Solstice Notes, 12–21–2016

So then we chopped down a conifer and dragged it inside on the shortest day of the year and we strung lights and shiny ‘round it and hung trinkets from pointy needles, trinkets that made us think of bigger times and colossal moments. And then we performed autopsies and wrote obituaries for the death of the way things were and it was easy and organic because we’d already written so many obituaries and any time a name is trending the first question is I wonder how they died followed by I wonder if they meant anything to me and then how many different words are there for impact or influence and if they didn’t have any influence then why waste the ink and if they did have impact then would they even want us to waste the ink?

It’s all nauseating and it’s all a nauseous blur and I don’t want the shortest day of the year to end. Two years ago I noted a single toddler’s sock found in the butcher’s parking lot and pondered the kid’s cold foot and was certain the pending arrival of the fat man in the red suit would erase all the pain of that podiatric flash freeze. Today I’m not even sure I’d differentiate the sock from the asphalt from the refried slush from the frozen waterfall of misery. I want to call a halt on the day. I’m not interested in the spring or the longer daylight. I want it darker, just as Leonard Cohen accused me of before he up and got the fuck off the ride. Can we get a second, super-solstice in, say, mid-February? I don’t want light or warmth. I want to test the mettle of the rest of you. The rest of us. I want to know who’s serious about this. I want to know who else lacks a flashlight but desires light at the end of the darkness. I want to know who knows how to tie the knots and flint-knap the spear-tips and who knows the good songs and the good stories. The skills and the lashings and the harmonica licks and the basic shapes of the angels.