NOFOMO

being homebound for NYE? no big deal in THIS house.

We watched our steady flow of customers slow to a thin trickle as the clock wound down to midnight, and at around 11:30 or so Bruce slipped off to the back to go grab a bottle of bourbon he’d stashed in a backpack in the employee bathroom. The store manager was gone and our district manager wouldn’t be making an appearance, so we figured…what the hell?

We started drinking not long after, even though the store didn’t close until midnight and we’d all be in deep shit if we got caught. But we didn’t care. We mixed the Maker’s Mark—or it might have been Knob Creek, maybe—with Dr. Pepper swiped from the back of the store’s soda coolers and partially emptied in the bathroom sink.

Mixing the booze with the soda gave us just enough plausible deniability when it came to drinking on the clock. That’s what we tried to tell ourselves, anyway. At least up until the point where we’d drank so much that you could really tell that we’d started the party a little early. I called Erin and told her to come up to hang out so that we could share a kiss as the clock struck twelve.

She asked if I’d been drinking, and I lied.

When she got to the store about ten minutes later, she just rolled her eyes. “Jesus Christ,” she said, “I can smell you guys.”

She still kissed me, though.

That was maybe the last New Year’s party I went to, I think, and I was paid to be there. But money aside, getting mildly intoxicated in a video store after hours doesn’t rank up there on the list of great days. It wasn’t the most depressing NYE ever, either, but it’s pretty damn close.

For example, one year in college I went home for the winter break with designs on getting back together with my lone high school ex-girlfriend, and all signs pointed toward that happening until sometime just before midnight, when she spirited away upstairs out of a mixture of apprehension and some weird feelings about Jesus.

We went to church the next morning and sat next to one another. It was fine.

The following year I was in the middle of a prolonged breakup, which was drawing out in one awkward death rattle. My mom wouldn’t let me go back to Cincinnati to visit my girlfriend, who I’d bailed on just a week and a half earlier because I got tired of sleeping on cat hair covered couch cushions in her sister’s living room. We fought on the phone a lot that week, which was hard because she was on a prepaid Virgin Mobile phone. Every text message and five minute phone chat where I begged for forgiveness added to the list of microaggressions I was guilty of; another check mark on the list of reasons to cut me loose.

Instead of making a last minute road trip, I ended up spending that night with some friends riding around Vincennes, eating Mr. Gatti’s pizza, and just having a good time.

In hindsight, it was the better decision.

But really I haven’t been to an end-of-year celebration in over a decade, and honestly it’s not that big of a deal? Nine times out of ten I end up playing video games on my couch until just before midnight, when I’ll flip the TV input over to cable and get reminded that Dick Clark’s been dead for a long time. Then I’ll go back to video games or—more accurately, since becoming a parent—I’ll just turn the TV off and go to bed.

Erin and I aren’t big party people anyway. We’re content to pass the time with books or movies or TV shows. And that was even before we became parents. Despite living in a decent-sized American city that hosts several NYE gatherings, we’ve never actually gotten dressed up to go out. What’s the point, anyway? It’s cold and dreary and expensive. I can get drunk in my basement for less than the cost of an Uber downtown.

I have more friends in Kansas City than ever, and ostensibly could very well host a game night or some other subdued activity, but I haven’t done that yet. And I sure as hell won’t do it this year, not with COVID-19. The temptation is there to try and get some friends together to play D&D over Zoom or have an internet-facilitated game night, but that just feels like too much effort to muster while on vacation. 

It really doesn’t matter, anyway. If anything I’ll end up in bed by 11:30 because my son doesn’t go to daycare on Thursdays and he’ll have me ragged by 9:00pm.

I am permanently tired.

With the pandemic in full swing (and probably getting worse), I’ll be spending a quiet evening at home with my wife, sleeping kid, and dog. We’ll watch Schitt’s Creek or Law & Order or maybe even finally catch up on The Mandalorian. I’ll be doing my best to get one final recharge in before starting work in earnest next week, kicking some ass and taking names for the biggest client projects I’ve ever worked on.

See? In keeping with my last letter, I’m tooting my own horn more.

Stuff I Enjoyed This Week

Essays/Blogs

I’ll 100% admit that I started following Heather Sundell a few years ago because she was featured in Me In My Place, that weird photography website where women posed for photographs in their own homes (and in various states of undress). But she’s a fucking phenomenal writer, and this week she talked about the struggles of navigating parenthood during the pandemic.

I think a lot about how weird it is going to be re-introducing my own son to so many of the things I took for granted prior to this year, including eating in restaurants and visiting shopping malls. While he still goes to daycare three days a week and sees his grandparents on Thursdays and Fridays, his world is still comparatively small, until it’s not. In this essay, Heather talks about that feeling of engaging with all the tiny details that blow her son’s mind and reevaluating her relationship with them.

Books

Because I was a weird kid, I had my parents rent Nobody’s Fool—the Paul Newman movie—for me when it came out on VHS in 1995, although I think it may have been because I just wanted to see Melanie Griffith’s bare breasts?

Anyway, I don’t remember anything about the movie, but I have seen Richard Russo’s novel (which the film is based on) on a handful of recommended book lists, so I decided to give it a whirl. I’m a handful of pages in and I haven’t stopped reading it yet.

Music

A few nights ago I had to spend some time on client work that was urgent, and the best way for me to get a lot of writing done is to zone out with a solid playlist. Spotify gets a lot of well-deserved flak for its payments to artists and the way it’s turned music curation from a personalized behavior into something that’s guided by algorithms, but the Lo-Fi Beats playlist they created is really good. I’ve been using it for over a year now when I need to be head down without lyrical distractions. And because there’s over 16 hours of music, you won’t have to worry about tracks repeating through your work day.

Other Things

My gaming group is looking to reconvene sometime in the middle of January, and I’m thrilled as hell to run them through the campaign provided with the Alien RPG quickstart, Chariot of the Gods. My physical copy of the kit arrived last week, and even though we exclusively play online, I really like the idea of having the physical materials here in front of me so I’m not taking up valuable screen space with PDFs. Like most gaming materials made by Fria Ligan, I’m finding it’s some quality, well-produced stuff. It doesn’t feel cheap. Which is good, because it wasn’t.

Because I’m a hoarder of this kind of stuff now, I’m also reading through the rulebook for Kult: Divinity Lost, which is a super fucked up Swedish RPG that’s geared toward body and religious horror, among other aspects. It’s one of the most beautiful sourcebooks I’ve ever picked up. As much as I like the portability of digital files, it’s really nice to be able to thumb through high-quality books, and this one is no exception.

Final Thought(s)

I’ve been trying to decide what kinds of stuff to regularly write about in this space, and whether or not it’d serve me creatively to throw fiction up based on prompts, to use it as a workshop of sorts for non-fiction pieces, or…stuff like what I’ve done the past few times I’ve clicked the publish button. I’ve also been kicking around the idea of working through some stories about my life in retail—thank you, Anthony Bourdain—but I’m not sure how many people would be entertained by reading about the worst that customer service has to offer. Then again, the Tales from Retail subreddit has over 600,000 members.

Anyway, if that’s something you’re interested in reading and you haven’t already, consider subscribing with the button below.