Winter Monologue

 

Midwinter Monologue

December's here like a missed belt loop you just noticed. This sartorial mistake already retroactively compromises you.

While we're on belts, our belts are financially tightened. So I hunt for supper. Or I say I do. I'll head down the watering hole, I tell Wife, quiche is in season. Or I say it is. I tape a steak knife to a clothes rail. Hunt like that. Or I say I do. Exposed in the cold.

There's a tension in air otherwise empty. Winter air always empty. Now the changing seasons, they're like good wine and heavy cheese. Winter is death, is vacuum. People add the colour.

This tension, its this new flu, Christmas on a razors edge. I felt pre-millennial-dread in 1999 celebrating the numerical misunderstanding. This is like that. Midnight dissipated it then into a leaden January four years long.

I volunteered to work one Christmas. Hospital job. There were equipment checks and stuff to move. I expected atmosphere, laughter, but it was flat echoes, stuffy heating. I only talked to the cook. Ex-navy chef barking bile. At least in Dialysis they were having a quiz. Later I ran a bath and watched a couple of films. Alone, yes. I am better now, thank you.

Talking of being better now, I'm long-term ill now, hospital job a rosy hindsight dream now. But with the world on fire, ice domes sweating, uber-flu, interweb rule . . . its dystopian is what I am getting at. Point being long-term sickness fits in like a jigsaw piece. I gasp bad air in the 4 pm patio chill, thin neon shards in the black sky. I am bleak midwinter.

I'm in Christmas rehab. That's my joke. Being indifferent gets you labelled a grinch. Office tension same either way.

The pressure of years-end disrupts me. When I attempt sleep my brain opens up a book of nonsense plays and reads to me. My winter hypnagogia is occupied by a soap-opera of strangers.

Foraging for supper is dystopian. The end of the garden, where fences meet like a ships bow, there's an opening where an alley used to be. A narrow no-mans-land of skewwhiff fences. This is the way to the watering hole. Or I say it is. I hunt quiche there. And pie. Between matchstick trees, the water low. Or I say I do.

Cat comes too, hunts with a BBQ skewer. Or he says he does. Grey dawn and pink dusk we're there, because flat winter sunlight conjures up migraines. I found this water hole following Fox. Or I say I did. Sometimes Cat rides on Fox's back. Or he says he does. They hunt pizza and ham sandwiches in chilly mist. Puddles irregular discs of ice. I'm hoping we find turkey and grass-fed roast potatoes.

December's here. That's the consensus of calendars. Still it surprises. The first of what? I say to Wife. December? No!

And suddenly there is so much to do. Or I feel there is.