All Hail 13

I have an abnormal aversion to New Year's Eve celebrations. I don’t know how I caught that disease, but it’s prominent. Immune to everything. I can not stand drunkenness all around me, platitudes out loud disguised as resolutions, it’s all fake, forced, and pointless.

There wasn’t much of a medicine for this condition, until I read this by Chuky:

palm leaves

at exactly twelve o’clock midnight
1973-74
Los Angeles
it began to rain on the
palm leaves outside my window
the horns and firecrackers
went off
and it thundered.

I’d gone to bed at 9 p.m.
turned out the lights
pulled up the covers –
their gaiety, their happiness
their screams, their paper hats,
their automobiles, their women,
their amateur drunks…

New Year’s Eve always terrifies
me

life knows nothing of years.

now the horns have stopped and
the firecrackers and the thunder…
it’s all over in five minutes…
all I hear is the rain
on the palm leaves,
and I think,
I will never understand men,
but I have lived
it through.

Charles Bukowski's view on New Year’s Eve; every year on December 31st, I read this. I don’t know what about this man or his words give me such comfort, maybe it’s the recognition, ease.

I’m trying to be more like other people, to be less dark in my mind, to be more open, more sunny, cheerful. Well, I take that back. I’m not really trying. I wish at times, but I don’t try.

My despair about everything that makes other people happy is what’s feeding my troubled soul. Cheery stuff is just not my thing. And cheery stuff is done by more people at once, in a group, together - I flinch.

Or in the words of one Hank Moody - I'm not a joiner. 

There’s just some sheep-like effect, something so pedestrian about it - it fails to give me pleasure. I welcome the new times, it’s the celebratory part I have trouble with. My body’s rejecting it. I sabotage it for me, and the people around me, every single time.

Luckily this year, the decision with the relationship unit was to stay in.

Best decision ever.

But let’s not exactly gloat.

Bukowski’s noise/stupidity references hit differently this year, since I wasn’t at the crime scene of the offense done on him, and us all - called Los Angeles; it felt appropriate.

My intro’s into every year are always semi-depressing. I don’t know why; maybe I want to induce this - opposite than I attract it with my words - scenario, whereas, if I bitch enough, the next 365 days might actually turn out to be just - tolerable, going on content.

This year, I don’t even have the strength or luxury to go about 2013 and my expectations. I’m so taken with 2012, I still can't cleanse my mind toward the next chapter.

I can’t think it.

I can’t write it.

And don’t even know what to expect out of it, 2012 wore me out way too relentlessly.

The shift of years is all about people. When I reflect on it, I can’t really put it all under an abstract folder, it was people. I didn’t have trouble with anything else but people.

I worked like a dog, I traveled way too much for comfort, and I did so many things, projects, events, where things could go wrong, but I managed it all.

But people? And that is the apocalypse of 2012, everyone was talking about. I’m sure of it. Stupid, silly, unintelligent, primitive, entitled, unkind people. Not the Mayan calendar, the people.

The combination of stupid, unintelligent, primitive BUT entitled people - there's absolutely nothing worse on this planet. If anything is going to fuck this planet, it's going to be that. They are scarier than any natural disaster. They ARE a natural disaster.

And I know quite a number of people that went through the same experience in 2012. All those creatures that made us miserable, were they like that all the time? And we just didn’t see it? Or did the global anxiety over the possible “apocalypse” made these kinds of people uninhibited about their own shittiness?

Maybe we’re really getting it all wrong by hating on 2012. Maybe it was a blessing in disguise. I feel as if the impending "apocalypse" kicked out the worst in people, something they always had in them, but were hiding it better. All those years you hang out with all those that fucked you up and let you down in 2012, maybe they always thought the worst of you and wanted the worst for you. And you were not lucky enough to see it.

2012 was pure pain. But would you ever take it back? Would you choose the option of those people not hurting you and continue living in oblivion, as you did for so many years?

I wouldn’t.

2012 kicked out all the rats in the rain, so you can see them, distinguish them, eliminate them.

I'm grateful.

All hail 13!

Let's open our fucking eyes for this one.