(no subject)
Holidays and Nights
Holidays can make people do crazy things. Let it be known that this winter break, starting immediately after Thanksgiving and going all the way up to Christmas Eve, I listened to Bing Crosby’s “Mele Kalikimaka” forty-seven times. Forty-seven. I figured that, contrary to the lyrics, it was no longer the thing to say at all after Christmas had passed, but I listened to the song three more times to make it a cool fifty.
I felt a greater sense of accomplishment for this than I did for having survived another ruthless shopping season with dollars in the bank and sense in my head. Last year, around this time, I was forced to decide between buying presents for myself, or buying food for myself. I ended up buying the presents, figuring that if I died of starvation, I could always will the presents to my friends as Christmas gifts and not seem like such an asshole.
Back in Moorpark, feeling under the weather, I decided to take a nip from my dad’s bottle of prescription cough medicine that he had sitting on the stairs. Turns out, it was basically codeine elixir. I say “had,” because I don’t like measuring doses and my nip was more a generous swig than anything else.
I naturally hoped it would go unnoticed, but my conscience had reservations. Well, actually, my stomach had reservations - but at least it was night time. No, that’s a lie, it was about ten in the morning, and I was about to drive home to Bakersfield with my mom, on Christmas Eve day. Needless to say, it was a bad trip, in more ways than one, chock full of urgent tummy rumbles and the occasional light-and-color hallucination.
I wouldn’t really call this substance abuse, but rather I’d say I was “full of cheer.” Cheer was curdling in my stomach, but I was full of it nonetheless. Since I know you’re reading this, dad, I’m sorry if the medicine level seemed conspicuously lower - mea culpa. Don’t worry: the Ghost of Christmas Future scared me away from anything stronger than Nyquil for the time being.
Though I didn’t do much in Bakersfield, it was nice to drive around at night. With all the lights visible on the houses, and the dark concealing everything else, the city was almost pretty - and if you closed your eyes, and plugged your nose, you could hardly smell the oil refineries. Before leaving, I managed to make some delicious molasses cookies, and completely destroy my mother’s computer. It’s totally dead, beyond repair. Merry Christmas!
Driving back from Bakersfield with my mom, through the mountain pass, I saw snow on the side of the road, making this the whitest Christmas in my history. Of course, it was brownish, much more like a muddy sluice, and only lasted for a few minutes before we were continuing back down into a lower altitude.
I returned to LA with about eight bags of crap, seven of which I didn’t need to bring home in the first place and the eighth full of gifts. My mother bought me a surprising amount of candy for Christmas, despite desperate pleas for her to purchase more nutritious goods for me.
“Mom, you know I try not to eat that stuff when I’m at school,” I whimpered as I pulled out a book of lifesavers, a giant candy cane, a bag of chocolate-covered pretzels.
“Oh, Christopher, you’re supposed to get things you enjoy for Christmas!” she said.
But I’ve never really enjoyed most of the lifesavers, especially the butterscotch ones, and surely I wasn’t going to enjoy the giant candy cane. Does anyone really eat those? They’re like, a foot long and several inches around. It’s like a baton, you could probably bludgeon someone to death with one of those if you timed it right. Those things aren’t meant to be eaten by anyone except porn stars without gag reflexes. I considered smashing it with a mallet and snorting it, but I imagine all I’d get out of that was a sore jaw from gnawing on the couch for a half-hour and visions of sugarplums dancing in my head.
Not that I really needed any more holiday high, not after the liquid morphine. Better was the out-of-body surreality that accompanied my visit with Zack to the Abercrombie and Fitch stockroom. Rows and rows and rows and piles of pure branded corporatism, right at my fingertips. Baby pink cashmere sweaters! Purple and gold-striped ties! Polos in every color of the pigmented rainbow! In my hands, I had dyes, and gone to heaven.
Not to be confused, of course, with Heaven, a club I went to the night before New Year’s Eve. It’s really more of a lounge, actually, a swank upstairs adjoined to the declawed malaise of TigerHeat downstairs. I didn’t venture down much into the suffocating warmth of the Heat except to say hello to Mike; I briefly saw him once, but finding him again was like looking for a needle in a gay stack. Tired of elbowing past throngs of sweaty, ugly people, I fled back into the sanctuary of the upstairs, segregated from the under-21s. As I discovered, Heaven is where you go when you die of boredom at TigerHeat, and also where you ought to stay.
As for New Year’s eve, I went to a party as touted as it was crowded: the gala event of the season, hosted by a well-known movie director whose name I hardly need to mention. Don’t worry, that’s not meant to impress anyone - judging from the sheer number of people at the party, half the population of Los Angeles was on the invite list, and the other half was hired on as valets.
I had a pretty good time, despite my sobriety, though I spent most of my time meandering circuitously through a swarm of thin, seven-foot-tall, blonde models. I couldn’t help but feel like I was fighting my way through a corn field, and for the most part the conversation is just as interesting as any I’d get if I shucked an ear or two and sparked up a chat. And, after midnight, everyone was drunk and I was still quite sober - the conversation wasn’t getting any better, and I was ready to shuck my own ears.
So not long after giving a polite midnight kiss to my conveniently-located, emotionally-comfortable ex-boyfriend Jesse, I left before, with all the “less polite” kissing around me, there was a devastating outbreak of mono and my health got caught in the tailwind. I love a festive environment, surrounded by warm friends and hot models, but without standing space or moderate sedative, I was ready to start the new year in my bed, asleep.
With the holiday break nearly over and the New Year ushered in, I’m more than ready to push the events of 2004 deep into my subconscious and bury them until I can afford the advanced psychotherapy sessions or market-grade horse tranquilizers necessary to deal with them and move on.
To 2005, I say Mele Kalikimaka! To 2004, good riddance - I’ll smell you later, and don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.
