Boxing Day

Christmas passed by fine enough. On top of what we already do as a family for the holiday, I also got re-acquainted with the gentlemanly pastime of playing darts along with my nephews; that plus dominoes. I knew I had some as a kid, but didn’t take interest in them then, and there was no one around who really knew how to play them. I encountered them again as an adult while in South America, where they were a popular game amongst the young and old alike. They seemed to be a ubiquitous feature on the tables in the outdoor taverns and cafes during late afternoon as friends and patrons played and chatted, and unwound with some beer or pop in the heat of the day. They are a reminder of the pleasantness of what the true essence of what a game, as I feel, is supposed to be: something essentially simple yet challenging; yet fun and social. I find chess to be OK, but chess is more complicated, seems to only attract introverts, and it only seems to make introverted people withdraw even more into themselves as they sit there calculating strategies. I can’t stand it when people make simple games or sports (which are just more glorified forms of time-wasting) less fun and more serious and intellectual than they need to be. I can’t be troubled into memorizing, and then being led to argue about, a few decades worth of sports statistics like it’s somehow going to change the world. It’s bad enough that I know the crazy amount of trivia that I do never mind adding sports plays to my synapses. If I were stranded on a desert island with ten other “professional” people, and if I were the one responsible to pick the five most useful and practical of them to aid in survival and then let the rest perish, if there was a sportscaster among them, he would be the most likely one to be chopped into fish bait first.
 

It’s the evening of Boxing Day and I’m supposed to be working my bloody night shift tonight. As always, I’m not at all up for the challenge. I didn’t go through anything as intensely insane and exhausting as Boxing Day shopping, but I did travel, did some laundry, picked through a shitload of unread email, replied to some, deleted others, tried to enhance my Mom’s computer’s performance (with much futility), plus attended to lots of other things that kept my from getting the sleep that I seem to desperately need.

There seems to be just too much free floating fuzzy thoughts in my mind right now to even allow me to sleep anyway, even if I didn’t have all this other stuff to do.  Writing to collect and examine them is like trying to snatch a single drifting dandelion seed out of the air: the focused effort to swiftly catch one only makes some wild turbulence that pushes it further away from your grasp. This is exactly the kind of bewilderment I have to learn to work past if I’m ever to get into the momentum of committing to the missions of the New Year. Sadly, it seems like the only remedy for it is to press myself into writing even more, no matter how nonsensical. Stab and swish long enough into the air and perhaps eventually something might get captured.

The New Year’s missions themselves haven’t got true forms or names yet, or at least any that I would be comfortable to admit publically yet. Words and qualities like: simple, efficient, balanced, creative, profitable, measurable, dynamic, portable, alternative, transferable, inexpensive all appeal and have value for me, but to square them up with a vision, or the time I’ll be given, and to make them congruent to the wildly varied skills, knowledge and interests I already have seems to be a huge undertaking.