What is it about the holidays that make you curl up in the fetal position, listening to Lou Reed’s Berlin (hooray for those wailing children) or Television Personalities’ the Painted Word? Oh, everything. The cold and the darkness that is stretching out for the next two or three months, the looming problem of January’s rent. I lose interest in the question halfway through the answer. What are you people doing to remain cheerful? I am finding that bingeing on cookies is only a temporary fix that leaves one worse off than before. I think it was Baudelaire who first noted the loneliness that follows such debauchery. Although he was talking about drinking and having sex with diseased prostitutes.
Speaking of debauchery, we had our work christmas party yesterday and that was definitely a missing element. In the good old days, we had these galas in fancy bars and ballrooms and people would get dressed to the nines and drunk to the zeroes. The next day spent discussing who had photocopied their fanny or made out with so-and-so. Now we have a modest but nicely catered couple of hours in the office, no dancing, no tipsyness. But we did have “s’mores”- a toasted marshmallow covered in cookie dust impaled on a plastic pipette filled with soft chocolate that you had to suck out.
Is it wrong of me to want to rock in a corner, sucking chocolate out of a pipette, playing “Closer” until Christmas is over? I should have understood this would be my fate when I quit smoking and binge drinking. I regret nothing everything!
