Thursday, January 10, 2008

Every Light is King

And Christmastide was gently roving beyond the braw brichts, moonlit nichts and crisp promises of Hogmany fun. Frosted pies, nutmegged wine and three goes on a pulling cracker. Ach, oy, rows of Chinese puzzles, palms of curling fishies, fists of minipacksacards. All a wrapped and all a ready to go.

Though, course, the New Year revelations were not without their moments of stillness, their endless leagues of dullness. Despite the hats and the blows, the curling things with feathers on the end. Even in spite of the stars on the actual night and the frost and the promise of better things yet to come. We rang it in and it oozed past us with the softest kind of whimper.

Revelries and resolutions.

Better for being free, costing nothing, the tree stood tall in the back room, dominating the back end of that room, shadowing out the light that shone through beacon like from the back neighbour’s security lamp, the selfish ugly cunt. It stood, that tree, wrapped glorious in glistening silver fur, coiled with tiny coloured lights, its branches a bobbin even as they swayed from the weight of brittle chocolates and mirrored baubles. Atop, at summit, precarious on spiny steeple, the silverest, brightest star that your eyes did ever aglow. And glorious further, blessed even, by cunt neighbour’s selfish, blinding light.

It stands, still, proud and greenish, two and a half weeks later. You take it down. No, you take it down.

The advantage is sort of mine this start to the new year in that I am free, free I tell you, to come and go as I please and touch myself as I please in places where I dared not have ventured before. Ever before. That is, I sit in my pants and as I sit in my pants, my underwear, attending to this and doing that, I allow myself a roam, as unconscious a roam as possible. Given my previous fastidiousness in this type of area this is quite somewhat of a movement forward for me as I roam and caress and touch myself in places that I’d previously dared not dare. I am, as we speak, reduced to lightly tickling the hairs on my toes.

But the past is just that and I have learned to put Christmas and the New Year revelries behind me and march forward with a determination that was borne, I admit, from the whole business of it being a new year. My one small concession, a tradition we go through every year, is to leave the tree standing, bedecked in all its festive jewels, even as we mutter in front of it that it will shortly have to go. The end of February is enough for it, is enough for me.