I’ve been looking at this blank page for about three days now. Or maybe it’s a canvas of white? Would it be more accurate to default to IKEA colors such as “eggshell white” or “Mother of Pearl?” I’m not entirely sure what Microsoft Word white translates into in the color scheme world, but it’s blank for sure.
Every year, I’ve made a habit of write up some obnoxious holiday post talking about any number of things, like my gifts to the world or what I would like. I’ll give it a stupid title. “8 Days of LKH Hanukkah,” “A Very LKH Kwanzaa,” or even “LKH New Years Resolutions.” I’ll be honest though. It’s been a tough go of things this time around and I’m realizing that while staring at this screen for three days.
Everything around here is dedicated to the holidays. I’m betting that wherever you are right now, from the mountains of France to the suspiciously misty Pacific Northwest. From Compton to Kalamazoo, it’s a Christmas-time bonanza. There’s really no bonanza over here for me in New York though and I suppose that’s the problem.
Now before I continue onward, this isn’t a “woe is me” story. So just in case you feel like you were about to have any flashbacks to November 2010, stick a fork in that time machine. Because I said so… (har har).
So I think the dearth of holiday cheer really struck me last week when it occurred to me how un-festive my life currently is. I had this realization when I visited my mailbox last Friday. My neighbor had her mailbox literally bursting at the seams with holiday cards and other assortments of tinsel colored bullshit. I saw her struggling to open the box, the key having trouble even fitting into the crushed lock. She needed to make two trips to her apartment to wrangle all of that holiday cheer.
“Well shit…” I opined aloud with the enthusiasm of an eager Christmas elf. “Let’s see what lovely gifts I’ve been bestowed today!” I opened my mailbox with alarming ease. The key went right in and the door opened like clockwork. A gust of stale air came sweeping out as if I had just opened the door to Tutankhamen’s catacomb. The only difference being that I’d imagine ol’ Tutsie had more stuff in his den of death than I did in this mailbox. I was the proud recipient of a cable bill and a circular from IKEA.
SIDE NOTE 1: I’m going to get all my IKEA angst out right here and now. First of all, when you spend a day building a crappy wall unit only to learn that the last 2 pieces are missing screw holes, it’s a real downer. What’s worse is that the good Swedes at IKEA decide to painstakingly name each and every small useless piece that comprises every model of furniture. You’re probably like, “awww that’s so cute.” Yeah, well, it’s not. It’s not like they call the screws “Cuddles” and the large handle “Henry.” No, they call it things like “Flurguergen 7” (There’s supposed to be 2 dots over the second “u,” but my keyboard can’t do it.) So when you call up to say you have a faulty Flurguergen, the conversation immediately reroutes to a call center in India and goes like this:
Customer Service: Oh, your Glenhuron is flawed?
Jon: No, my Flurguergen.
Customer Service: Klausdurgen?
Jon: No. You aren’t listening to me. Flurguergen!
Customer Service: Flur….trucken?
Jon: Goddamit! No! Flur! (Dramatic pause) Guergen.
Customer Service: Oh, your Flurguergen (less dramatic pause) 8?
Jon: 7!
Customer Service: Klausdurgen 7?
Then in a moment of blinding frustration, I realize how idiotic it is that I’m trying to speak Swedish to a lady in India, hang up on her, grab a hammer, and smash screw holes in it myself. A half hour later, my completed Hans Christian Andersen
11 wall unit has drawers that don’t exactly fit right. Happens. Every. Time.
Also, I’d like to mention their color schemes once again. Whatever happened to the good old staples of Black and white? Why do they call things “Oyster Fluff” and what in the hell is “BLACK BROWN?” That’s not a color. That’s an identity crisis!
Anyway, back to my mailbox.
I’m sorely lacking in the holiday greeting card department. Maybe I was stupid just to assume that people don’t do that anymore. I asked around. Apparently people do send out greeting cards. My friends Mike and Hilary send me one every year, but this year; they sent it to the wrong address so I had nothing in the cheer department. I contemplated the contemplation that maybe if I were to like… you know… send people a personalized holiday greeting card myself, I’d start getting one in return.
Still standing at my mailbox, I break this down into two simple steps. I consider what makes a good holiday card and then I conceptualize what mine would look like.
Here’s what I came up with in terms of “Important Holiday Card Elements”
1. Involve a holiday motif,
2. Have holiday…things – like a Christmas tree, a menorah, presents, etc.
3. Include a festive cornucopia of holiday meals.
4. Include people in ugly sweaters if possible.
Something that would look like this (And no, I don’t know these people)
So, if I use any number of these guidelines by involving the festive things I already own, I should figure to be alright. Then I conceptualized. (I’ve also left the mailbox in case you’re keeping track of my whereabouts in this story.) Back in the apartment, I took a go at this holiday card experiment. Here’s what I was able to come up with this year.
