Post-Holiday Synopses: Nightmares before and after Xmas

Day XXX

Having nearly recovered from two gloriously hedonistic and lackadaisical weeks off work, and having been back for two weeks of hard-travail, it is time to kick some old ghosts.  Unfortunately, without the rigorous daily routine provided by employment, I slept an inordinate amount, ate erratically, and most detrimentally and notably–became addicted to the tawdry clove!  Seeing that the inception of this very blog had nearly everything to do with nicotine deprivation and the resultant insanity brought forth by such-this should be a pretty monumental, devastating, perhaps monumentally devastating or devastatingly monumental happening.  Personally, I’ve distanced myself from these shocking developments, mostly with the aid of alcohol, repression (mostly with the aid of alcohol), and denial.

I’d like to take this moment to dispel some myths about my new lover.  No, cloves are NOT worse than cigarettes.  Assuming worse implies higher nicotine and tar levels, imported cloves are in fact  similar to the average cigarette.  This myth most likely comes from partial fact-cloves, or kretek, in Indonesia do in fact contain around three times the levels of nicotine and tar than the average American cigarette.  They are not imported at such levels.

So, yeah, I have relapsed.  Officially fucking fallen off the wagon.  My intentions have come around, once again, to bite me in the ass.  A side diversion intended to prevent me from relapse has become relapse.   A cloying, 7th grade habit that once nauseated me, now holds more allure than my dear ol’ friend of 10 years, the cigarette.  That’s fucked up.

That reminds me of a few other fucked up things…specifically, the holidays in New York City.  If you know where to go, i.e. the East Village, for example, on Christmas or Xmas Eve, you will most likely encounter some very odd behavior.  By odd, I don’t mean drunken, although that is a near certainty.  There is a somber starkness to the Village streets on Xmas Eve-unsettling and tense, amiss–one feels something is a bit off, but cannot describe it beyond the lack of people.  It is in this environment that one witnesses a man chasing another man, screaming racial obscenities, holding a smashed bottle of red wine as a weapon.  It is in this environment that one meets two brothers from North Carolina, one polite, intelligent and conversational, the other blatantly trashed, singing odes to passersby he manages to chase down.  The oddness to various bar districts in the city during this time isn’t due to mere holiday loneliness, stragglers out because they have nothing else to do.  The city itself emanates an estranged, twilight zone feel (perhaps this is helped by the actual xmas lighting overdone in too many bars), a strained and forced happiness that doesn’t coincide with the dankness.  This is the pinnacle of palpable contemporary urban alienation.

On a lighter, more relevant note, I’m going to go smoke a clove now.