Baby, I’m Wasted

New year, new day, new drug, new you.

The malaise that is winter. The sun shines and it lies through it’s glory and beams. The sun says “I’m warm, come play”. Then I do. I go and play and the sun in not warm. The sun is a frigid mirage or sub zero temperatures bouncing off the sheen of the icy streets. My fingers are numb and my nose drips a watery discharge, too thin to sniff back up.

In 2016 I know of other lands and scapes, both sea and earth locked. What about in 1016. Did the people who were roaming the frozen tundra 9 months out of the year, did they know of paradise? Were there tales of far off places that never got cold and bloomed with exotic fruits? Did they know about the places that swarmed with a humid and sultry warmth? I wonder if I didn’t know of the warm and nurturing sun, would I still hate the winter?

Is happiness really the cause of unhappiness or discontentment? If I didn’t know of the summer that awaits me with it’s wide open and accepting arms, would I hate the cold and bitter winter with it’s bony and creaky limbs so much? I don’t know that I would. I grew up in a super cold climate. Winter was most of the year. Frost bite, frozen hair, chapped lips, cold toes and fingers. The cars had tennis balls on the attennas and cords to plug in at night. We used words like snow drift, wind chill, and antifreeze. I don’t remember hating the winter. I used to like to go tubing and ice skating. We would build snow forts and go ice fishing. I don’t remember the cold being a factor. I remember the good times. I remember the fun. But I didn’t know anything else. I only knew of my 4 seasons and how they rotated. I had never traveled. When I visited the sea, the desert, the mountains and I learned… learned of the world, the sadness started to creep in.

Now, when I think back to more recent winters I don’t revel in memories of snowball fights. I don’t long for the winter of 2013 where my car was stuck in the driveway for 3 days because of a deep freeze that iced the steep bank. I never think of how wonderful it was to be inside because my body hates the outside and the outside hates my body. I remember only the bad. The cold. The dark. The misery that comes when the air doesn’t move and walking is never safe because everything in your outdoor environment is a fall risk. In the misery comes the promise of wonderful.

The drugs and alcohol and sugar and coffee and pills… all of these will get me closer to May. In may the sun will come and lift me up and take my hand. The sun will tickle my nose and scratch my back and pull me into the horizon. The sun will heal my burden and the present will just become a memory of a cold morning or an icy parking lot. Chemicals helping me along until the day when my skin is wet from sweat; my freckles spread like giggles in a classroom of 6 year-olds. The warm sun taking the cracked and weathered hands and coloring them with bronze and coconut oil. Sunshine, the original Prozac.