to look for as far as those lover's gifts go. No mistletoe. No extra stocking to fill. No hurrying home after family time to start an online Christmas with an ice-eyed elf far away. There were a lot of carols I couldn't listen to. I stuck to instrumentals. Nobody's coming home for Christmas for me, not for Christmas, not for New Year's Night. I didn't have to come home from dinner to let the dog out, either. This is our first Christmas without her. No worrying about the gifts while we were gone. It's hard to rip up wrapping paper when you're frozen underground. Even dinner wasn't the same. My grandfather slipped off the fireplace step and fell when he was unplugging the lights, a few days before Christmas Eve. He hit his head pretty hard, broke his pelvis. Grandpa's the patriarch, he sits in his rocker, he carves the bird, he mixes the gin and tonics and leads the whiskey toast. This year we toasted without him and his spot at the table was empty. A voice in the back of my head said I should get used to it, that he would likely not be here at all next year. I won't believe that. He's in a hospice home kind of thing and insisted he was too much of a burden, didn't want to come home. We went to visit him, of course. Two dozen of us packed into cars, filling up the lobby with our noise and presents. He looked so tiny in his wheelchair, shrunken in on himself, one sock foot double the size of the other. This is not the grandpa I remember. This grandpa is old. My grandpa was never old like this one. Grandma too, who's doing better than him, trying to put on her brave face for everyone on the holidays.
I visited a friend of mine on the 23rd. Spent four days baking nearly a dozen kinds of cookies and I brought him up a little assortment on a plate, a poinsettia (my favorite kind, a tiny blue glittered one), a card and a gift. His wife is in poor health and without her, he doesn't like Christmas. No tree, no presents, no calls. We talked over coffee and I realized that the dashing sir I remember from years gone by has pretty much gone away. Hiding somewhere, I hope someday to return. We talked about suicide and the death of dreams, the gradual inevitable decay from a life full-lived to one cut back to simple pleasures, and then even that cut down to a mere existence with every day bleeding into the next in one long gray smear. He has no hope of it ever getting better and I find it hard to convince him otherwise. It made me think a lot. Here's a guy who could've had a great many things, but chose instead to stay somewhere quiet with the girl who is his world. She's not really there anymore and he's like the physical representation of her mind. There like an afterthought, a token placeholder without much substance to it. I wonder if I could end up like that. If my choices would be the same, or different. How long I would last, in that kind of situation.
I drove home by my favorite route, the long dark two lane road with only three reasons to stop in 30 miles. There wasn't much of a moon but I could still see the snow, turning everything into what I would've termed "a glittering fairyland" if I'd been in a better mindset. As I was, it looked like an ice cold wasteland, harsh and unforgiving. Mechanical Animals was perfect and I cranked it until I could feel the bass purring against my ass through the seats. I'm never gonna be the one for you. Maybe my favorite song on the album. It was so loud that I couldn't hear myself sing but I sang anyway, for the tremble in my throat to match the one in my stomach. Manson's voice glazed me in permafrost, ruffled my skin into gooseflesh and every hair on my arms and my neck was electric. It was me and the sky and the ice and the song and something hard in my chest cracked, dissolved like an egg under acid. I don't know what came out of it, but it brought tears to my eyes and I remembered the first time this feeling happened to me, a good twelve years ago in Cleveland. It was different then, everything was. I was someone else entirely and the sensation was only somewhat related. This crumbling, the opening, some terrible light flickering into being where there'd been none before. It was comforting and I had a ghost of that feeling I get at a show, where I'm positive the world could end at any second and I would have no regrets and wouldn't be angry at death in this fashion, with my veins full of this feeling and my ears full of this noise.
