Seasonal Content (2024 Edition)
I’m way too tired to write, which is why I’m doing it. I’m finishing a magazine gig and gathering the nerve to stick the landing. God willing you’ll see it early next year. I’m gonna use a word my mom abuses: it feels weird doing magazine assignments when you’re not actively employed doing something else. When you’re not chasing a dream or leveling up at a hobby. I’m doing it to pay bills for one month. That’s all.
It’s a powerful motivator and I appreciate the fact that it’s a rare luxury to do work like this at all, even once, as a professional. But I’ve never had that motivation manifest in a positive way. Not once in my life. The way it always works is this: I gather up a bunch of research, toss it in a pile, highlight some stuff, write on legal pads for awhile, then I spend a month inventing new ways to be neurotic. Just pacing around the block smoking cigarettes, wishing I was somebody who could string two sentences together to save his life. Wishing I could be forgiven by everyone I’ve ever known, just for being like this.
I know the hip thing to say, at least in sunny California, is that it’s imposter syndrome, but modern living has too many labels. What happens is I feel like a criminal, like I’ve sinned, that I should be ashamed and punished. Like all this could go away. But everything always could go away at any time, that’s the deal. This has an urgency to it. A heat on your neck. Like somebody has a sniper rifle trained on you. The feeling will only go away when I file the damn thing, feel like I’ve been hit by a truck, and spend the afternoon at Bob’s Big Boy, looking like I’m thinking about my life even though I’m actually just struggling to think of anything, for my brain to do anything. Sometimes it’ll take 45 minutes just to come up with an idea as challenging as “food is good, I like burger.”
I’m not doing anything for the holidays; nobody in my family is. It’s too complicated and expensive. But there’s always a temptation around this time to feel left out, like you have permission to feel sad and lonely. Get a sad Christmas tree and put two ornaments on it or some shit. Get a bunch of peppermint bark and eat it joylessly, until it tastes like chalk. Get a storebought pie and house a cowardly amount of it, like a little more than half, before realizing it isn’t particularly good. Put on The Last Waltz even though everybody familiar with that movie finally knows that they had to rotoscope the cocaine out of Neil Young’s nose. Of course they did! It was directed by Martin Scorsese and filmed in California in 1978! They didn’t even do that good of a job! You can still see some cocaine!
I don’t hate the holidays. It’s just that it usually winds up being a bunch of conspicuous consumption you can't actually afford and it feels like nothing. And that’s where the real sadness kicks in. When everything is hollow. Where you think somebody ripped you off because you don’t feel different. All this ritual and money and it doesn’t even work.
This afternoon I took some time to earnestly reflect on what I like about the holidays when I’m feeling down and out. It sounds stupid but it’s not. I like to get in the car and drive somewhere in the daylight, get out on the actual highway. Pull off to a gas station and get some Camels. Go to McDonald’s and get some fries. There are two reasons for this: it’s literally forward movement (I’m going somewhere else), and it’s boring as sin. The one thing I never feel on the holidays is normal and bored. I’m always thinking about others’ expectations and my own disappointments or anxiety, the cultural weight of all this pointless storytelling. I just want permission to feel normal, and sometimes that means driving to a random gas station, something that could happen to anyone on any day of the year, good day or bad. Something about that feels like freedom.