Trouble

Friday. I knew I shouldn't, but I knew it was too late. I’d woken up with rocks in my head, an ache in my liver and a sandpit in my throat. It felt like I hadn't slept at all, and I was all out of ideas. I reached for the drawer under my desk where I keep the emergency aspirin, and that was when I saw her: a shadow on the frosted glass of my office door, behind the black letters of my name. I held my breath, and she knocked.

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It was too late to pretend I wasn't in, too late to pretend I wasn't a sore loser, in yesterday's clothes and barely awake, in a seedy office on the wrong side of town: stinking like an ashtray and looking like hell. I let her in.

She was tall and expensive, with a face that didn’t move. She breezed in on a cloud of Arpège and looked me up and down like a hawk on high heels. She said, you look like you need motivation to reach your health and fitness goals by tracking your activity, exercise, sleep, weight and more.

I offered her a drink, but her blue eyes stared me down.

The phone hadn't rung for weeks and I had bills to pay. I knew I shouldn’t. But I bought one. She said, only Fitbit gives you the freedom to get fit your way. I bought two. She was beautiful when she sneered.

Ten minutes later we were nearly friends but before I could get her name she was gone, leaving only a breath of jasmine and the memory of her lips in Velvet Venom on a half-smoked cigarette, going limp in the dregs of yesterday’s coffee.

I put on my Fitbit. 

By lunchtime I had walked ten thousand steps, pacing up and down beside my desk, while my coffee cooled and the traffic snarled outside.

At two it started to rain, a miserable drizzle that couldn’t make up its mind. I stopped pacing and picked up the phone. I had bills to pay.

Saturday. A fly was buzzing in the window and I woke up on the floor. I hadn’t slept so good in twenty years but something was needling me. I’d been dreaming in Cinemascope, all car chases and smashing glass, and I was tired like always. But for once I hadn’t woken up at 3am, going over conversations in my head while the neon sign outside flashed yellow through the blinds.

Things were looking up.

I went downstairs for coffee, and while I waited I checked my Fitbit. It said I hadn’t slept at all.

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Eight thousand steps last night, and my heart racing like a greyhound, on and off. I thought about that. I thought about it some more when I got back up to my office and noticed the bloodstains on my door, and the bottle. The bottle. It should have been in the drawer, with the aspirin. I was having trouble with my health and fitness goals. What the hell was going on?

I calculated the cholesterol in my cheeseburger while I stared out the window, chewing. I was starting to feel like I didn’t know myself at all. There was a knock at the door, but I wasn’t in the mood.

I needed a nap.

I looked out the window at the fire escape, and the fire escape looked back. Fifty-seven steps down to the sidewalk and a hundred more to my car. I put on my hat.

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But it was too late to pretend I wasn’t in - a cop with a face like a damp tomato sandwich busted through the door and I knew I’d reached the finish line. He said, we’ve downloaded your data. You’re under arrest.

Christmas stories

TV has lost a lot of its currency, in these end-times. First downloads, and then the desperate corporate clawback of Netflix, Neon and Lightbox have killed off freeview, leaving it a stinking puddle of simpering infotainment and crass Americana: Hoarders, Botched and the Real Housewives of the Anthropocene.

But everything changes at the end of the year, when it’s time for the annual Christmas movie programming tradition.

It doesn’t seem that long ago that there was only one movie on TV at Christmas: The Sound of Music. I could never understand why, because it seemed to have about as much to do with that Bible story as pine trees, credit card debt and ham. 

But then we began to get the annual dusting-off of imported nostalgia like Miracle on 34th Street, followed by new-school Christmas-themed films like Home Alone, Elf and Love Actually.

 Neo-liberal brat struggles against the proletariat, whose demands 
threaten his own status and resources. Source

But this year, idly skimming the listings, I’ve noticed a change.

Frozen, Pretty Woman, The Wedding Singer, The Shawshank Redemption. The underpinning religiosity of Christmas, long since mutated into a godless, reindeer-propelled tinsel-covered mess, has now mushroomed into some vague, generalised ‘family values’ fable, with a side order of prosperity theology. Glossy, moralistic stories, with a family values focus and a weird element of aspirational social mobility – this is the new-look Xmas fodder. There’s a self-righteous sense of justice and entitlement in all of these films - a striving for outcomes - that fits well with the ethos of Dance Moms and Reno Rumble. Are these the ‘Bible stories’ of the modern age? 

I can’t say I have a particular affinity with Bible stories, but I am quite attached to the

Sound of Music’s celebration of singing your heart out in the open air and making
goofy clothes out of the curtains. (And as the movie itself illustrates, not everyone’s cut out to be churchy, even the Mother Superior.) But what’s the messaging from these late-comer faux-Christmas movies?

·    You can have your own kingdom and get rich any old how cos you deserve it, but it might take you forty years (or if you’re a woman, you’ll have to get married and give up your well-paid job).

·    Believe in yourself, even though you’re a loser. Don’t go changing!

The stories we tell ourselves as a culture have strong aspects of crowd control, for children and adults alike: messages about morality, gender roles, and acceptable behaviour; what we value and what we desire. The Bible, a product of its time, is just the same - full of good guys and bad guys.

But these modern ‘ends justify the means’ stories seem to lack a certain focus – there’s no

Crisp apple strudel. Source

god-figure, no santa-figure, to pass judgement on our characters’ achievements. Just us, admiring the outcome of their wealth and/or romantic success. Is this what we need, post-Santa, post-God? 

Now that the Christmas season’s main focus is on quality time with the family, are these really the fantasies that tell our stories? Do we really need that lump in the throat from some movie about the perfect oddball family to make us see our own as worth the effort?

     

Listening

She said, there’s never any noise,

unless I make it myself

it’s cold, it’s empty, it’s

sad

She said I’m sick I’m sick I’m

sick to death

of turning around

inside

And she said, there’s a picture of a hill on my wall

and it looks a bit

like home, that’s all

it’s just that

sometimes I feel

like I’m my only friend

And I said sorry what?

Say that again?