Warm holiday greeting

Great White Dispatch
Notes From Damn Near Canada
No. 46
12/31/09

I hate New Year’s. Just hate it. This crap-ass holiday depresses me more than reading The Road while watching Mystic River. After two weeks of festive good cheer, parties and presents, fireplaces and holly, you wake up January 2 and Everything. Just. Sucks.

All those Christmas decorations – glimmering symbols of fun and warmth just a week ago – now serve as reminders that you have to get back to work. Get your ass up that ladder and pull those lights down, bitch. You spend two hours sweeping up the evergreen splinters that your Christmas tree – now nothing more than a dead and brittle fire hazard – so kindly deposited all over your house when you finally evicted its rotting corpse, but your feet will still resemble that dude from Hellraiser until March. You suddenly go from having worked maybe 2 full weeks in the last 6, and now you don’t get a day off until what? Good Friday? New Year’s Day is nothing but the first of 365 Monday mornings.

And you kid yourself with these ‘resolutions.’ Let me enlighten you here: If you really need some contrived reason to do something, it ain’t gonna happen. You either want to do it or you need to do it. Making a promise to yourself just because the picture on your calendar changed isn’t the best motivation in the world. I’m the perfect example here. A few years ago, I started wearing a flab suit made of neoprene for the express purposes of hiding all my fabulous muscle definition. I really need to take it off. Problem is, I can only do that by moving my legs at a ridiculous speed for minutes at a time. Jogging. I hate jogging. HatehateHATE. Yet I live in a place seemingly custom-made for jogging. And if I haven’t been able to get off my ass and do it in the spring, summer and fall, in the middle of this land of parks and scenery, I sure as shittin’ won’t start doing it because I made a promise in the dead of winter to a baby in a golden sash. Or Dick Clark. Who do you make resolution pacts with?

Here’s an idea. Maybe we need some incentive to keep these resolutions. Say you break one. What if Dick Clark showed up in the middle of the night and showered you with stroke drool? Good god, I want to go for a subzero run just thinking about that scenario. But if the only motivation is a promise made to yourself while slurping down sauerkraut and watching Ryan ‘I am a pimp’ Seacrest, guess what? You will stay fat. You will remain at your desk. You will keep smoking. You will continue killing hobos and wearing their flesh. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with these things. I’m just saying we should all stop kidding ourselves.

Anyway. I love the holidays. Had a very nice month sequestered here in Minny. Saw some good people, got some great gifts and gave some better ones. But the holidays are over. We can hope that 2010 sucks less than 2009. But we can’t count on it. Happy New Year. Back to work.