turkey day

Family holidays are not my thing. At least I'm not alone in this, and I do love to cook and eat. My partner is not fond of holidays either, for other ethical and personal reasons and we hack it out together. Solidarnosk. Usually it ends up making it more pleasant, and we are aligned in our desire to get it, get out go on to celebrate occasion in our preferred way (our friends or ourselves, our food, insobriety, amusement.) When I was younger they caused me to sink into serious depressions that I would mask with manic cheer and activity. It worked out for everybody and made me feel exhausted and lonely, but at least satisfied with my work and with the fact that I was coping and not just sleeping and crying.

Today we go to my partners' family, as we do on 100% of the forced-action holidays. The sigh I released after I typed that phrase was sickening. They're decent people. Mostly they are good people. They try very hard to be. I am not like most people and I am very not like them, and so I am prickly around them always. I keep it light and polite and hide behind exhaustion. I sometimes don't sleep well and have a physical condition that causes me to feel tired, so this does not seem unusual. I haven't slept well in days now and it's not hard to see that I look a little punch-drunk. No one will mind, and I may even be treated more nicely out of sympathy.
I realize how sad that phrase is too, but this is life, and not just my life. V's blog and others I've read - good comics too - tell us all how completely someone else out there is feeling our pain. It's solidarnosk.

I was talking to a close friend the other day, a writer, and the subject of blogging came up. I asked him his opinion of blogging and he said he had done some and that his quickly became a diary of mental illness. I hope my shock didn't show too badly. I was too surprised to ask him if he had read any blogs and if so, what he liked to read. A lot of writers seem to struggle with the question of whether what they are writing is valid or important and I think since no paper is being wasted, very little energy (ok, a LOT of time, but fuck it. i'm charles bukowski motherfucker!), and for most of us, no money, why not. Does it help? Who knows? It helps me. I need to feel real, even if I know that I'm not* and this helps. Writing it out helps me to consider the truth and the impact of what happened to me. What happens to me every day. Robotherapist.

Most of my childhood family holiday memories are relatively (ahahaha) pleasant. My family was happy when there was food and booze and a reason to bunk off work. The kids were left to their own devices and there were often a lot of kids around. We began drinking their drinks, as we were used as bartenders of course. I started drinking whiskey when I was 12. Sweet with coke, mm. There was often chaos surrounding all the visiting that comes with holidays + large, convoluted, possibly inbred, multi-wed families. There was often a post-event fight, due to the open and absolute drinking so we pretty quickly learned how much alcohol to give the adults to make them pass out. It was not until I was older that my mother taught me to hide sleeping pills inside my stepfathers' tylenol capsules for the bad nights when he was only inclined to have a few. I always liked the holidays because they gave me opportunities to be alone or be with the kids i liked sometimes, time to pursue my hobbies, there was extra food around, and the grownups were generally more pleasant and often gone hunting or otherwise occupied. It took "nice" Christian people to make me hate the holidays, when you'd think the fucked up people I grew up with would have ruined them for me. Don't get me wrong, there were weird and sometimes terrible things that happened on the holidays too, but that was normal. There was usually less awfulness around the family holidays, and more fun. the rest of the year, the shit didn't come with tinsel.

I am not too stressed out about the day now that it's here. Christmas however, is a whole other story. I have cooked and made some plans OUTSIDE the "traditional !@#$" that involve food i can eat and people i can stand. it's just another thing, right.
I try to tell myself it's worth it all for the cranberry sauce.


*This is not crazy talk, both Buddhists AND Physicists tell us this is so!