On the Nature of Suffering and Why Christmas Is Hell

On the Nature of Suffering and Why Christmas Is Hell

God only knows that there is work to be done in the world and that some of it is unpleasant and dirty.  Why do we torture ourselves with the expectation that everything will turn out totally peachy when we know for a fact that as we begin to gather those around us with which we have such tenuous arrangements and relationships our chances of having awkwardly painful moments increases exponentially.

Each thing we clean, and every surface we surrender, moves our comforts out of the way, and eventually we are beset gargantuan with reminders on our Christmas trees by tokens of generations of family failings and unsettled moments, ornaments of yielded years which have lain dormant in boxes in the attic until just this present time when those we many times swore we would never see alive again are standing in our fortresses, fortified by alcohol and on the brink of saying those most insipidly crippling and courageously stupid zingers that will send us into heart attack nirvana.

What cathartic god of conscience drives us to repeat this paranormally disvalencing every single year or even every decade like a high school reunion where we gather to compare the destiny of gravity and despair?  What do we hope to gain by our constantly driving together the forces of dark driveling carnage and our lost sense of youth and pleasure?  It is as if we have yearned all our lives to have just this chance at redemption from our emotional dyspepsia at having yielded or been at the bare hands of or had to suffer through the banalities of, or in some lonesome rift of self-sacrifice given so deeply of ourselves that we, not unlike Prometheus, must parade ourselves before the monsters of our past and allow them to gash our psychic flesh and suck the marrow from our bones as sacrifice to purge us of some cosmic wrongdoing, as if this would be atonement.

Perhaps this year will be the final inkling payment.  Perhaps this last engagement will fill the gaping hole that sorrows us such that it cauterizes the open wounds of childhood long gone these many decades and, in pleasantries among the over stuffing and the unassuming potency of eggnog, we might find some solace.  At least, if nothing else, may the bastard fall down the steps in a drunken haze and, racked with pain, take some accountability in his lack of sobriety so that he will stop off his reminding me of how I was the one who left the fence gate open and let the dog out when I was 6 years old.