Season's Gratings

Somewhere between Paso Robles and Salinas, at around sunrise a couple miles south of King City - if the sun had in any way been visible through the sheeting rain and the pregnant bellied lead gray clouds dragging themselves along the mountains to the west - the car hydroplaned across the flooded highway.

It took just a fraction of a second, barely enough time to register something was happening. That instant of terrifying but seductive glissade as traction disappeared, a slewing weightlessness and a near infinite chasm of possible outcomes. Then before I had time to really even think much beyond “Oh, man…” the tires did their job, the reassuring mass of the vehicle pushed itself down against the pavement, and with the slightest of shivers we continued north into the downpour. An 80’s mix was playing on the radio, and Morrisey was right at that moment singing “I am the son, and the heir, of a shyness that is criminal and vulgar.”

If the stars align and I get this written in time and Cam massages it to life on the site and you read it sometime on Thursday, December 21st, 2023, the Solstice, the shortest day of the year, then this would have happened yesterday. Now it’s today, four days until Christmas, and this is the time of year when we are all wrapped up (pun intended) in the spirit of the season.

I have always struggled with this seasonal holiday. Blame it on being born within a couple days of the alleged birth of Jesus, maybe. Having your birthday undermined every year like clockwork because everyone is suffering some sort of holiday battle fatigue by the time Christmas rolls around can have a deadening effect on how much overall excitement one can muster after a few years of conditioning. Kinda makes birthdays suck, but it also has the knock-on effect of making the unfortunately timed Capricorn resent Christmas as well, since the holiday effectively cockblocks any potential birthday celebration. Sprinkle some Seasonal Affective Disorder into the mix, and things can get a little bleak.

That’s all said without even throwing an elbow at the elephant in the room and acknowledging the orgy of compulsive consumerism that this festive time of year ushers in. “Orgy” may not be an appropriate word, come to think of it. An orgy might last a night. Leaning fully into the spirit of Saturnalia, even the most hardcore orgy practitioners would be getting pretty damn haggard after three days, and anyone who could keep the debauchery rolling for seven days would be deserving of some kind of formal award, and maybe new kidneys. But Christmas, and Christmas shopping? We start feeding that bloated monster around Halloween. Two months of caroling, yule logs, egg nog, chestnuts roasting by the open fire, Salvation Army bell ringers, mall zombies, obligatory office parties, familial expectations, consumerist exhortations, and Die Hard movies on endless repeat and even the sturdiest of us can buckle. Those Romans had it easy…

Yesterday, as the car got weightless for a second, I wasn’t thinking about Christmas. I was thinking, instead, about all the things I still wanted to experience in this life. And I was thinking about how easy it is to take for granted this flickering little moment we have on this mortal plane. I was thinking about how the past month has kicked my ass clean across two countries, three time zones, four states and 5000 miles of freeways, and how it would be ironic but somewhat fitting to have my timecard punched right as I was regaining some sense of equilibrium. I was thinking that it would be a total cosmic kneeslapper to die as my new car hydroplaned into a truck full of Brussels sprouts while I was driving with my new bike to go ride except the ride was going to get cancelled because it was bucketing down sudden inches of rain and there was no way anyone would be riding in this shit. And I was thinking that Morrisey should have been singing about “a ten ton truck, smashing into us” instead of that criminal and vulgar shyness. Hell, Morrisey shouldn’t have been singing at all. Pass the mic over to Alanis Morrisette, buddy.

The personally elusive Christmas Spirit did not make an appearance during this tiny sliver of time when Everything Could Have Changed. Again. This was not a movie, after all. So there was not any imperative to find a reason, a moral, a convenient ending, a rug that really ties the room together, a ghost of Christmas present (or Christmas Presents, for that matter), Jimmy Stewart, Macaulay Kulkin, or Bruce Willis. No Jim Carrey, and especially no Will Ferrell or Ed Asner. Nothing heroic happened, nothing tragic happened either. My life didn’t flash before my eyes, but I did have a brief epiphany.

I didn’t stiffen up. That has been the big lesson of the past two months. If the universe is going to roll you, it is best to stay loose. Tightening up only slows the reflexes anyway. Same as when a sniper root tries to knife your front wheel out from under you or an abrupt lip can slap your saddle right up into your ass, a death grip on the bars will almost guarantee a yard sale while a more relaxed hold, a more fluid stance, will likely improve your odds of riding it out. Either my reflexes are really getting slow, or the universe has tenderized me enough that I subconsciously accepted what was happening without panic. I suspect the former, but the romantic in me would love to believe the latter. Whatever the cause, we drove on without incident to Salinas. The streets were flooded. Inches of rain had fallen in a matter of hours. The bike ride got scratched.

I’ve missed a ton of bike rides lately. Part of me wants to thrash around in the frustration of those missed rides and find reasons to get angry; try to force a change and make the rides happen, damn the consequences, to hell with other obligations, and eat a bag of dicks, universe. The clock is ticking. We are going to die, maybe some time way off in the future, maybe right now on a flooded highway with Morrisey in our ears. If not now, when? That’s what the frustrated part of me asks, hands balled into fists, shoulders knotted.

The other parts of me say, yes, the clock is ticking. Yes, we are all going to get turned back into the mulch of timeless, infinite matter. Pay attention, this ride will end. Our time here is so short and tenuous, and holding on too tightly to any one moment of it will only stiffen us up and slow our reflexes. Stay loose, don’t grip the wheel too tight, you might miss the magic fraction of a second when the universe lets you get a glimpse of it.

Merry Christmas? Happy holidays? Ki Yi Yippie Yi Yay, M*****F******! May you find traction in the roots, clean snow on the peaks, shafts of sunlight amid the rainstorms, packed sand in the desert, tailwinds on the dirt roads and the grace to drink it all in like it is the last ride you’ll ever take.