These colors are much better than Christmas colors

[Twenty minutes]

The December treeline at sunset isn't itself contemptuous of human life, or even indifferent. Its observation is more that of a drug court bailiff, silent and geometrical, flooded daily with the frantic protestations of sentenced meth heads blabbering lies before the bench, whatever the bench is.

Christmas Goblin

[Forty-five minutes]

It's just past noon on Christmas Eve and there is a sweet sunny chill in Little Rock, clear blue skies above the dun, broom-bristle grass of Arkansas winter. I am sitting in my apartment about to drive to my parents' house, some two hours west from here. I am sitting in my apartment with hate in my heart.

This is the year that I hate Christmas. I hate the sentiments, the fellowship and goodwill and family togetherness. For some of us, the idea of Christmasy family togetherness is as foreign a concept as a burqa. I hate the dichotomy Christmas creates: the warm cozy womb of the stocking world on the inside, the frostbitten blue fingers grubbing at the glass from the outside. I hate the way Christmas hijacks December so completely that for the duration of the month, the holiday seems like the axis upon which the entire calendar year turns. I guess if I had to make an argument for my sentiments, I'd say that I hate the smugness of Christmas. Satan was revolting against smugness as much as anything else (and the Grinch is just a stand-in for Satan, the entire tale being a twisted and heretical parable of universal reconciliation).

But smugness is usually (always?) an illusion sprung from the eye of the envious. The happy bestockinged family isn't smug on their own; their smugness only springs into being when observed by window goblins like myself. Smugness, like certain quantum events, doesn't exist without someone to observe it happening. A hermit in the woods can't be smug -- no matter how self-satisfied his stroll to his pious primitive toilet, no matter how saccharine his contented whistling through his licey beard. The joke is always on the devil.

I hate Christmas for the only reason anyone hates anything, which is envy and pride and covetousness, and the second-order emotions that spring from them: contempt and self-loathing and revulsion and bewilderment and despair. Yes, I hate Christmas this year, and yes, that makes me a bad person. Which makes me resent it twice as much, because I don't particularly want yet another reminder that I am a bad person alone in a cold and ever-shrinking world. It makes me want to go back to school and study design and marketing so that I can concoct consumer hysterias around horrible toys, creating ad campaigns so deviously hypnotic they fuel frenzied crowds of shoppers into Black Friday stampedes with death tolls reaching into the tens of thousands.

It wasn't always so, and I hope it will not always be so in the future, but this year I am a hater. But I am not particularly proud of the fact. If I'm not fighting it, I'm at least not embracing it. I try my best to cover my snarling face with a quilt, like a good child, so that we can all have fun or at least not be shitty to each other. As the narrator says in one of my favorite books of all time, in what seems to me nowadays the only statement in the human world with the remotest claim of moral truth to it, "the crime that is latent in us we must inflict upon ourselves, not on others."

And on you, now that you've read this. Merry Christmas! Actually, I feel much better now.

Spool it up

[One hour]

Going to saddle up this old swaybacked blog. I'm gonna do it on an absolute daily basis, because after years of pretending that writing isn't all I want, I've now started trying to get things published. And it's a little bit working out, but not fast enough to keep the flickering whisper of flame alive. I've got to learn how to write, quickly, urgently, with both hands.

Right now, I've got a trickle of bland, policy-focused journalism flowing through the sluice, but the wheel turns only intermittently. It's not enough. Each time I get an assignment for a story, I'm bad at it. Each time, I'm filled with dread. Every assignment brings a brief torrent of horrified activity, a flood that damages more product than it mills. Every article terrifies me. Not a good sign. This is supposed to be what I want to be doing. What's the problem?

For one thing, I can't handle the fact that it's seen. The knowledge of Actual Readership is an intimidating drone of noise that constantly threatens to seize up everything and frequently does.

