Holiday Cheer.

Outside of these walls the streets are all lit up bright with holiday cheer. Children are running and laughing. Christmas music is leaking out of the speakers of department stores. Mock Santa Claus’s in the malls overcrowded with overbearing young mothers out to spoil their chubby little bastard children with overpriced gifts that their children will tire of after three weeks are grinning with thoughts of pedophilia. Candy and junk food are crowding the shelves of the pharmacies, just waiting to fatten us up for the killing.
Inside these walls is another story all together. I sit with bare cupboards and spiteful eyes staring into pointless nothings on a computer screen caked over with dust. My funds are diminishing rapidly. My neighbor is a transsexual, not that I’d care but the motherfucker is a surly one, challenging junior high students to fist fights and flashing his uncircumcised shwanze at passersby on an almost daily basis. The man at the liquor store knows me by name and gives me the store discount on twelve packs of Old Style. He tells me I’m their best customer, which could easily be translated into: You are the biggest drunk in our entire fucking neighborhood. The sink is dripping and the drain is clogged. Slow country songs ooze sadly out of my speakers and a twelve pack of Old Style is my only company.
The days are cold and the nights are colder. This weather just depresses me, brings me down and leaves me in a rut, a pit of self-despair. I drink like a fish and I curse the night wind. I stare out the windows and curse my neighbors. If winter isn’t a season or reason for cursing I don’t know what is. Old Man Winter is a son of a bitch that deserves a candy cane up his ass and oodles upon oodles of verbal and physical abuse, the rotten motherfucker.
My guts are aching and I’m grateful for nothing. My friends are bastards and nobody knocks on my door. Homeless people fill the streets and there’s never a hot meal. The warm bottles of beer are diluted with cheap piss and cigarette ashes. Men and women are alone and feeling more lonely than they’ve ever thought even possible, sleeping through loveless nights. Old women and men are slipping and falling on ice and shattering their hips. Gas bills are being turned off and families are freezing to death. Lovers and loved ones are turning their backs in times of need. What’s there to be so cheery about?
Yeah, the girls are still calling, pleading for me to come out for a drink, asking sweetly for me to stay at their house for the night, sending out text messages with blessed and beautiful hearts, but they just don’t seem to get it. I can’t just go out. Not with all this. It’s just too much. Tragedy is in the air, not magic, and I can’t just grin through it all and exchange gifts with a plastic smile on my tired and unshaved face.
Instead I sulk, pound my fists on the wall, smash the coffee maker, ride my bike in the house and hurt my knee badly after crashing in to the couch. Drink a beer and grimace through it all.
Holiday cheer holiday schmeer. The love stories have all run out and I’m stuck with the sobering thoughts that this Christmas will be spent alone once again. This was once a special time. Years ago I was a kid with a girl that had wants and needs and these needs were met and I regretfully didn’t embrace them. Now this day means nothing to me but misery and an empty wallet. I get cards in the mail and I don’t open them. I throw them away. They all say the same old shit anyway, really. I get calls from family members and don’t answer the phone. I get a call from a girl and she wishes me happy holidays. She goes on and on about what she has to be grateful for and about how much she loves Christmas. I try speaking but she continues on, ignoring me, muttering stupid stutterings. While she’s mid-sentence squawking about the gifts she’ll receive I hang up the phone, tilt up the beer, and turn the volume knob up a hair.