It still feels strange, you know? The changes. People going, people coming in. Getting nearer, pulling away. My grandfather's cancers won't let him stay long and I'm watching my parents come to grips with that. I took a photo of my dad today and he looked older than I remember. I watch him limp to bed some nights and I wonder how long it will be before I'm in their places. How many Christmases I have before I have to postpone dinner to do a nursing home visit. How many more years before he won't be able to punch a slot machine into working again. I wonder how I'll handle it when his hands shake too much to cut the Christmas turkey. This is supposed to be such a happy holiday and such a great time of year and instead I find myself more fearful of the future than I think I've ever been. But at the same time, I'm incredibly hopeful. Today I got some money, new luggage, a new GPS, some gas cards, a couple books (Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas and American Psycho), and the same fucking amazing Sony CyberShot DSC-H20 that I've been stealing for shoots since my mother got one. Plus candy and liquor (and, oddly enough, Marilyn Manson lightswitch plates. WTF.) It's pretty much a giant "looks like you'll be gone a lot. Enjoy the road" sign. I plan on it. I needed all of these things. I was hoping to not need the GPS, as I'm hoping I'll be riding on a bus instead of driving in a car, but it's a giant arrow to the EXIT door. I'm just afraid of what's out there. And now that I think about it, with as fast as it seems as things are going and people are leaving and aging,if when I do get out, I'm afraid everyone will have aged 20 years in the short time it'll take me to come back. I feel like a vampire sometimes. I don't see myself aging much, but I see it in everyone else at frightening speeds. My own scary revelation today? I have an inch of undyed roots and just touched up my hair two months ago. Damn.
I think Captain Buzzkill should consider doing something else that isn't ranting incoherently and sadly into the Internet nothingness. No doubt you all are warm and comfortable and safe with your families, your friends, your gifts, your treats. I have those but I can't seem to feel them. I hate when I get caught in these little whirlpools of unhappiness. Always unexpected. Never good. Maybe there's trouble somewhere out there that's giving me dissonant feedback. Time may tell. Probably not. Anyway. I hope the rest of 2009 brings you peace and wonder, that the world seems bright and new, that you sleep deeply and wake up feeling alive, and that your thoughts are sweet and untroubled as the last grains of 2009 slip through our fingers.
On the other hand, that black path has a darker side, and as the year draws to a close I'm also taking inventory of what I lost. Often with equally profound meaning and a devastation that sucked the air from my lungs and the strength from my legs. I didn't soar through 2009. Several months in here, I crawled, and I can see the smears of blood along the way where I passed. There's still a huge, huge hole where Lukas used to be. I've gauzed it over pretty well. Sometimes the wind whistles a tune when it slips between my ribs, where my heart once hung. A lot of the time it just aches. Things will remind me of him, events won't seem quite right without his hand in things somehow. I dialed his number today. Listened to the double purr of UK ringing. Hung up. I don't even know if he'd answer, if it's still his number or someone else's, don't know what I'd have said if he'd answered but I had to try, he's not forgotten, my number on the caller ID should be enough for him to know. This is the first Christmas in ten years when I didn't have a special someone to look for as far as those lover's gifts go. No mistletoe. No extra stocking to fill. No hurrying home after family time to start an online Christmas with an ice-eyed elf far away. There were a lot of carols I couldn't listen to. I stuck to instrumentals. Nobody's coming home for Christmas for me, not for Christmas, not for New Year's Night. I didn't have to come home from dinner to let the dog out, either. This is our first Christmas without her. No worrying about the gifts while we were gone. It's hard to rip up wrapping paper when you're frozen underground. Even dinner wasn't the same. My grandfather slipped off the fireplace step and fell when he was unplugging the lights, a few days before Christmas Eve. He hit his head pretty hard, broke his pelvis. Grandpa's the patriarch, he sits in his rocker, he carves the bird, he mixes the gin and tonics and leads the whiskey toast. This year we toasted without him and his spot at the table was empty. A voice in the back of my head said I should get used to it, that he would likely not be here at all next year. I won't believe that. He's in a hospice home kind of thing and insisted he was too much of a burden, didn't want to come home. We went to visit him, of course. Two dozen of us packed into cars, filling up the lobby with our noise and presents. He looked so tiny in his wheelchair, shrunken in on himself, one sock foot double the size of the other. This is not the grandpa I remember. This grandpa is old. My grandpa was never old like this one. Grandma too, who's doing better than him, trying to put on her brave face for everyone on the holidays.