I was missing any defining characteristic that could say “hey, tis the season to like… you know, feel seasonal.” I was missing a tree or a menorah. I didn’t have much in the way of a holiday cornucopia… quite fucking obviously. I was also missing people. And I dress to impress so ugly sweaters are a no-go. What my Christmas Card looked like was this:
What I had was a cactus, my refrigerator, and a positive can-do attitude. I also found an ornament on the street while making my way home from Brooklyn last night. At first, I was convinced it was Santa doing his jolly thing, whatever that might be. But now, I’m not so sure. It could actually just be a fat homeless guy obsessed with his wooden donkey. Either way, it made me feel festive at the time so let’s go with it.
So… that’s my card. And then I sat back on the couch and immediately went back to being depressed for completely obvious reasons.
I suppose that’s how I got into the whole “blank page” situation I started this little note with. I’ve been pretty down in the dumps for a while now and I was telling one of my friends about it one night. I can’t really pinpoint why. It’s just one of those things, I guess. Trying to cheer me up, she asked “Well, if you could have one thing this Christmas, what would it be?” Now, while I would typically retort with my patented brand of obnoxiousness like “A secondhand ball of yarn and the world’s biggest shoe horn,” I legitimately gave it some thought. Seriously though, I did!
The first thing that came to mind was that I’ve never actually had a Christmas. Ever. Sure, my parents used to celebrate Hanukah, but that stopped when I was 10. I haven’t been the recipient of a present in so long, I almost can’t remember. Vivid memories of gift giving inevitably lead to a blue Fisher Price convertible and I assure you, I outgrew that thing a while back. Frankly, the very thought of even asking for a gift seems sort of strange. It’s just not been a part of my life.
I did have one Christmas though…
My last year of college, I was sitting in my room at the end of November, getting ready for a big night out. My roommate, and best friend at school (who has since completely left the reservation and not spoken to a soul in years), asked me if I was excited to go out. I assured him I was pumped, but completely flat broke so either I needed to get less excited or find money in a hurry. Knowing that the money thing could be hard to come by because I never had any money, he came up with a solution on the spot. My pal went over to my computer, brought up a song on YouTube, and said this:
“You’ve been moping around about [insert girl’s name here] lately so this will help. I’m going out for an hour. Listen to this song on repeat while I’m gone. No breaks. When I come back, if you still want to go out, drinks are on me.”
SIDE NOTE 2: In actuality, the drinks and everything else anyone in that house had purchased that semester was not on him, but rather on his unsuspecting father… and his unsuspecting father’s credit card. This would one day lead to a surprise parental visit/ rage incident at my front door like I had never seen before or since.
The song, which I had never heard before, was “Fake Plastic Trees” by Radiohead. Challenge accepted.
I did not leave my room that night. In fact, I didn’t leave it for the next month besides trips to the bathroom. You’re probably thinking “and the kitchen too, right?” No, definitely not the kitchen. That’s another story for another time…
Christmas Eve, I was lying on the bed begin all sorts of emo in the dark probably, and my roommate kicks the door in and tosses me a Santa hat. I told him to get lost, but he was pretty persistent. “You have to get out of this house. We’re going out. Plus, you should experience a Christmas at least once in your miserable life.” Well, if you put it that way…
I’m unsure of why he didn’t go home that year, but I’m betting it had something to do with that credit card snafu. So we got drunk and decided to head out to the bars… on Christmas Eve… in Albany, NY. If you’re trying to set the scene, just imagine the most depressing scenario going down at one of the most depressing places ever in the most depressing city on Earth.
So there we were, multiple shots into the night, at a dive bar called “Alibi’s.” The bar, for all intents and purposes, was completely empty besides the bartender and some other pathetic creatures on the other side of the bar behind a wall. It was, after all, Christmas Eve. There I am with my friend, sitting on a bench in a dingy dump, both of us donning crooked Santa outfits, listening to the same Maroon 5 song on repeat, which was my fault since I had accidentally made it repeat on the jukebox 20 times with a 10 dollar bill. I pressed the wrong button…
Morose and dejected, drunk and depressed, I swallowed each verse of “She Will Be Loved” like it would be the last time I heard that Goddamn song… And then of course it would play again. Did I mention I was wearing a Santa hat?
“I don’t mind spending everyday, out on your corner in the pouring rain. Look for the girl with the broken smile, ask her if she wants to stay awhile…”
“This is hell,” I thought as I pulled beer number eight to my lips. “I’m in hell.”
My friend laughed. Maybe it was because he contributed in some small way to ruining my last month. Maybe it was because he got a kick of how shockingly deep this rabbit hole of mine could go. Or maybe it was because he was just a drunk idiot.
This is all going somewhere. Keep up.
Right at that moment – the one where you feel your heart inexplicably drop into the pit of your stomach, and then shoot right back up into your throat, where your eyes well with water and fists get tight. The time and place where you are certain that all hope is lost, love is a myth, and the world is waiting to end. Right at that moment when you feel like you’re about to either cry or toss a beer bottle on the floor (How I got this LKH name in the first place), something unexpected happened.
