Hot:

“What is the problem?” I asked.

“She’s getting all crazy about this,” said Chuck. “And we don’t have the money for this. Table cloths, flowers and place settings… ugh.”

“Why don’t you get this by now?” I asked.

“Get what?”

“Everyone has a holiday. Especially every woman. It’s the holiday they gear up for, it’s the holiday that takes them back, whatever. Some have Christmas, some have Halloween. For some it’s all about Valentine’s Day, and for others it’s New Year’s Eve – just don’t date the ones that are all about New Year’s Eve. Trust me.”

“Whatever.”

For me, it was three holidays: Halloween, Christmas and New Year’s.

I used to go all out for Halloween. I loved making my own costumes and dressing up for the day. There was something about losing myself behind a mask, living in the fantasy of another life, another place and time.

I could live in a novel, a movie, a play or just something different. It was a chance to escape without avoiding; a chance to be someone else without diminishing myself.

New Year’s was a chance to blow off steam with friends. Make special plans filled with renewal and portent. It was about spending way too much money, making sincere promises to myself, spending time with good friends, making new connections and getting blasted.

Christmas was the most special for me. It was a time when the entire family came together.

Getting someone the perfect gift; finding the right wrapping; making custom cards; walking through Herald Square, lost in the excitement of getting ready; decorating the tree; dropping in on all the holiday parties.

The crisp air, the Manhattan street-steam, finally getting home after a long day of shopping – there was something emotionally buoyant about the preparation, the anticipation of it all.

But my favorite part of Christmas, was Christmas Eve.

There, in the dark, I would lay by the tree. The string of lights blinking and fading to a serene rhythm. Quiet streets, quiet night, the stillness settled like snow and covered everything with tranquil hope.

But that was a long time ago.

I don’t really “do” holidays anymore. The mystique of Halloween has worn off – I’m tired of pretending, tired of spending lots of money, time and energy putting together an uncomfortable costume so I can have another excuse to consume copious amounts of drugs and drink.

The hassle of New Year’s plans has gotten to be more trouble than its worth. Most of my friends are married with children. Finding a sitter during party-night is not an easy task. And getting everyone to agree on where to go and what to do? No, I left all that behind a few years back.

I don’t miss any of it. Been there, done that – as the saying goes.

But Christmas… that I do miss. I miss that tree, the stillness, the shopping and the smell of roasting chestnuts along Broadway. I miss the portent, the anticipation, the hopefulness and the serenity.

It feels lost to me now. I’m not sure what it would take to get it back. I’m not even sure where to begin.

I could get a tree. Decorate it and light it up. I could look for the perfect gifts for friends and family. I could drop by all the holiday parties and dip into the punch. But it wouldn’t be the same.

Looking back, Christmas was much more than the accouterments and the dressing; more than the meals and the gifts. It was the sharing. It was the security of family and friends. It was about people having your back, no matter what.

People have my back. My family is scattered, but still family. But as I pass 43, and head towards 44, I can’t help but miss what I still don’t have – a family of my own.

That was a part of it too, back then. It wasn’t just the moment, but the promise of a future with my own kids, my own home and someone special to share it all with.

It’s not over for me, by any means. I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, in the next hour, between posts. But, right now, I feel adrift. Weightless and unanchored.

I am searching for something that’s proved elusive and slippery. But I have hope. I’ve gotten close enough to have hope. I know it exists. It doesn’t have to remain a dream.

Hope – that was part of Christmas too.

Hot:

I am afraid of being worthless.

I am afraid of being wrong.

I am afraid of being hurt.

I am afraid of hurting someone else.

I am afraid of looking like a fool, because that would reveal my charade.

I am afraid of having a ridiculously inaccurate understanding of myself. That everything I believe about myself to be good are the things other people snicker at. They snicker at the self-delusion and the self-denial.

I am afraid that I am nothing more than a burden to the people I love and respect.

I am afraid that I will be alone for the rest of my life. Worse, I am afraid that I will deserve to be.

I am afraid of being selfish. That I am shallow. That I am nothing more than flotsam – clogging up the works for the people in my life.

I am afraid of responsibility. How could I ever take care of someone else when I can’t take care of myself?

