Inverse New Year

It’s New Year’s Day for those of us who use the Gregorian Calendar. Worldwide, however, there is pretty much a different New Year for every day of the year, and they all fascinate me. You can customize your own New Year and that’s just fine. Sadly, you won’t get to take time off work to celebrate it in America (if you do, anyway...). I have worked way more New Years than not. It has never really gotten to be the champagne hoisting, woo-woo self-reflection this culture advertises. And I don’t want to bring up the “in these times” element, but here we are. Basically, what I’m trying to say is that the concept of New Year’s Day is highly unnatural.

This is not a cry for help, it’s just an observation, but I don’t think I’m alone. I don’t feel so on the brink of some “new thing” like I’m supposed to? Even Nature is different, or at least it’s pissed at us and screaming in our faces. What am I feeling? I wish I had someone to tell me. I am warping in and out of many dimensions. I zip out of highs and lows suddenly without provocation... but only random parts of me. And I feel them stretch unnaturally like I’m hanging high above the summer carnival midway, upside down across the lap-bar on the Zipper, too heavy to rest against my bruised hip bones, and suddenly the flying cage violently changes direction, and all my liquids and soft organs slosh to and fro from my stomach to my head. I feel the weight of my hair hanging straight down from the follicles and realize this is something I take for granted, save an occasional low-level headache from having it in a hair tie too long. Micro-focused down to a human smear in seconds.

Does everyone feel the need to leave where you are and get away? Start over. You don’t have to do the work if you just start over. You could just run? Maybe as a nation we all feel trapped. Even the rich people are restless. I’ve never seen that before. They don’t usually invade my spheres or the spheres of people I know all over North America. The rich have always forced me to come to them. These days they are insecure in their wealth, buying up all the homes in the countrysides sight-unseen. There is a desperation that makes them almost dangerous? Or perhaps growing up really poor has cursed me to be eternally restless, suspicious and uncomfortable; it could all end at any second. “You don’t belong here,” but if I was “here”, no doubt I’d fuck it up quickly in classic poverty-dummy style. I want to go home from this feeling. I want to quit the full time job of this feeling. 

I want to take the blinking incandescent colored lights of this feeling home and want to live inside of them without the painful hip bones and sloshing. I want to go home. But no matter how much time elapses or how much credit card debt I chip away at, it won’t solidify around me. The house is burned and gone. Would I rather be secure in a museum of my mind? One small shangri la? I just want to go home; the lights of the midway retired to neatly trace the stairs up to my room. I can feel their warm glow on my cheek as I pass them. Hear the clicking and movement of their filaments as they run through their sequences. Gone is the sound of crashing machinery and screaming. A beat and drone I choose to think and dream along with in the evening.