Another part of it is that the product I'm producing is practically sealed behind glass. I do the writing, but I don't get it. I mean, I get the issues involved, the ins and outs of the levers and gears and politics. I just don't know how to insert myself into the writing of it. The writing I've grown to know intimately well is this sort of stuff right here -- personal blogging into the windy sweeps of the open internet, formless and directionless, sprawling and insignificant as lichen. But a piece of policy-focused journalism is a complicated little machine of statutes and politics and accompanying connective tissue. Such assembly requires a glove box, hermetically sealed for everyone's safety, and devising the innards of these pieces is both delicate and dangerous work. I'm just as likely to contaminate the fragile end product with some pathogen heaved out on the damp airwaves of my dumb horse breath as I am to poison myself by inhaling the finished piece's offgas -- the volatile, noxious fumes of the real world, bureaucracies and business and other such polymers.

I want to do well. I very badly want to keep writing. I want to keep getting paid for it. But I can't spend all my time hunched over a glove box. The thing with the dread happens largely because the stakes seem so very high -- I don't get many more life chances after this, folks, that's my feeling -- but also because the precision of motor movement involved in such tinkering is so very cramping. There's nothing wrong with building machines, but I've got to spend at least as much time thrashing around and flailing all my limbs into tables of glassware. I don't want to be gloved up all the time. I want to reach my bare hands into horrible nightmare squirming things and brightly gleaming boxes of razoredged technology and dusty crumbling trunks filled with scraps of antiquated textiles. I want to construct lurching abominations from their constituent parts and set them loose to amble around. To do that, this is necessary, the blogging. I feel certain I won't be able to continue to coherently write about, say, teachers' insurance rate hikes if I don't also revive the practice of regularly plugging art I know nothing about and describing carpet and generally bitching about absolutely everything in the world.

Fuck death and abandonment and betrayal; fuck crippling regrets and nostalgia and the creeping entropy of age; fuck the sad insignificance of this place in the world and the nauseating horror of this time in the world; fuck insecurities about lack of money, kids, or coolness. I'm going to try my damnedest to regress this lichen growth right back to where it was sixteen months ago and evolve it from there onward. A daily lubricating shot of freeform writing is essential to keep the rotten, creaking wheel turning. Or plodding along. A daily handful of oats. This blog is a setting where I can mix up three pretty shitty metaphors in the space of a few hundred words, none of which I'm remotely familiar with -- mills, horses, laboratories -- and I can trowel on the utter bullshit as thickly as I want (and I can also use em dashes, a semicolon, and a parenthetical to torture the hell out of any coherent syntax). Why? Because it's fun, goddammit.

Part 2

[Ten minutes]

Does consciousness deteriorate over time? Not cognition, not self, but consciousness. It feels like it. It feels like sentience is receding, even as thoughts and feelings remain. There's a sense of deteriorating insulation. Ever-accelerating flow of time means excessive experiences and not enough framework to fit them in. Things don't fall apart so much as they pile up on the floor. Too many things, but never enough things to satisfy.

Why isn't anyone talking about the ice storm?

[One hour]

This afternoon, fear gripped the city. Our offices were silent as tombs as we moved through the dwindling daylight, our faces drawn and gaunt, avoiding one another's gaze. In every home and building, men and women avoided the windows, consciously or not -- for through that tenuous glass membrane we could feel the temperature dropping. We could watch the clouds flowing eastward, hastening our certain doom. How many of us would see Monday morning? Better to turn inward and click grimly at the Internet, denial pounding in our ears.

Dusk. On my way home from work, I stopped by the bread-and-batteries queue at the Stephens building, their annual Christmas light display winking on and off in the descending darkness. A line of families stretched around the block, and beneath the bonhomie of the familiar red-and-green "NOBLESSE OBLIGE!" some people seemed to be achieving a scrap of normalcy, conversing and nervously chuckling. I eavesdropped on their talk of sports, politics, domestic dramas, acclaimed HBO series. None, of course, mentioned the hell about to befall our state. Next to me in line, shivering and scowling, stood a father of perhaps fifty years with a young girl at his side. Her face turned upwards toward his.

