happy holidays and all the rest, I have only ever loved the lights. I have favorite trees all over the state and all over this city, California at Christmas is somebodie's idea of an oxymoron, but it's all I have ever known - even in the not so high foothills a white Christmas was a Hallmark cliche.
It's been exceptionally cold and it's been exceptionally clear, I expect the end of the world or the new messiah forthwith, rare is the day that calls for mittens in San Francisco, and yet here we are bundled and trundled pushing the heat gods at PG&E to their Enronless limits. I have been quietly pleading an absentia Christmas this year because I can't be assed and even if I could I fear that I am leaking a sad combo of bitumin, bile and the occasional tear (damn you NPR!)I have donated in lieu of gifts, but the magic of the season evades me and is eclipsed by the eulogy my mother has asked my to give for her mother and I have absolutlely nothing nice to say. It's heartbreaking but it's true, the only thing I wish I had from her is the songs she used to sing, that shoot through my memory like poison darts, that and the hot pants, but therein lies a legacy of vanity and deep, trenchant self-loathing. I've got enough of that! Thanks Dorothy! May you rest in peace with your tea cups of vodka and your pink feathered boas and your venom! Sleep well into this goodnight, don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out! (I have now secured my place in the ninth circle for maligning my dead grandmother.)
Oh just go ahead and fuck me, and all the goddamned rest - I'll be fine if I can just make it through past the new year. When we can dispense with the streamers and the feigned good cheer, when we can collectively head stolidly into the doldrums of deep winter, when our good Californian sun will peek out for a day as glorious as a chest of treasure, when the abandoned trees are weeping on street corners and the pointsettias are finally wilting, I will trade my grinch for a glimmer of hope that this year, the year 2007 and my future 36th year will be the best year yet.
All the augers are in place - the chinese magnolia is considering its magnificence at the head of Page Street, I am not renting my heart from my breast, I have been reduced to pounding my rib cage occaisionally, playing the xylophone on my rib cage in the name of sentimental exorcism.
I plod along increasingly perplexed and amazed at how fast the world passes into yet another ideology and lapses into another dogma. I was at a big box store (also recent to my vocabulary) buying one of those super cutsie photo printers and spent a few hours up way past my bedtime delighting in the very fact, the very fact that I could print my own pictures like a goddamned photomart in the middle of suburban fuckall, I was making pictures.... like I did with those brownie cameras in the early eighties, before fax machines in the age of the Apple IIE. I used to deposit film at Longs and have to wait seven to ten business days to get to the thrill of a bit of artistry and the abject disappointment in illconcieved photos. Part of the pleasure was the wait......... But there is no wait anymore, not for anything. The buzzing thrill of anticipation is an antecedant, why would you wait in the face of the dominating and frosted present. We mollify our grandiose dreams of the love we dont have and the success that continues to mysteriously elude us with a steady diet of internet gossip and futile comparisons with the rich and exceedingly idle, then again, I might just be be projecting across the whole of the vast expanse of the internets.
Just so you know, last weekend was a wash. Lot's of booze, exhusbands and old friends and the like, they just keep coming, sometimes I think I am the swirl in a frosty so preciously co-opted by the various western facing foodie meccas plaguing us like macerated locusts. Exotic goat's milk or not, I am just a dullard being trotted out in the name of novelty, I am as familiar as your highschool back pack, so find me there if you dare, half hidden under the shiny bag of semi-discarded chips and the carefully wrapped US history text book, adorned with your favorite bands and the identifiers of your makeshift tribe, way back in those brown paper days, way back in the days when we all had a stab at parity, when we were young and promise was at our feet. These days I am just a luddite confounded in solitude.
It's been exceptionally cold and it's been exceptionally clear, I expect the end of the world or the new messiah forthwith, rare is the day that calls for mittens in San Francisco, and yet here we are bundled and trundled pushing the heat gods at PG&E to their Enronless limits. I have been quietly pleading an absentia Christmas this year because I can't be assed and even if I could I fear that I am leaking a sad combo of bitumin, bile and the occasional tear (damn you NPR!)I have donated in lieu of gifts, but the magic of the season evades me and is eclipsed by the eulogy my mother has asked my to give for her mother and I have absolutlely nothing nice to say. It's heartbreaking but it's true, the only thing I wish I had from her is the songs she used to sing, that shoot through my memory like poison darts, that and the hot pants, but therein lies a legacy of vanity and deep, trenchant self-loathing. I've got enough of that! Thanks Dorothy! May you rest in peace with your tea cups of vodka and your pink feathered boas and your venom! Sleep well into this goodnight, don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out! (I have now secured my place in the ninth circle for maligning my dead grandmother.)
Oh just go ahead and fuck me, and all the goddamned rest - I'll be fine if I can just make it through past the new year. When we can dispense with the streamers and the feigned good cheer, when we can collectively head stolidly into the doldrums of deep winter, when our good Californian sun will peek out for a day as glorious as a chest of treasure, when the abandoned trees are weeping on street corners and the pointsettias are finally wilting, I will trade my grinch for a glimmer of hope that this year, the year 2007 and my future 36th year will be the best year yet.
All the augers are in place - the chinese magnolia is considering its magnificence at the head of Page Street, I am not renting my heart from my breast, I have been reduced to pounding my rib cage occaisionally, playing the xylophone on my rib cage in the name of sentimental exorcism.
I plod along increasingly perplexed and amazed at how fast the world passes into yet another ideology and lapses into another dogma. I was at a big box store (also recent to my vocabulary) buying one of those super cutsie photo printers and spent a few hours up way past my bedtime delighting in the very fact, the very fact that I could print my own pictures like a goddamned photomart in the middle of suburban fuckall, I was making pictures.... like I did with those brownie cameras in the early eighties, before fax machines in the age of the Apple IIE. I used to deposit film at Longs and have to wait seven to ten business days to get to the thrill of a bit of artistry and the abject disappointment in illconcieved photos. Part of the pleasure was the wait......... But there is no wait anymore, not for anything. The buzzing thrill of anticipation is an antecedant, why would you wait in the face of the dominating and frosted present. We mollify our grandiose dreams of the love we dont have and the success that continues to mysteriously elude us with a steady diet of internet gossip and futile comparisons with the rich and exceedingly idle, then again, I might just be be projecting across the whole of the vast expanse of the internets.
Just so you know, last weekend was a wash. Lot's of booze, exhusbands and old friends and the like, they just keep coming, sometimes I think I am the swirl in a frosty so preciously co-opted by the various western facing foodie meccas plaguing us like macerated locusts. Exotic goat's milk or not, I am just a dullard being trotted out in the name of novelty, I am as familiar as your highschool back pack, so find me there if you dare, half hidden under the shiny bag of semi-discarded chips and the carefully wrapped US history text book, adorned with your favorite bands and the identifiers of your makeshift tribe, way back in those brown paper days, way back in the days when we all had a stab at parity, when we were young and promise was at our feet. These days I am just a luddite confounded in solitude.
posted by emma at
10:32 PM
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