Holidays can make people do crazy things. Let it be known that this winter break, starting immediately after Thanksgiving and going all the way up to Christmas Eve, I listened to Bing Crosby’s “Mele Kalikimaka” forty-seven times. Forty-seven. I figured that, contrary to the lyrics, it was no longer the thing to say at all after Christmas had passed, but I listened to the song three more times to make it a cool fifty.
I felt a greater sense of accomplishment for this than I did for having survived another ruthless shopping season with dollars in the bank and sense in my head. Last year, around this time, I was forced to decide between buying presents for myself, or buying food for myself. I ended up buying the presents, figuring that if I died of starvation, I could always will the presents to my friends as Christmas gifts and not seem like such an asshole.
Back in Moorpark, feeling under the weather, I decided to take a nip from my dad’s bottle of prescription cough medicine that he had sitting on the stairs. Turns out, it was basically codeine elixir. I say “had,” because I don’t like measuring doses and my nip was more a generous swig than anything else.
I naturally hoped it would go unnoticed, but my conscience had reservations. Well, actually, my stomach had reservations - but at least it was night time. No, that’s a lie, it was about ten in the morning, and I was about to drive home to Bakersfield with my mom, on Christmas Eve day. Needless to say, it was a bad trip, in more ways than one, chock full of urgent tummy rumbles and the occasional light-and-color hallucination.
I wouldn’t really call this substance abuse, but rather I’d say I was “full of cheer.” Cheer was curdling in my stomach, but I was full of it nonetheless. Since I know you’re reading this, dad, I’m sorry if the medicine level seemed conspicuously lower - mea culpa. Don’t worry: the Ghost of Christmas Future scared me away from anything stronger than Nyquil for the time being.
Though I didn’t do much in Bakersfield, it was nice to drive around at night. With all the lights visible on the houses, and the dark concealing everything else, the city was almost pretty - and if you closed your eyes, and plugged your nose, you could hardly smell the oil refineries. Before leaving, I managed to make some delicious molasses cookies, and completely destroy my mother’s computer. It’s totally dead, beyond repair. Merry Christmas!
Driving back from Bakersfield with my mom, through the mountain pass, I saw snow on the side of the road, making this the whitest Christmas in my history. Of course, it was brownish, much more like a muddy sluice, and only lasted for a few minutes before we were continuing back down into a lower altitude.
I returned to LA with about eight bags of crap, seven of which I didn’t need to bring home in the first place and the eighth full of gifts. My mother bought me a surprising amount of candy for Christmas, despite desperate pleas for her to purchase more nutritious goods for me.
“Mom, you know I try not to eat that stuff when I’m at school,” I whimpered as I pulled out a book of lifesavers, a giant candy cane, a bag of chocolate-covered pretzels.
“Oh, Christopher, you’re supposed to get things you enjoy for Christmas!” she said.
But I’ve never really enjoyed most of the lifesavers, especially the butterscotch ones, and surely I wasn’t going to enjoy the giant candy cane. Does anyone really eat those? They’re like, a foot long and several inches around. It’s like a baton, you could probably bludgeon someone to death with one of those if you timed it right. Those things aren’t meant to be eaten by anyone except porn stars without gag reflexes. I considered smashing it with a mallet and snorting it, but I imagine all I’d get out of that was a sore jaw from gnawing on the couch for a half-hour and visions of sugarplums dancing in my head.
Not that I really needed any more holiday high, not after the liquid morphine. Better was the out-of-body surreality that accompanied my visit with Zack to the Abercrombie and Fitch stockroom. Rows and rows and rows and piles of pure branded corporatism, right at my fingertips. Baby pink cashmere sweaters! Purple and gold-striped ties! Polos in every color of the pigmented rainbow! In my hands, I had dyes, and gone to heaven.
Not to be confused, of course, with Heaven, a club I went to the night before New Year’s Eve. It’s really more of a lounge, actually, a swank upstairs adjoined to the declawed malaise of TigerHeat downstairs. I didn’t venture down much into the suffocating warmth of the Heat except to say hello to Mike; I briefly saw him once, but finding him again was like looking for a needle in a gay stack. Tired of elbowing past throngs of sweaty, ugly people, I fled back into the sanctuary of the upstairs, segregated from the under-21s. As I discovered, Heaven is where you go when you die of boredom at TigerHeat, and also where you ought to stay.
As for New Year’s eve, I went to a party as touted as it was crowded: the gala event of the season, hosted by a well-known movie director whose name I hardly need to mention. Don’t worry, that’s not meant to impress anyone - judging from the sheer number of people at the party, half the population of Los Angeles was on the invite list, and the other half was hired on as valets.
I had a pretty good time, despite my sobriety, though I spent most of my time meandering circuitously through a swarm of thin, seven-foot-tall, blonde models. I couldn’t help but feel like I was fighting my way through a corn field, and for the most part the conversation is just as interesting as any I’d get if I shucked an ear or two and sparked up a chat. And, after midnight, everyone was drunk and I was still quite sober - the conversation wasn’t getting any better, and I was ready to shuck my own ears.
So not long after giving a polite midnight kiss to my conveniently-located, emotionally-comfortable ex-boyfriend Jesse, I left before, with all the “less polite” kissing around me, there was a devastating outbreak of mono and my health got caught in the tailwind. I love a festive environment, surrounded by warm friends and hot models, but without standing space or moderate sedative, I was ready to start the new year in my bed, asleep.
With the holiday break nearly over and the New Year ushered in, I’m more than ready to push the events of 2004 deep into my subconscious and bury them until I can afford the advanced psychotherapy sessions or market-grade horse tranquilizers necessary to deal with them and move on.
To 2005, I say Mele Kalikimaka! To 2004, good riddance - I’ll smell you later, and don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.