"When is the ice storm getting here, Papa?" she asked, innocently. Her shrill voice carried far too far in the frigid December air. All conversations around us ceased. Heads swung towards the man, faces contorting and emitting the bestial sounds of anger that only hysteria can draw forth. "What did she say?" hissed a gaunt woman with a CALS tote. The man blanched and clapped a shaking hand over the little girl's mouth. He knew as well as I that it was too late. I turned away and headed for home as the crowd closed in. The child and her father would have no need of bread now, nor flashlights.

A TV in a sports bar window caught my eye as I walked through the drizzle. News of a half dozen mass suicides across the city. The Fox 16 anchor maintained his cheer nonetheless, skillfully transitioning from brow-furrowed sorrow to amusement as he introduced a feel-good story about a knitting squirrel. And then, the weather update. "Well, it's certainly looking to be a white-knuckle night," the newsman said, flawless smile glinting in the studio lights. "Stay warm, stay safe, and stay off of those roads. Coming at us with an update from the front lines is Veronica, in Mena. How's it looking in Mena, Veronica?"

Half the screen cut to a crooked shot of a nighttime street blanketed in ice. Icicles were forming around the camera's lens. A prone blond figure in a lavender North Face windbreaker lay stiff and cold on the ground, her wireless mic clutched in one frozen hand. "No," whispered the anchor. "No. Veronica. I...I love you. NO!" His face twisted and he rose from the seat, tearing at his artificial hair. "VERONICA! God DAMN YOU, ICE STORM!" The show cut to commercial, and I continued on my way.

On my way home, I stopped by the Walgreens on Main St. for some essentials. The store seemed oddly empty at first, but in the seasonals aisle I found my answer. Of course -- eight or ten naked bodies covering themselves with cheap fleece throws manufactured in Honduran sweatshops. A clumsy shot at a spontaneous millenarian orgy had devolved into weepy recriminations and subsequent apologies, as such attempts so often do. Perhaps they'd at least reach some emotional catharsis in lieu of orgasm. They paid no attention to me. I gave them a nod and stepped carefully around a series of prone forms to get at the candles.

but...

...writing is the way out and up. Or one way. Sometimes.

Doomed

[Thirty minutes, go]

I find small ways to self-destroy, subtle and insidious strategies so well-hidden that my conscious mind remains unaware of their presence even as they're being put into practice. Not alcoholism or oxycontin, not gambling or physical mutilation, just targeted guerrilla attacks upon my dignity and sense of self that forward the thanatos campaign on an hour to hour basis. To outside observers, I assume, these look less like lacerations and more like bad habits, weaknesses. (Maybe this presumption is false, since it's often true that those outside my head are more aware of its workings than me on the inside. Or always true?) Even to me they seem only like frustrating lapses of will until I remember the truth: an enemy concealed in my mind seeks at all times to destroy me. Weakness is the means, not the end: it allows the enemy to gain a foothold and begin its gleeful slicing.

So what do these attacks look like? Stooped over a tupperware container, mindlessly shoveling an unheated mixture of acidic leftovers into my head. Logging onto Facebook at work, scrolling through a news feed, eyes narrowing or widening slightly at stimuli so slight they hardly register. Listening to a song, a decent song, over and over for the hooks and the beat until its slender worth is bleached away entirely. Bit-width pleasures. Slipping down a slope into a narrow muddy mental well, just shoulder-width if that, of memory repetitive and meaningless in scope, its context lost, a moment pilled and shredded over time into a solitary image and a phrase of conversation -- probably about myself -- years elapsed and lost to everyone but me and meaningless to everyone but me. And in that spot, people are lost to me. And alone, and alone.

Little things, little pleasure buttons to push and pleasure loops to unfulfill -- they kill. They allow the enemy to scrape away the day and self entirely. Get out the two-day old spaghetti and a cold fork. Uncouple the sensory input from one end of your being, the analytical and emotional response from the other end. Then, stare sightlessly, pace aimlessly, eat mechanically, but at an animal pace. Retreat inward in a grosteque parody of meditation. Living in the moment is inconceivable; annihilate the moment with a gray wash of obsessive nostalgia.

Put it on autopilot. Put a brick on the gas pedal and a clamp on the steering wheel, crawl down on the floorboard in the fetal position, and let the chips fall where they may.