2013 Can Suck My Peen!

I've decided it already.  If 2013 can be anthropomorphisized enough so that it can have a mouth

: >(  )

it can wrap its quivering lips around my mushroom cap and yule log and go to town.

That's right, you year, you: suck it.

2012 was a real mixed bag.  My children were born, (well, in 2011, but the tail-end of it), my brother-in-law died.  "Life is a series of meetings and partings, children, that is the way of it," Bob "Kermit" Cratchit tells his frog-and-pig children after Tiny Tim passes away in the "Muppet Christmas Carol".  I don't know if the real Bob Cratchit in the original "Christmas Carol" says that line, if it's Dickens or Henson, but who cares?

I don't know what else happened that year, because I was too befuddled and overwrought and enmeshed in my own neurotic horseshit to have noticed.  I stumbled through another year of work.  I got violently assaulted and I got a new used car (those two events were unrelated).  My daughter learned how to say "Mama" and "Dada".  My son learned how to stand up and let go.  My wife is finally crafting again (right beside me at her Viking Husqvarna, in fact, at this very moment).  My parents, ageless in my eyes for so many years, finally look old.  I'm getting fewer pimples and more wrinkles.

Hoorah, hoorah, hooray.

In 2013, I'll turn thirty-three.  My children will be speaking, evidently, if all goes according to schedule.  Hopefully I'll be working somewhere else.  Hopefully I can stick with the same pair of glasses for an entire calendar year.  I don't much know what it all means, though.  I don't know what 2013 can offer me.  That sounds kind of obnoxious, but the mirror on the stairwell says "GROW" and, while I continue, I think, to grow and change and evolve as a father and as a husband and as a partner, I cannot help but feel that I am stagnating as a person.  Will I be doing G&S patter roles with amateur theatre groups forever?  Part of me says, shit, I hope so-- I'll be pretty lucky if that's the case.  Another part of me longs to do Pinter and Shepard, Stoppard and Wilder, McDonagh and Chekhov (well, maybe not Chekhov so much), and another part of me longs to get paid for it.

I don't want to stagnate in therapy.  I want to keep climbing the mountain, and not get pooped on one of the little lower peaks.  I'm afraid to fall, and I'm afraid to ascend-- I don't know what I'll find if either happens.  What's worse-- I'm starting to not care anymore when I sit in that chair in front of that intimidatingly handsome man.  I'm starting not to care about what he thinks of me, or what he thinks about anything.  What good is he?  What good are any of them?  For how long will I continue to hand over those $50 checks-- how long will I tolerate it?  How long will he?  As long as I keep writing those checks, I suppose.

I want to keep learning about myself, but, in another respect, I want to stop.  I'm so tired and sick and grossed out by all the navel gazing.  It's consuming our society-- narcissism and introspection and masturbation and I'm growing so sick of it.  This blog, my internal monologue, my obsessions and my insecurities that I'm dying to throw up all over you with.  What I can't say here.  After 955 posts you'd think there's nothing that I can't say here, but there is.  I can say that I'd like to have sex with two Pakistani eighteen year olds at the same time before I die, I'm fine with saying that-- but there's so much that I can't say.  And that is painful for me, and, at the same time, it's annoying and necessary and at the same time, it's neither of those things.  I don't know what it is.

In 2013, my 2006 CR-V will reach 100,000 miles.  Years ago, when cars didn't really do that, you took a picture of your odometer rolling over (because, like I said, cars didn't really do that) and the car company would send you a beautiful metal medallion to clasp onto your grille to mark the achievement.  Volkswagen, Volvo and Mercedes did, at least.  Other car companies didn't because, like I said-- oh nevermind.  Now, most cars make it to 100,000, but car companies don't send you medallions anymore because they're too expensive to make and nobody makes things like that anymore and everything's plastic and nothing's metal and nobody cares and watches are all about bling now and Chips Ahoy taste like chemicals and they're smaller than they used to be and what exactly are crab fries anyway and where did we all go wrong and who wants tea and why did Graham Chapman have to die in 1989 and why couldn't it have been Nicolas Cage and why do you sob, heavy world, sob as you spin, mantled in mist, remote from the happy and Matilda's the defendant, she killed about a hundred and where you'll lay your head, where you'll sleep tonight, bluebirds say and a Gilbert is of no use without a Sullivan and I'm terrified to go to sleep tonight, and I'm just as scared of waking up tomorrow morning.

Or not.

I want to watch movies and go to the theatre and sit cross-legged at folk concerts and drink overpriced coffee again.  Can I do that, 2013?  I want some motherfucking balance, and some goddamned, Christ-gobbling fun.  Also, I want those two babies to hug me back.  They're going to hug me back in 2013, I think.

I want that.

And, I've got to say, in 2013: I don't want anymore partings.  And, frankly, I don't want anymore meetings, either.  I hate meetings.