musing of a vogon who’s not in the holiday spirit

The holidays is just around the corner. I can feel it in the air, the December breeze is beginning to gust through my window. It feels nice, to get a break from the heat and the sun. It doesn’t feel much like the holidays this year, in fact, it hasn’t felt like it for a number of years now. I don’t know if my lack of enthusiasm for anything that contains fun and laughter, is one of the symptoms of growing up, and becoming a full fledge schizoid slash quietly disappearing member of society( couldn’t care less). I find that as I’m getting older that one of the things that start to go for me is my idea of happiness, the kind I felt during childhood. It’s that special tingle inside your stomach that tells you something good is about to happen. This feeling accompanied me mostly in the earlier part of my childhood. Then one day, it just died, it died…and I never felt it again. But back then, I would feel it very strongly, especially during this time of year, when the force was strongly with me, the reason? because I always knew I would get tons, and tons of presents.

Yah, I was happy about receiving presents. This is a highlight of any child’s life: the acquisition of new things that would accompany them during the interesting, sometimes scary, journey of childhood. Don’t we all know people who are old enough to be our parents, but still take their old scraggly, teddy bears to bed? By old, scraggly teddy bears, I do mean old scraggly teddy bears. This is not a euphemism for, a well: an old scraggly teady bear. luff luff.
Plus, the blanket of hope that accompanies the holiday season I used to feel very thickly during this time of year, especially when it's cold outside, and you see a milion twinkling stars dancing outside of your window, but as you get older, that hope turns into disillusionment.

You always hear in the news that the suicide rate during the holidays escalate to beyond norm level. Now, this makes perfect sense to me. The holidays is traditionally the time of year when people’s loneliness and desperation is put under a microscope, and magnified a million times to the tune of Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer….As if to mock us, with his very shiny nose.

It is sad but true, but not everyone has got some close people in their lives that they could come home to, or share this special festive time with. Heckadoodle! many, many people, don’t even have a place to call home, especially here in the Philippines, where below poverty line is the standard fashion of living.

For the longest time I’ve been trying to figure out why this old, semi- demolished building that sits just at the corner of my place was taking forever to get renovated. Every time I’d look up, I’d see workers, standing on top of ledges, smoking or just talking. I mean, the front side of the building was completely stripped of walls, you could see everything that was happening inside. It would not be very hard to take a wrong step and fall to your death. I would always imagine that they were on their lunch break, just sitting around, talking about their kids and family. Then it hit me one day, and I realized with a shock, that this building was not getting a facelift. Those workers that I’d see up there were not construction builders doing some scaffolding work. They were in fact inhabitants of this old, abandoned, condemned building.

Derelicts all gathered in one place, seeking shelter. No wonder there was a clothes line attached to one side, filled with multi-colored shirts that flap about when the wind blows: like a bright crooked rainbow, hanging upside down. I don’t know why I didn’t see it before, but I guess it’s easier to keep your eyes close, than to see the painful truth.

I don’t know. I think most of us get on with our lives because we are on cruise control. Whether you are aware of it or not, is another matter. I know I am. These days I find that it’s easier for me to cope when my days are filled with numerous laborious tasks that will keep me occupied. That is why I haven’t had much time to update my blog. At one hand I’m very grateful for this distraction. There are certain moments when I get the urge to write, but choose not to, because I know that the stuff that would end up on paper would be too painful for me to deal with.

On the other hand, I know that this is such a lost, because I'm losing a lot of writing material, because I'm choosing to shut off, everything that I'm feeling. But I kinda need to do this at this time.

There's this certain sadness that always remain inside, despite your desperate attempts to be happy, or shrug your blues off with a smile, or a round of fake laughter. I can always detect when I’m doing this. It hurts, but I still think it’s funny, because I’m so good at it that I even get compliments for it, from people who know me well.

Sometimes it’s easier to keep things inside, that have it come out in the open, and have to do a head to head battle with your invisible demons. It’s like having to kill a million flies with a single fly squat. not fun at all. impossible. maybe, i don't know, but I'm in a weird mood