I am afraid that I am just surviving. That I will never truly live. That this life is without any meaning other than the ignorant, unenlightened, myopic and childish observations I have accumulated between shots of tequila and bong hits.

I am afraid of never measuring up. Not only to the standards set by parents or teachers, co-workers or friends, lovers and enemies, but the standards of a baseline, decent human being.

I am afraid I can’t change. I am afraid I will never get beyond past disappointments, traumas and mistakes. That I will always be haunted by my failures, surrounded by them in some dark hole; that I don’t have the means or the intelligence to get out and start again.

I am afraid of losing hope. That I will harden. That I will become brittle. That I will never experience joy again.

I am afraid that no one will love me. That no one will need me. That I will always fall short. That I will do more harm than good. That no one will ever discover anything hidden inside me, because there is nothing to discover.

That no one will ever be moved by my kiss, my touch, my heart.

I am afraid that I will make a terrible father to any child. That I will damage them beyond repair. That I will drive them to drugs and prostitution; to ignorance and anger; to prison or a biker gang, or both.

I am afraid I will ignore my children. I am afraid I will expose them to nothing but what is broken and ugly in me.

“What are you afraid of?” he asked, again.

“I’m afraid… that I’m only a lie,” I said.

He paused for a moment and smiled. “You probably don’t remember this, but you called me in a near-panic once about a dream you had, years ago.”

“What did I dream?”

“You dreamt that you were part of a lynch mob – that you had lynched a black man.”

“Wow, yeah I do remember that.”

“After that dream, you called me because you were worried, that deep down, you were some raging racist.”

“Yeah…”

“Do you remember what I said?”

“Not exactly.”

“I said, ‘racists don’t sit around and wonder if they’re racists. If a racist had the same kind of dream you had, he wouldn’t be calling up his friends and asking their opinions on it.’

“Not unless it went something like, ‘Say, Bob, I had a dream where I was lynching me some coons and eating macaroni and cheese. I got so scared, I jump right up and called you. Bob, do you think I have a deep-seeded hatred for macaroni and cheese?’”

I laughed. “Yeah, I do remember that.”

I am afraid of the future. The light I saw as a younger man has dimmed.

I am afraid of having dredged up too much. I am afraid of what might come up if I keep digging.

I am afraid to return the love of people who have been patient with me all this time. I am afraid I will only disappoint them.

I am afraid the changes in me are only new rationalizations. That I have not changed at all. That I am still nothing more than a frightened child stepping off an airplane in 1973.

There are times when I am afraid.

But I’m not afraid everyday.

Sometimes, I’m not afraid at all.

Hot:

“You ever read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?” she asks.

“No.”

“You would get a lot out of that,” she says through a mouth full of salad.

“Yeah? Why do you think that is?”

“I don’t know. You seem to be a pretty, I don’t know, spiritual guy and stuff. I figure it’d… speak to you in some way.”

People who discover zen usually end up recommending Robert M. Pirsig’s book to me. And I never bother to read it. Maybe I should.

Maybe I should read all the books on zen and see what attracts so many people to this way of coping with the world. I know. It’s not just a coping mechanism. It’s life-philosophy, it’s a way of existing, it’s the key to one’s inner sanctum. Whatever.

The thing is, being in the moment is a daily occurrence for me. I get lost in lines, in shapes and colors; the character of a stroke, the flow of a gradient and the density of a shadow.

There’s a moment in every day when I look up at the clock and realize my internal sense of time has taken a break. For a few hours I stopped keeping track of things; stopped anticipating, regretting, analyzing, projecting or predicting. I had, for too brief a time, been unaware of any time passing.

And it’s not because I have any extraordinary illustration skills that allows me immunity from the fourth dimension. It’s not some special power I have. I can easily get lost in words, in film, in music.

But those are passive ways of eluding the stream of moments. The lattice of a sketch, the weight of it, spreading across the page… to get lost in that? Abstract and grounded, free and confined, frustration and elevation blend together into currents and eddies that wash through all the sediment at my feet.

“You know… you know when you’re in that zone… when the world just disappears… you know?” she asks with guarded enthusiasm.

“Yeah. I’ve had that once or twice,” I say.