A Little Gloom 'n Doom For Ya

[oselle]

I've really turned into one of those people who hates the holiday season. This whole entire stretch from Thanksgiving through New Year's. It's not the holidays themselves, it's the whole miserable year's-end thing. I hate it. I hate it so much. I hate all the "Best of 20--" compilations, and "Images of 20--" montages, I hate Auld Lang Syne, I hate every second of it.

It just feels like failure, every goddamn year. Another whole year gone by and nothing good to say about it. And then there's that awful new year looming ahead. For a while now, every new year has filled me with dread. I just sit here wondering what it's going to bring and I never imagine anything good. Usually I imagine disasters on the order of illness, injury, financial ruin, death, etc. And I wonder, Am I always going to remember 20-- as the worst year of my life?

Was 2008 a bad year for you? I feel like it was a bad year for me. I've been on a sort of weird downward spiral since the middle of the year and I can't get out of it and it doesn't seem much better for a lot of people I know. My parents almost got evicted from their apartment and my mother is getting more demented by the day, the husband of a friend of mine committed suicide in July, another good friend had a catastrophic accident at home and has been hospitalized since September...and don't even get me started on what's going on with the economy and terrorism and people getting trampled to death at Walmart and oh my God. Oh my God, people. I want to feel optimistic about having a new president but I can't. I just don't think the new administration is going to make that much of a difference in the short term, I don't think it's going to make much of a difference to me. I think things are bad and are going to stay bad and may even get worse for the next...I don't know. Two or three years. And in the big picture that may not be a whole lot of time but in one lifetime, two or three years of bad mojo is...I mean it can be something you don't ever get over.

To date, I'll always recall 1999 as "the worst year of my life" for reasons too numerous to detail. Let's put it this way -- it started with a car accident and ended with what I guess you'd call a nervous breakdown. I was still relatively young then, in my early thirties, but the things that happened in 1999 still affect my life and always will. It was just a complete derailment and I don't think I've ever really gotten back on track since. Part of my dread of 2009 is that it's going to be the ten-year anniversary of my annus horribilis and I'm superstitious about that. Last year of the first decade of the 21st century and I feel like...I've been silently accruing disaster interest on some cosmic charge card and 2009 will be the year the bill comes due. And I know I can't afford to pay it.

So, everyone else having a great weekend?

Comments

[oselle.livejournal.com]

Yes, I know you've had a lousy year. Are we stuck in some sort of astrological bad mojo zone? Mercury in retrograde or something? I hope you do get your life back on track in the coming year -- one day at a time, as they say.