the rix mix

Christmas Eve can be a little tricky for me, emotionally. But that's largely because I've rarely had an "ideal" Christmas Eve. For a number of years my then-female cohabitant & our next-next door neighbors co-hosted small late-evening parties for local friends, all of us had earlier obligatory family functions. Small gifts were exchanged, party  food consumed & much beverage imbibed. Those parties broke up around 3 or 4 am. Later, I had a few sentimental type Christmas Eves with another girlfriend,  tree in my apartment.

Apt building next block.

I often spent Christmas Day at my sister's for a traditional dinner, very theatrical in the Norman Rockwell mode.  But when I no longer had a car this pleasant six-hour excursion , or an overnight if I decided to attend Pottersville Reformed church on Christmas Eve & packed a sports coat & tie  (Rixons do not do church casual),   turned into a three-day, two-night  production before my shrink began providing me with an efficient snooze-inducer named Ambien. I had no lap top or wifi,  had to check my identities as a venerable WFMU  DJ &  & respectable minor poet & writer at the door along with my heavy winter jacket, & suffer being called "Bobby" by my brother-in-law, Only three people may call me Bobby: My sister, & two WFMU DJs , Stan  & Monica.

It became too much. By 2002 I felt like the most expendable & least liked  of the guests. I naively  believed I should be commended for surviving a depression that institutionalized me for a week, followed by retina  surgery (I've had four) that rendered me legally blind in one eye thus ending any hope of retuning to bookstore employment requiring me to heave 50 pound boxes & read long packing slips with minute print,   In 2002 I should have been arranging  a six-figure malpractice suit against an eye surgeon, but I wasn't yet aware my eye was permanently  ruined (the surgeon hadn't told me) or of the statute of limitations. So there went my one chance at a modest doublewide in a Cape May County trailer park with the usual nautical decor, & a Hyundai Accent, collecting SSD & working part-time in-season at a miniature golf course.

 My therapist at the time - I saw her every week - was struggling to get me to accept  this changed  situation & use all the benefits it made available, & which  I was  irrationally resisting. "Why?" she would ask, again & again. I knew but I was afraid to say. It took another 10 days in Ward 2B, no one  knowing I was there, to make the point for good. I walked away from that semi-voluntary  incarceration determined  that for anyone who could not accept & besupportive of my condition & situation, I would become as best I could a  courteous but distant character. I would not let others put me down & undermine my worth  anymore,  whether they did so openly or subtly. That is reserved to me. You can believe that what I put out on the internet is the "real" me or decide I'm behind a curtain pulling levers that manipulate  a phony persona. But any poem, good or not so good, signed by me, is not the creation of a phony.

The most remarkable thing about the community, or communities of friends & acquaintances spread across the internet from California to England, is that none of them are fakes or phonies. They may go months posting political gripes, recipes, funny photos, favorite music mp3s, or hardly anything at all, & then, boom, something bad happens to them, which they write about with candor. Because they are talking to friends.

Labels: holidays, mental health