The year is winding down. Goodbye to all that. Raise a glass to yesterday. Raise another to tomorrow. We have persevered. We have survived. We have struggled and grown and stared at the stars when all we were meant to be doing is taking out the trash, and we have contemplated the vast firmament of existence while holding in a dam burst pee. The future has whispered in our ear, yet again, upon this dead week between Christmas (now past) and New Year’s (coming up).
And what does it say? What wisdoms do the all-powerful coming years offer us mere mortals? Put your ear to the wind, my friend. Listen closely to the howling night. Out past your car. Out beyond your garage and out past your neighbor’s garage too. Over the fences that keep others out but keep the idiot dogs shitting on your own property (American Dream!), then over the houses and over the trees down the street in the parks and swirling up into the darkness with the gusto of all of nature inhaling the hit off a bowl in which you are there: the tiny speck of inn hearth light: waving up from the burning ashes: the deep faded coil of ancient fire that brings the noise: the expansive, unimaginable early winter sky peering cross-eyed down at your ridiculous teeny self as you stand in the fire pit, your little arm moving back and forth as all of space and time pauses to watch you for a moment.
You lose your breath. You feel inspired. You sense that everything you have ever known will culminate in honesty and beauty in the words about to be spoken at you/ to you/ for you/ forever.
The night releases the hit, lets out a mass of shapeshifting smoke as its eyes go slitty/ clam-like/ an entire universe/ your home of homes/ stoned out of its ever-loving mind.
It leans in then. So you lean up. Your foreheads nearly touch. It clears its throat, a scratchy oatmealish sound, like the pushing and dragging of wire brushes through the pipe. Your eyebrows raise in anticipation/ as if to say: I’m ready! Wisdom awaits! Good fortune is possible for all! Oh, night sky! Oh, titillated master of all to come! You tense up, your body down there in the bowl, its heaving and dimming with the pulsations of an un-hit cherry/ like a small Belgian pastry chef lying on his back upon a chunk of the Titanic/ breathing deeply/ staring/ alone/ at the boundless stars/ the sea below him/ the sea around him/ surrounding him/ calling his name with every sizzling shooting star.
So what does it say, god almighty?!
What does the future tell you, for heaven’s sake, man?!
Okay, okay. I will reveal it.
Ahem, the universe begins.
You pause. You ponder. You lick the cool of the abyss.
Yessssss? you say at last.
Inside the house someone is hollering. Something about an iPad charger. Voices collide and the dogs begin barking at the chaos of their lives.
Another year just like the rest.
That’s what the universe blurts before it sucks back into itself and leaves you standing there alone, piss roiling up over your bladder, a sharp rain of daggers beginning to pierce your fish-like skin.
It’s the year’s end once again, and once more, I don’t know what to tell you. No clue. Basically, the way I see it is this. Our skins are a fabric serving to cover our bones. And our bones are a cage that wraps around a small bird. And that bird, in the ribs, is a force like a soul. But maybe something else. Maybe a ghost even when we are alive. Maybe a cherry heaving and fading. It doesn’t matter anyway.
Why?
Because even that, as simple and comforting or majestic as that may sound, it’s all just bullshit. Not in a bad way, mind you. I’m not here telling you this stuff because I know things, or even because I like to pretend I do. If you haven’t figured that one thing out by now, I feel sorry for you. Because if there’s anything to be taken away by reading the things I write, week in and week out, I would hope it is this.
I don’t know anything. And I don’t pretend to know anything. And, as a matter of fact, I don’t mind this later-in-life epiphany I’m having where I am beginning to realize, a little more each year, that I actually enjoy being tossed and turned on the seas of knowledge without hardly ever getting even a drop of that stuff on me!
There is, I would submit to you, a perfectly delightful comeuppance in self-realization. Especially when that which you begin to comprehend is directly in correlation to the long suffering times of punching-yourself-in-the-face that have been the dominant theme of your life up until now.
Oh, and I know that no one else really knows how very uncoiled your mind has gotten over time. Trust me, if anyone gets it, it’s me. The coming days and the passing nights have always been tricky for our species, you see. To be human is more than to admit to fallibility or whatever sort of nonsense we like to sing-song to ourselves and our social media cohorts (strangers, all) at the turn of the year.
Blah, blah, blah, goes the rawest of poems.
I see the greater good now because the numbers are changing so.
It’s preposterous, honestly. To dare our fellow man to trust that you are intrinsically good and open and law-abiding and helpful to your fellow neighbor, it makes me spit out my wine upon this screen! What mockery you have made of the Bible this year! What words you have strewn upon the altars of others attempting to strew their words upon yours, and all to what point, I ask?!
TO WHAT POINT, I ASK??!!
The summer has left us. The autumn has retired. The first days of winter have slid off of the narrow road and down under the country bridge, down into the dark shadows beneath the world to where the sluggish cold trout lie like ogres and the ice drips from the metal rails into long knives and swords, to gut us all, but as yet undiscovered.
Passing cars hiss salt and filth down onto the slush at the rocks by the bank.
Every eagle flying over sees what neither you nor I ever stop to see.
We have obtained our licenses, LONG AGO, for shouting our beliefs and our hopes and our needs into the frozen forest, but at what cost?
How have we never recognized that the echoes of our every day life have been slicing the heads off of quiet sleeping squirrels and chipmunks for centuries now? We have played, it would seem, a long game with nature. And with fate itself.
Now we are crying into an empty wood.
Like a flock of mad men scattered by a blast.
Oh my lord.
Oh, my sweet stars of heaven.
That stuff up there, don’t pay attention to it. I mean, I guess if it speaks to you or whatever then have at it, but like I said earlier: I’m talking to you almost exclusively in jive.
Why?
Fair question.
I guess it’s because I think there might be something in it for me. Surprise surprise, right? Me, me, me. But there you go. At this time of year, when everyone is spewing our their solemn bullshit to the world (or rather, to the very itsy-bitsy cross-section of people mentally tethered to the rails of some godforsaken internet platform) I am not pretending that I can do any better. Because I can’t. I’m dying to speak in tones of Earthy winter. I’m cracking at the bit to write some things that appear to resonate with you down along a deeper hum/ somewhere down past the places where you usually hang out: places like your funny bone and your bombed-out concentration and your weird sex visions that are both flagrant and breath-taking, I must say. Down into your rolling guts I’d go, if I had my druthers, dragging my chain of language with me to hang it all up in your more secure barbed wire/ your more diligent thought processing plant that is going to waste, like an abandoned mountain factory.
For me, sometimes I just want (NEED) to simply write without consequence. Without fear or trepidation. I want to write animalistically, with all caution thrown to the wolves and all wolves thrown at your door. I long to better myself by un-guarding myself. By dislodging my very shape and form from within my cage of bones so that the little bird inside there not only flies off into the evening sky, but it disappears in a way that seems to convince us, both you and I, that it never existed in the first place.
I want to be truly wild last year and next year because this year never happened. To live in the present, to mine from the past, to ignore the future except for good tidings of hope, it bores me.
It shatters my skull with all the cinderblocks that come out of your mouth at the end of every single year.
_____
Grateful. Thankful. Loving. Family.
Weight loss. Smoking. Sober. Home.
Children. Grandpa. Dog. Dog. Kitten.
Ireland. Mexico. College. Phone.
_____
Blood clot. Baby. New truck. Pie.
Champagne. Football game. Equality. War.
Albums. Movies. Air fryer. Pray.
Kanye. YouTube. Kindergarten door.
To read the rest of this essay and more from Serge Bielanko, subscribe to his Substack feed HERE.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