A beautiful girl walked into the room. This brunette with the pretty eyes, wearing a skimpy red Christmas skirt and a leather skintight top delicately strolled right over towards us with an increasing amount of purpose in each subsequent step. She saw my roommate and I sitting on that bench, the two most pathetic holiday ornaments in the history of monotheism. Seeing us there in our Christmas malaise, her eyes went as wide as two full moons. I sat up straight, dried my own eyes with my sleeves, and took a deep breath. The girl stopped in front of us.
“Oh. My. God,” she exclaimed, eyes full of wonder. “Stay RIGHT here.” In her skimpy outfit, she hopped back away.
“Oh no,” My roommate mumbled through pursed lips, a dagger stare towards the door. It was that look he would give where if he wasn’t completely inebriated, he would have gotten up and left in a hurry. But no, he couldn’t pull off such physical feats in his condition. So there he sat in recognition of his physical malady.
“Wait, you know her? Who is she? How do you know her? She’s really hot. Why the hell is she even here?” I asked a lot of questions. None came with answers. To be fair, I didn’t allow him the chance. It didn’t matter. They came soon enough. The girl came running back over with a crowd of large football player type guys behind her. She stopped in front of us and angrily pointed at my friend.
“THIS is the guy!”
“Him?” The biggest guy said with a huge laugh.
“Yes! Him! This is the guy who pissed on me!”
Everyone laughed. The guys laughed. The girl laughed. My friend even feigned a laugh just to stop himself from feeling too awkward. She repeated it a few times so every person in the bar, the few that there were, knew who my friend was. They walked away. He and I sat in silence for a while.
”And she will be loved. And she will be loved. And she will be loved. And she will be loved…”
“You… pissed on her?” I finally inquired, interrupting the silence.
“No, I didn’t piss on her in the traditional sense…”
“So you non-traditionally piss on her?”
“No…”
“On purpose, dude?”
“No, I pissed on myself, thank you. And the piss got on her.”
“So you pissed on yourself?” I incredulously wondered aloud, almost frustrated I was trying to be sold on this nonsense.
“That’s what I said, isn’t it?”
“Right. And that’s great, but honestly who pisses his own pants? Seriously? What’s wrong with you?”
“Whatever.”
“Not whatever. And plus, not for nothing, but that girl seemed to give off the impression that she was covered in piss. Not just a little sprinkle. But that you actually pissed everywhere and all over her.”
“Could we just let it go, please?”
“I’d love to, but can’t understand why anyone would do that…”
“We were camping, OK!?” he yelled, as he brought his beer to his mouth and ended the conversation.
Maroon Five filled the void where the most obvious of conversations should have been taking place. “I don’t mind spending everyday, out on your corner in the pouring rain…”
I never asked him how “Because we were camping” presented itself as a legitimate answer to such an unfortunate event taking place. I go camping every year all across the world. Never once have I pissed on myself, let alone anyone else. I guess that’s not the point. I looked over at the dejected bed-wetter in his stupid over-sized Santa hat and said aloud as I finished my beer and sarcastically shook my head, “This is the greatest Christmas of all time.”
—-
And that brings me to the here and now. To my failed holiday card, the lack of presents and the complete deficiency of holiday cheer. The complete absence of anything I could even remotely consider a “happy holiday.” It brought me back to the question this girl asked me and what I intended to write about all along.
The last year or so has seen some incredible ups and downs. I found myself angry about things I never expected to be upset about and amazed at the beauty of life in the most random of situations. Life is a rollercoaster… or at least it has been this year. I suppose that through all the tough times and the moments I didn’t think I’d get through; I ended up learning more about myself than I had expected. Not that I’m trying to make this into an episode of “Full House” or anything, but what I figured out is that in all stories, it’s the characters that make them worthwhile. This one about my only Christmas is probably a bad example just because it’s ridiculous. But… it’s funny and I needed to trick you into reading until the end…
So take all the words on a plain non-IKEA white canvas and subtract all the characters, and all you’d be left with is that blank sheet of paper, no different than any of the rest in the stack. The people you never expected to meet in places you never expected to find yourself make the story worth living. You can’t put a price on something like that and no matter what holiday you celebrate, you won’t be able to find it at the store. When I get down and out, it usually takes some characters to drag me out of the muck. I’ve met some great people and managed to lose some also, as i have a tendency to do. This year, last year, probably next year…
The point being, I don’t say it enough, if ever, but I appreciate them all regardless. Maybe that’s my fault, that I let shit get to a point where it all falls apart — where I lose characters in the story. Maybe it’s why I don’t have a mailbox full of Christmas cards or whatever. So if I could have that one “something” for the holidays it would be, in all sincerity, for people to read this and understand that they are important even if… you know… I haven’t expressed it before.
Merry whatever and long live the King,
-LKH
