Am I alone in feeling like I’m ringing in the New Year from inside a bathyscaphe? A Christmas-week relocation – the second blitzkrieg move in three months – has not helped. The creeping paranoia and claustrophobic feeling of city life in Kingston has been replaced by the glass-house paranoia and caught-in-the-crosshairs feeling of country living, punctuated by the howling of coyotes and the growing specter of secondhand woodsmoke seeping into the house from all the beleaguered homeowners trying to wean themselves off the Central Hudson/Heritagenergy/Kosco fossil fuel teat.
Life has become one long, cockeyed David Lynch movie, replete with passive-aggressive neighbors glaring at your parking placement, second-guessing where you store your lawnmower and wheelbarrow, and moving things around on you when you’re not home. There’ve been muffled arguments heard through the walls, and enough uncomfortable, hair-raising personal exchanges to fill a couple of chapters in a Gothic novel.
Night sounds in the country take on a new quality of menace; it’s customary to be awakened from a deep slumber by a piercing “What was that?!” voiced by my more aurally sensitive beloved.
Television is no panacea either. Watching the eternally youthful stroke victim Dick Clark mumbling his way through another “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” only reminded me of my own mortality in a way that no amount of alcohol could have suppressed, even if I hadn’t been suffering from a stomach virus and been able to drink.
Not that I’m alone in my spiritual dyspepsia. My friends and family – indeed the entire regional, state and national psyche – seem to be suffering from a similar malaise. People I know well, love and respect are hurting, physically and emotionally – people are dying too young, falling off roofs, contracting awful maladies, burying pets, crashing cars, falling into potholes and breaking their ankles, quitting jobs to do nothing. It almost seems as if there’s an involuntary mass civil action in progress, with people subconsciously checking out of the mainstream social contract that has brought us September 11; the endless morass that is Iraq; the apocalyptic Katrina debacle; the further exposure of our government’s corrupt core in the Abramoff scandal; and on and on. Even for those of us who keep trying, fuel prices, skyrocketing taxes and the collapse of the mortgage business are keeping us pinned to our velvet-backed display cases. The local economy sputters along, half on life support, waiting for the axe to fall.
It is not a time for optimism.
But it is, ironically, a time for faith. If all you have is a belief in God, good luck with that. What I’m talking about, really, is faith in back-to-the-wall human resilience. It’s that feeling that starts in the stomach – viral cramps and shooting pains be damned – and rises up into the pituitary gland, feeding steely resolve to the brain. No matter that everything seems to be going down a giant toilet; while there’s a woodsmoke-fouled breath to be taken, I’ll take it.
So tomorrow, on the first real day back after a disastrous holiday vacation, I’ll drag myself out of bed, clamp on the shin guards, breastplate and helmet and get back in the saddle, taking the fight as deep as possible into 2008. See you then.