Ghosts of Christmas Past

I just can't seem to get into the Christmas spirit.

A couple weeks ago, I did all of my Christmas shopping in one fell swoop, but it happened to be 77 degrees that day. It was a checklist marathon, nothing more. I wrapped all the gifts. I put up strands of lights, but no tree yet.

Actually, I might not put a tree up at all this year. It's a hassle, and I'm just not feeling it. But to be honest, the reason I didn't put up the tree is because I know I should be spending that time either hunting for more money or for a new house. We can't live here when the baby comes, which means the writing is on the proverbial fucking wall. Why pretend to be jolly and waste an evening putting up a Christmas tree?

The polar vortex a couple weeks ago hit us hard. It actually got down to freezing. Barely, but still technically freezing. I should have jumped on the opportunity then, to get in the spirit. Alas, I am doomed to walk the earth in perpetual non-Christmas. Despite the stores ramming mistletoe down your throat in early November.

I don't mean to serve you a plate of humbug-and-crackers as an appetizer, it's just that my mind is everywhere but Christmas.

It has been dreary and chilly. I mean that in the best way possible, because after so long, the interminable Texas summer sunshine is fucking suffocating. What's my f-word tally for this post so far, by the way? My point is that, when once there was a time when dreary was actually dreary, now it is a welcome change of pace! After almost five years here, I have come to appreciate--and relish--any day between 40 and 69 degrees Fahrenheit. And if it's cloudy, so much the better. But I digress.

Because such weather is so uncommon here, it only serves to further distract me. I am time traveling, whether I like it or not, to years past. Fall, Christmas, whatever. Minus the holiday cheer. The past week, I've been dwelling on my time in Bowling Green, Ohio. August 2004 to the very end of July 2006, not that you give a shit about the dates.

In the interest of brevity, and in integrity, I will not waste your time with portraits of Christmases prior to my BGSU grad school years.

December 2004.
I spend several days ensconced in my analysis of the score to Black Hawk Down. I actually didn't see daylight for about three days. On top of the single-digit cold, I might as well have been in Alaska. I was working damned hard, and became so familiar with the movie that I might as well have been an editor on it. (Meanwhile, present-day, I have been revisiting that score.) This was an intense month. Finals Week was evil, and a semester of compositions with the worthless Burton Beerman left me utterly nonplussed.

Home for the holidays, which is a ten-hour drive from BGSU. After one semester there, I was already in hell. I think a big part of the reason I hate BGSU so passionately is because it began with such innocence on my part. Such earnestness, such a love-driven motivation to have a good rapport in what should have been a nurturing environment. Like an abusive relationship, I kept coming back for more, when I probably should have just dropped out. And so, naive love turned to hideous hate. But not quite yet. This was just the beginning, when I started to realize how deep the rabbit hole went.

That Christmas, I was home, and people who really missed me were around, and they made good company. I saw the dichotomy between BGSU and Home like night and day. My heart was even more weary seeing how much better it felt to be away from Ohio. Once a weight was lifted, I could tell just how heavy it was. And there was so much more to go.


December 2005.
Same, only more so. By this point, I was locked in a brutal war. You know the rest. BGSU will burn, I so swear it. All of those mother fuckers, including some of the students at the time, will regret being born. Merry Christmas. I'll see you in Hell.

I started to think about my friend Dean, from my undergraduate. I missed him and the gang, but just as much, I had come to miss the person I was when I was around him. We had a dynamic, and I really wanted it back. Earlier that year, I had been thinking about the few trips I made to Kansas City, to train with the South KC Shotokan dojo. I knew I had to find something to do after grad school, and I thought, "Why not just move to Kansas City and figure it out from there?" Why not, indeed. It was a crazy, random notion.

I was driving back to the music building, listening to The Breaking of the Fellowship, mulling everything over. Thinking about my friends and enemies at BG, how much I had invested in the place, and thinking of the future, of maybe returning to Kansas City if for no other reason than for martial arts. And the horns came in with the fellowship motif in that moment when Aragorn declared that they would not leave Merry and Pippin to torment and death. "Let's hunt some orc!" In that musical moment, in my car, I decided--no, I promised myself--that I would move to Kansas City as soon as I finished my Master's Degree. And so I did. Truth be told, I don't remember if that moment occurred in December; in fact, I think it was later, as there was no snow on the ground. But the seed of the idea was there in December, at Christmas time.


December 2006.
I was still decompressing after grad school, holed up in Stonewood Apartments in Kansas City, MO. I was coming to love that town since moving there on Labor Day. I had a soul-sucking, menial job, but I was in charge of the rest of my time, which I largely devoted to trying to build a sense of community, fellowship, and above all, belonging. I was devoted to the dojo, and going to the gym on the off nights. I was in a Lifegroup with the Metro Christian Fellowship. I was meeting my other friends when possible, brainstorming, exploring, or just puttering around. But we were thinking big, and were working on making the city ours. It was a hopeful, if frustrating, time.

One night, the snow hit KC especially hard. At the time, I was just getting into Firefly, which was I think recently available on DVD. I bought it at Best Buy purely on the unanimous recommendations from several people; I had never seen a previous or TV spot for it, and just went in blind. I think I picked it up for $18, and thought, "It's worth a gamble."

