Following the celebrated end to 2016, as evidenced by my previous post, I sank into a rut. A really deep one. I believe it was a combination of factors, but having a few days off for the Holidays after weeks of daily toil threw me off of my game. Especially when told that the end of the year is the “slow season” and to expect 12 hour days, 7 days a week from then on out! The Holiday season has been a tough time of the year for me anyway, as it has been for decades.
The 12 months of 2016 just flew by (I still have candy canes from last year on my coffee table) as I was at times working up to 3 different jobs simultaneously. Health care insurance issues. My DVD player quit working. The floor fan that I run for the white noise to induce sleep came to a grinding halt at 3:23 AM. But it was when I opened a can of V8 to apply the final touch to my vegetable soup (my sustenance for the week) and it foamed over like a shaken can of soda pop, spilling over into my gastronomical masterpiece, that I went directly into melt-down mode. I was afraid to eat it but didn’t throw it out. I eventually consumed it due to hunger pangs (after applying enough heat to the substance to force each molecule to be replaced by the atoms of a neighboring molecule), one small serving at a time until it was gone.
It was the little things piling up; laundry, library books overdue, haircut, groceries, keeping watch over my diabetic neighbor, an unwelcome family of pets commonly referred to as bed bugs, in addition to some major changes taking place, some real and some imagined, based on the new administration taking over at the White House. One, thing, after, another. I began to feel “out of sorts” but found some level of comfort in consuming large quantities of beer accompanied by wine and other assorted forms of evil spirits, which seemed to make everything more tolerable, at least until the sun began to peep through the blinds the next morning.
Then, the loss of my beloved Dallas Cowboys to the Green Bay Packers in overtime at Arlington, ending a record-setting season for the franchise, only served to underscore this fetid return to the miserable reality of it all. The entire month of January of this new year was stagnant and anti-climactic. A complete wasteful expenditure of life. But with that month now over, it’s high time to snap out of this funk!
Okay, I’m done pitch’n my fit.
But at least the Cubs pulled it off! What more could this insatiable prognosticator wish for?
You can’t always get what you want… you get what you need.”
– Sir Mick Jagger
