Niagara falls Frankie angel

Mark this event, write it down. I need to remember when it all started. This was the first Christmas that slipped through my fingers. The first Christmas I never got the full-on, "It's FUSKING Christmas!" feeling -- Santa, Jesus, goodwill toward men and all that. Mark it down so when I'm visited by three ghosts I have a place to trace it all back.

Wrapping presents at my mom's house and watching a little bit of A Christmas Story I thought I felt something, but nothing came to fruition. Don't get me wrong, I have plenty to be happy about. I know that. And it wasn't so much that I was unhappy as much as I felt like something was missing. Something's not the same.

There it is again, that abstract term I've come to know so well. Something.

About a week before holiday ground-zero -- as a last ditch attempt to clasp on to some festive feeling -- I tried to go buy my favorite Christmas movie, Scrooged but I couldn't find it at any of the local stores. It's been a couple of years since I've seen it and most of the time it's my holiday pick-me-up. My Christmas Viagra, if you will. Christmas movies on TNT or USA. That usually does it for me. Queue the warm and fuzzy.

Maybe a winged Carol Kane needed to hit me in the face with a toaster. I could have used that this year.

Christmas day was good. All the pieces were in place. Everything played out as planned, as it always does. Food, family, presents. We ate Turducken, which I don't know how I feel about. A chicken inside of a duck inside of a turkey. It sounded more like a dare than actual cuisine. It was good, I guess, but I still felt nothing. No Christmas glow.

I even got to see the abomination of a house on the way back to Grandma's. The house you can see from space. Every neighborhood has one. It stands tall with a blinking light covering every inch. The one that looks like it's on fire. On fire with Christmas.

Seeing this should have done it, it's a tradition after all. It should have struck that dormant Christmas nerve. It should have started my heart growing three times it's size, but somehow, it wasn't the same. Like looking at a bicycle when you're all grown up. It's not as big as when you were seven. It serves a different purpose now.

I remember things being larger. Bigger than I could ever surmount.

I feel like I just rubbed my eyes and rubbed away the magic.

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Menstrual cycles of exgirlfriends

Someone from work just put a bag full of Lindt Chocolates on my desk. They just left it there as a holiday gift. Here, eat all you want, you know you want to. Like the apparition of peer pressure it doth call to me.

You can't know how opportune it is for just such things. And yeah, I've had three chocolates so far. I know it won't only be three that I have all day. I know it as well as I know my soul.

I'm weak, and because of Kelly, this time of the month I always crave chocolate. It's the residual left-over of our relationship. This time of the month was always her time if the month, and so she always craved chocolates or sweets. And through sympathy pain, I was always her partner in crime. So yeah, I can't get enough chocolate right now.

Just like everything else that's leaving me about her, I know this too will fade. But right now, at my desk, in front of the great expanse of the internet -- my confessional -- I feel like eating more candy.

:)

Make that four I've had all day.

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Transubstantiate

I open my eyes into a maw of burning light. A morning of revelations. Like going to bed on earth and waking up on the sun. Refreshed. Reformed. Reconciled. Laying in the bed next to me is a burned-off, dead, calloused layer of skin. Next to me the old me is sleeping. A new and different day indeed.

It's eight a.m. and I forgot to close the blinds last night. It's bright in here. The only thing I can think is: it's been a while. Like Melvin Udall in As Good As It Gets, I forgot to lock the door.

Maybe I didn't say that with enough bravado. This deserves another avowal. This weekend I forgot to lock the door.

Not everything went right. I was a complete fifth wheel on Friday. Club Sonar and dancing with friends who seem to be finding themselves with strange attractors. Pulled in directions opposite me. I see what it must have been like for them when I wasn't around. When I was lost to the ether of a long-term relationship. I'm happy for them. I'm happy for me too. I'm happy I can handle it.

Saturday I attended Michele's birthday party. Good food, good peoples, good times. There was talk of pretzels making us thirsty, scissor fighting and Dr. Tran's hickory smoked horse butt-holes. Sometime during the night Duncan the dog got a wild hair with a squeeze-toy hotdog and decided to run laps around the living room. "That's how Dennis eats hotdogs," I exclaimed. We all got a laugh. Sorry Dennis.