That whole week, I was in a bit of a slump. On the weeknights, after coming back from the gym or dojo, I would wind down with an episode and some Southern Comfort (the 100-proof version, not the 70-proof) as I had discovered near the end of my time at BGSU. Anyway, a bad blizzard hit, and one night I had a perilous journey home after work. I decided to just hole up in my lonely apartment and watch Firefly with some SoCo. It was the episode that ended with a funeral in the snow (you either know it or don't; you'll get no spoilers from me). The music, combined with the shot of Mal's expression through the snowfall, seemed to last a lot longer than the split-second that it did. I don't know, something about that music cue, and the look on Mal's face... man, it struck me hard. For days, I would try to recapture that moment, playing "The Funeral" from the score on my iTunes playlist, staring out at the thick snowflakes out my apartment balcony window.

That cue will always take me back to December 2006, staring out at night into a blizzard, pondering how I was struggling to make Kansas City my place of belonging. That was a very important time in my life.


December 2007.
I was living in the basement of a quadriplegic attorney's house across town, in Overland Park (the Kansas side of Kansas City), getting free rent in exchange for part-time personal assistance. The goal was to turn my luck around. I moved there in October, and I was finally starting to see some real savings from rent, which I badly needed to pay off a new transmission for my car earlier that year. 2007 was mean, but I still made the best of it, because I was in Kansas City, a place of my choosing, building a life of my own. I was just behind schedule on those goals. Struggling, and down on my luck, but ready to make a comeback.

And then, at the beginning of December, I was laid off. I was Proper Fucked.

That Christmas was dark, but that time of my life was still characterized by stubborn hope. I hated my job anyway, but I didn't know what to do next. The next few months I lingered and languished, until enough was enough. My part-time responsibilities at the house precluded me from a job with Commerce Bank that I was a shoe-in for, so I decided to just abort the situation altogether. In April, as you may recall, I pulled out of KC and moved across the state, to live with my brother for a while, outside of St. Louis. That's history.


December 2008.
After almost an entire year of unemployment, my self-confidence was as shattered as my dreams. I finally got a seasonal cashier position with Gordmans. I was in my on personal hell, full of fear, anxiety, and a nagging voice in the back of my mind, asking what it would really take to push me over the edge? I had every intention of moving back to Kansas City, somehow, someway, to pick up where I left off, and put the pieces back together again.

That was the darkest Christmas yet. Best defined by my night "patrols," venting in my own way, by listening to The Dark Knight while looking for trouble. Looking for some spoiled, bitchy, rich St. Charles yuppie to start mistreating a cashier or waitress so I could step in and unleash a Jason Statham-inspired fury on them, as a way of punishing every asshole customer I had experienced in my own cashier position. Yes, The Dark Knight was by far the most-played CD in my car that month. It was a very, very bleak time for me.


December 2009.
By this point, I had moved in with my parents. I was a substitute teacher in three districts, one of which was the very shithole I attended as a kid myself. I had come full circle to that fucking place. Nothing could have been more of a blow to my ego. Nothing could have been more devastatingly insulting, telling me that, despite my starry-eyed high school intentions on seeing the world, that I'd ended up right back where I started, with nothing going for me. I was the ultimate underdog. I mean, imagine if Luke Skywalker had become a Jedi Knight, saved the Rebellion and overthrown the Emperor, and redeemed Darth Vader, only to return to Tatooine and get a job as a farmhand.

And then I met this girl. Her name's Juliet. Actually, I met her briefly in BG, years before, when she visited her sister, a classmate and friend of mine. But I met her again in Minneapolis this month. Well, Juliet and I hit it off... (Present Day: Juliet is my pregnant wife.)


December 2010.
Now I was in Texas, to be near Juliet. After months of struggling, I found a night job at a wealthy retirement resort in Austin, Texas. Where was I going with this?


December 2011 and 2012, a blur.


December 2013.
I quit my night job, on a wing and a prayer. Juliet and I went to go see my family for Christmas, having gotten engaged over Thanksgiving. This was a beautiful, if scary, time in my life.


December 2014. Present Day.
I feel no cheer. Juliet and I have to find a new place immediately. The baby is due in March, and we are no longer welcome at the house, so we suddenly have to find a new place to live, on top of every other fucking crisis we have to deal with already.

I have no Christmas spirit. All I have is panic, anxiety, and resentment.

I'm sure that there will come a point when my mind realizes it has been shorted a Christmas season, and I will go through Christmas Spirit Withdrawal much the same way I go through Halloween withdrawal every couple months or so, and I will have to relish all things Christmas in shameful privacy, because it will be February and no one will tolerate my antics. I will listen to Christmas music with my headphones on and get my fix from Pinterest, and that will be that.

Time is against me, in every sense.

I realize now that Christmas, as much as I truly love the spirit of the season, from commercial to spiritual, has mostly been a time of fear and angst for me. Holiday stress has had a more profound meaning for me, and while I always acknowledged the stress, in the end Christmas was always still Christmas, even when I felt profoundly left out and didn't even get to see my family. Even then, I still had the spirit. I was still involved.

But now, I feel nothing. I am uninvolved. I can't even tell it's December. I am numb to the "spirit of the season." I feel the way you must feel when I go off on my Halloween antics in June: detached, like Christmas is out of season. The way you feel when you hear a Christmas song in May. It's inappropriate, and so you feel nothing.

All I feel is stress. Stress to the point of dizziness. And bitterness. And resentment. And an intense desire to, on one hand visit Kansas City and paint the town red, on the other hand visit Bowling Green, Ohio and burn it to the fucking ground, starting with the Moore Musical Arts Center.

I don't feel what you feel. I haven't yet. Not at all. And believe me, I tried. I listened to Christmas music, I did my shopping, I put up lights... but I don't feel it.

But I hope, in the end, like every other year, that I feel Christmas again.