I visited a friend of mine on the 23rd. Spent four days baking nearly a dozen kinds of cookies and I brought him up a little assortment on a plate, a poinsettia (my favorite kind, a tiny blue glittered one), a card and a gift. His wife is in poor health and without her, he doesn't like Christmas. No tree, no presents, no calls. We talked over coffee and I realized that the dashing sir I remember from years gone by has pretty much gone away. Hiding somewhere, I hope someday to return. We talked about suicide and the death of dreams, the gradual inevitable decay from a life full-lived to one cut back to simple pleasures, and then even that cut down to a mere existence with every day bleeding into the next in one long gray smear. He has no hope of it ever getting better and I find it hard to convince him otherwise. It made me think a lot. Here's a guy who could've had a great many things, but chose instead to stay somewhere quiet with the girl who is his world. She's not really there anymore and he's like the physical representation of her mind. There like an afterthought, a token placeholder without much substance to it. I wonder if I could end up like that. If my choices would be the same, or different. How long I would last, in that kind of situation.
I drove home by my favorite route, the long dark two lane road with only three reasons to stop in 30 miles. There wasn't much of a moon but I could still see the snow, turning everything into what I would've termed "a glittering fairyland" if I'd been in a better mindset. As I was, it looked like an ice cold wasteland, harsh and unforgiving. Mechanical Animals was perfect and I cranked it until I could feel the bass purring against my ass through the seats. I'm never gonna be the one for you. Maybe my favorite song on the album. It was so loud that I couldn't hear myself sing but I sang anyway, for the tremble in my throat to match the one in my stomach. Manson's voice glazed me in permafrost, ruffled my skin into gooseflesh and every hair on my arms and my neck was electric. It was me and the sky and the ice and the song and something hard in my chest cracked, dissolved like an egg under acid. I don't know what came out of it, but it brought tears to my eyes and I remembered the first time this feeling happened to me, a good twelve years ago in Cleveland. It was different then, everything was. I was someone else entirely and the sensation was only somewhat related. This crumbling, the opening, some terrible light flickering into being where there'd been none before. It was comforting and I had a ghost of that feeling I get at a show, where I'm positive the world could end at any second and I would have no regrets and wouldn't be angry at death in this fashion, with my veins full of this feeling and my ears full of this noise.
It still feels strange, you know? The changes. People going, people coming in. Getting nearer, pulling away. My grandfather's cancers won't let him stay long and I'm watching my parents come to grips with that. I took a photo of my dad today and he looked older than I remember. I watch him limp to bed some nights and I wonder how long it will be before I'm in their places. How many Christmases I have before I have to postpone dinner to do a nursing home visit. How many more years before he won't be able to punch a slot machine into working again. I wonder how I'll handle it when his hands shake too much to cut the Christmas turkey. This is supposed to be such a happy holiday and such a great time of year and instead I find myself more fearful of the future than I think I've ever been. But at the same time, I'm incredibly hopeful. Today I got some money, new luggage, a new GPS, some gas cards, a couple books (Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas and American Psycho), and the same fucking amazing Sony CyberShot DSC-H20 that I've been stealing for shoots since my mother got one. Plus candy and liquor (and, oddly enough, Marilyn Manson lightswitch plates. WTF.) It's pretty much a giant "looks like you'll be gone a lot. Enjoy the road" sign. I plan on it. I needed all of these things. I was hoping to not need the GPS, as I'm hoping I'll be riding on a bus instead of driving in a car, but it's a giant arrow to the EXIT door. I'm just afraid of what's out there. And now that I think about it, with as fast as it seems as things are going and people are leaving and aging,
I think Captain Buzzkill should consider doing something else that isn't ranting incoherently and sadly into the Internet nothingness. No doubt you all are warm and comfortable and safe with your families, your friends, your gifts, your treats. I have those but I can't seem to feel them. I hate when I get caught in these little whirlpools of unhappiness. Always unexpected. Never good. Maybe there's trouble somewhere out there that's giving me dissonant feedback. Time may tell. Probably not. Anyway. I hope the rest of 2009 brings you peace and wonder, that the world seems bright and new, that you sleep deeply and wake up feeling alive, and that your thoughts are sweet and untroubled as the last grains of 2009 slip through our fingers.
- Music:David Bowie - Time
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