Old friends I hadn't seen in years, we made small talk and smiled, bringing back times before people moved away. Before all the distance. The theme of Saturday was catching up and for the first time this year I started to get into the spirit of the season. After everyone left, Michele and I sat in the aftermath looking through the evening's pictures. I drove home shortly after.

Sunday morning came bright and early. I woke up, grabbed a shower, threw on some clothes and headed out to nab breakfast. I came home, knocked on Dennis' door and woke him up with the King. We were eating sausage egg and cheese sandwiches in the kitchen at ten in the morning, cracking jokes about something or another when I suddenly came to -- on present course -- one day, him and I, we're going to be common law married. Indeed a scary thought. Then the gay jokes will seem founded. One of us needs to get hitched and quick.

At the mall the parking wasn't as bad as we had expected. We found a place with relative ease. Inside the crowds were dense and we weaved in and out of packs of people like a school of fish through the thickness of water. Dennis and I were drinking and shopping, Sean was driving.

Before you think us alcoholics this is not something we normally do. It's just that it's the only thing that makes the mall remotely bearable this time of the year. We were the Dan Akroid santa from Trading Places. I spilled vodka down the inside of my coat pocket and it soaked through to the outside. All I needed was a salmon sticking to the white synthetic hairs of the santa beard I wasn't wearing. It was great.

It's Christmas and just like the holiday tunes they pump out over the audio system in every store you walk into, we danced the line between endearing and annoying. In the end I think we were more the latter.

I got stuff done this weekend. There's still more to do but I'm getting there. It's a whisper in my ear telling me I'll be fine, that I'll get there. And when I do, parking won't be as bad as I thought.

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My new favorite

Driving in Baltimore to get tacos. Sometimes I love this city.

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Refraction

Touch the mirror, break the surface tension. Watch the friction ripple off into infinity. A million reflections stretch out like a paper-doll. Your shades of gray. Your selves. Each one different, separate from the beginning. Like the rings in a recently sawed tree-stump, this is where you've been. The things you've lived through, each one written on your image.

You're as easy to steal as a car with an open window. You're an unlocked door. A safe the combination has been entered. Too easy to know. People get the full story just by looking at you. No mystery, no secret to your ticking. Nothing to unwrap.

You're disarming. You follow the rules. People can be themselves around you. Inside of minutes they feel they've known you their entire life. You have the same conversations with strangers you always have. You hear the same things. Nice words falling from their lips on familiar ears.

Yesterday I wrote down my birth-date on a form at the doctors office. Instead of 1977 I accidentally wrote 2977. Funny how something as small as a typo can make you think about so much. The weight of a date. Knowing at some point that day will exist. It's out there and you'll never see it. In the span of seconds you think about where you've been, where you're going. Time. The arbitrary nature of things like dates, plans, concepts of future.

I've fallen into the fold of my life. Putting things down on paper always helps me with perspective.

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Snow in New York

I'm a building scheduled to be demolished. I'm emptied, a house with nothing in it. Vacant. I have been for sometime now. Likewise, I'm to be rebuilt.

The wrecking ball crashed into my facade at approximately 3:30am Sunday morning. Exiting a bar in NY and finding it snowing, a kiss out of left field from a total stranger. Pulled aside into dark corners. She said, it's snowing, and before I'd even realized she slammed into me with all the force of something that changes everything.

Her name was Elizabeth, I think. We spent some time talking at the bar, we all did. Her, Jon, Nick and I. I doubt I'll ever see her again. Not said like that's a bad or good thing.

Scarves, Nick throwing a menu in a Korean restaurant after we were ignored for twenty minutes, the browbeating cold, the snow, warm gloves from your pockets, the subway, the picture Jon took of Kevin and I where we look like secret agents, pizza as a substitute for sushi at 4:00am, pictures in elevator mirrors, three guys singing "Let it Snow" in the middle of the street, a toilet that flushed like you were at thirty-thousand feet, a twenty-six dollar round of shots, hot-dogs, coy glances, unexpected street bazaars, feeling completely interesting, using a cute girl's favorite word by accident -- I like New York more than all of these things. It's greater than the sum of it's parts.

Snow in New York, there's nothing like it.

EDIT: Jon's pics are up.

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