Hey there.

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I do apologize for that. See, I’m much better at writing about the negative. My prose style has been described as “elegaic” by the sort of folks that would use such words as “prose style” and “elegaic.” Things have been quite pleasant, in a bittersweet sort of way, down here of late and my writing has suffered in frequency because of it. I’d like to say that I’ve conquered my demons and learned to write about “nice things” but today is not that day. Hopefully what I’m about to scribe will act as an exorcism.

Today is Sunday, and it is the day after Christmas. I am alone. I am at work. I have been scheduled to work since this past Tuesday, and have been alone for most of the past four days here. It has not been pleasant.

Actually, allow me to paint you a mental picture of precisely what it is like to have to work Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and the day after Christmas while living very alone, knowing the people you love are miles and miles away. Imagine this: a newborn litter of puppies, little golden-haired puppies making their first hesitant yips, stumbling around half-blind searching for one of mommy’s many nipples. Isn’t that adorable? Now imagine those same puppies rudely stuffed into a dirty burlap sack, beaten to a very inch of their tiny puppy lives with a 9 iron, and tossed callously from the back of a moving pickup truck into the surging flow of a river. Working on Christmas is a little bit like that. And then imagine that you phone your friends to ask what sort of fabulous gifts they received and how well they liked the gifts you chose for them and having two separate persons make the comment “Well, at least your next paycheck will be nice and fat,” but you have to protest describing how your employer only awards one extra dollar an hour for holiday work so your next paycheck will not be appreciably larger than any paycheck you have received hence. Then you realize that, actually, your next paycheck will be smaller than your previous paychecks because your health insurance rates are going to increase by 50% in January. At this point, crying yourself to sleep seems almost heroically proactive.

Oh, it needn’t be that bad if I had someone waiting for me at home. But, I didn’t. There was no hug, no steaming mug of cider, no piping-hot cookies fresh from the oven. Just a cold, empty apartment and an icy gray drizzle.

Never again.

I make a vow, here, tonight, on these “interwebnets” to never spend another Christmas so utterly, utterly alone as this. How? Come back tomorrow for a much, much more positive entry, detailing just why this sort of awfulness need never plague me again.

I am in a funk. There’s something I’m not getting, some vital nutrient essential to my well-being and contentedness — like calcium or one of the B vitamins — only on an emotional and mental level. I’ve fallen out of love with my routines and habits.

Earlier today I received a call from my mother who made the mistake of asking me something general about work. I unleashed an elaborate and venomous rant about just what I thought about my current job. Well, not so much the actual job per se but the climate that surrounds and envelopes it like a thick, brackish miasma that stifles the breath and irritates the throat. More on that later, perhaps.

Once I said these things, I didn’t feel any better. It wasn’t cathartic. Quite the contrary, it only made me feel worse. I’m not so sure I fully realized how unhappy I was until I said it out loud.

I’m lonesome. I’m sick of going to bars to sit around talking to folks who may or may not remember in two days or two weeks, to say nothing of the cost of doing such a thing on a regular basis. I’m just not making connections.

I miss having a pal. I’d probably miss having a lover if those sorts of things ever worked out for me in a substantial way.

Something needs to change.