Season’s End Blues, 2019 Edition

The party’s over. Time to get to work.

After a long night’s revels watching the snow fall as my Christmas mix played one last time, I awoke at around 9:30 a.m. to find that my wife had already completed the mammoth task of taking down the decorations and was two-thirds of the way down with dismantling our artificial tree. As always, I felt melancholy seeing everything gone. I’d said my drunken goodbyes to it all last night as I loaded the wood pellet stove that one last time before bed, so there’s that.

This would take me all week for mooning over the ornaments and when we got them, etc. My wife dismantles and packs away everything in a morning.

For that matter, I said my drunken goodbye to drunken goodbyes. My weekly ragers are now something I used to do but don’t anymore, because don’t get me started. I’ll still have my ale with my dinner when my wife and I go out to eat, but even that will be only twice a month in 2019. This is the year those life-sucking credit card bills go away.

Last year’s entanglement with tobacco use must end once and for all. I have to start taking care of myself. 

I’ve actually made serious resolutions for the year that I’ve written down and posted on my wall. One of them, a refutation of my tendency to wallow in sadness, got its first workout today. I looked at the ornaments through the plastic box where they were stacked and wondered How many more? How many more years will we be here to put these up? And there’s Otis, our eldest cat, on the pillow we put out for him in front of the wood pellet stove. He’s 17 years old. Was this already his last Christmas? 

All this, and the usual difficulty adjusting to the hard shock of transitioning from the three-month long festive season of football and candy and parties and gifts to the dull and unremarked days of January and February. I have plenty to keep me occupied, though. I have a book to finish, weight to lose, and I need to get out of the office and spend more quality time with my family. It sounds basic enough, but the basics are exactly what I need to get back in touch with.

Meanwhile, there’s tonight, New Year’s night, and it’s nothing special. Tomorrow will be nothing special. It’s not even a New Year anymore. Just January.

Happy New Year, anyway. 

Just let me have a few more of these, Lord, it’s all I ask.