“I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.” ~ Sylvia Plath
When Suzie asked me how Christmas had gone, I responded that I went through it like a stunned mullet. I’m not entirely sure what a stunned mullet is, but in what I believe was a ‘New Yorker’ profile on her, Liza Minelli once described coming off stage feeling like one, so I’ve always used that phrase whenever I feel shell-shocked. Not entirely sure what that means either. But when you spend a heightened holiday around people with whom you’ve shared a complex and primal relationship for twenty to forty-four years, you sometimes feel like a stunned mullet. I take it to mean someone or something that’s been shot with a stun gun or hit with some other method of blunt force trauma, and who’s just beginning to come to consciousness again.
The simile fits. The fog is lifting. The heart is heavy. And I’m tired.
Here are a few photos of Christmas 2019. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and when you’re channeling a Dickensian state of existence, you know you’re in trouble.
