I'm Dreaming of a Black Christmas - Lewis Black [5]
Which makes it all the more strange that during this season I am drowning in sentimentality just like any Christian. I will choke up while watching a commercial where a father and son argue over a cell-phone plan. Tears come as a mother talks to the camera about the extraordinary power of a cleansing detergent. Coke celebrates the Christmas season with images of traditional Christmases, or Santa placing gifts under a tree, and I am incapable of getting out of my chair for a good five minutes. Someone as emotionally detached from the world as I usually am finds himself awash in emotions generally found only in movies with Jimmy Stewart in them. I am drenched in a romantic sense of life that I don’t even believe in. As happy as I am with my life—okay, happy might be a bit of a stretch, but I do like my life (colonoscopies not included)—I somehow feel that something indefinable has passed me by. I am an outsider to the grand scheme of things.
I am alone.
Sure, I have friends, lots of them, and I have the Christmas cards to prove it, but most of them are raising families. They have real lives. I know I have a real life, too, but theirs seem realer. They have normal lives. I have a tour bus. Where is my wife? Where is my family? That’s what we were all programmed for; how the fuck did I miss the programming. Where is my really real life?
The question rarely occurs to me, but at Christmastime it pounds relentlessly on my psyche, my conscience, and my frontal lobes. Or the back ones, I can never remember, because of all the pounding.
I dream of girlfriends past, of girlfriends present, and girlfriends future. It’s as if I am Scrooge, but instead of being a miserly prick, I am emotionally withdrawn and inept at relationships, and the ghosts of my ex-girlfriends take me through our times together and remind me of the wondrous joys and warmth and fulfillment of the loves we shared. They then present to me a vision of the extraordinary children we would have had and how rich our family life together would have been. They then dance around me as achingly beautiful as I remember each of them as they sing like a chorus of angels, “Shithead. Shithead. Lew, you really stink. You have nothing left except your stinky stink.” And before I awaken, I am naked on a promontory as the wind howls and the vultures pick the meat off me. Needless to say, I awaken with a start.
Where did I go wrong?
Every Christmas I feel that I must now mate and have a family, or else all of my time on this planet has been for naught. I realize this is totally irrational, as if I am awash in the hormones produced by a romance novel or the film version of “The Gift of the Magi.”
In the end, my Christmas is not about Christmas. It’s about me. I spend it rattling down the corridors of my mind, jiggling the knobs on imaginary locked doors, behind which just might be all the answers I have spent a lifetime desperately searching for, wondering how I ended up becoming me. Just me. By myself. Alone.
Let me show you what I mean.
THANKSGIVING
I hear the peaceful sounds of waves doing their dance on the beach as I bask in a sun that seems just a little too close to the earth today. Birds are twittering. (Birds twitter, humans shouldn’t. Trust me, it’s a law of nature—number 7, I think.) Occasionally I hear the piercing cry of a seabird that sits in a tree a few feet from my chaise lounge.
I am reading George Carlin’s final book, Last Words. I am enjoying it. I am enjoying where I’m sitting, too. I am at peace. It’s Thanksgiving and I am far away from home. Literally and figuratively.
I