Unlucky Days

This essay has taken a few forms over the years. The first draft appeared in a blog I maintained for a couple of years back in the 2010s. At one point “The Rambler” had close to a thousand readers, but only occasionally, and never with enough momentum to become anything other than a place to stretch my fingers. The essay was originally called “Drunk in America,” which was an occasional theme I would revisit when playfully chasing literal drunkenness with Rumi-like metaphors for it.

Then in the winter of 2019 I adapted it for a reading I was doing in NYC at the KGB Bar for a Writer’s Circle meetup. Friends were there. It was cold outside, and warm and wonderful and giddy inside the bar where everyone understood how the world was supposed to work and for whom.

Next month I’ll return to the book. The next chapter focuses on why a term like “religion” still makes sense, can be made reasonably precise (even for rigorous intellectual inquiry), and has the advantage of preserving our practical intuitions. For now, I’d like to share this with you.

It’s nominally about “the holidays,” but the holidays as a reminder that our calendars don’t always climb higher and higher. Modernity, the 21st Century, emancipation, suffrage, from one thing to the next: two steps forward, one step back, slip, fall, onward, but always, always keep in mind what’s next, the future is just waiting for us to deserve it.

That’s not the only kind of calendar there is. Calendars are also round. The days come back around. It’s Monday again, turn, Spring again, turn, a New Year again, turn. As secularists we are trained to see one way, and not the other. But there is wisdom to be found in other ways of marking our time here.

The Mesoamericans had a name for the funny five days that fell outside their ritual calendar, which consisted of 18 months of 20 days each, totaling 360 days. They called them Nēmontēmi, unlucky days, empty or useless days. We have those days too. The days between Christmas and New Year are a strange kind of null-time. We lose track of the weekdays, there is no weekend.

It’s no time to start something new. We drift in the doldrums between life’s squalls. It’s the right time to remember that at any moment we might fall off the edge of the world.

—

There isn’t much to say about Christmas that hasn’t been said. Crass commercialism? Check. Feeling marginalized? Happy Holidays! Feeling combative? Join the war against the “war” on Christmas. No God to speak of? Don’t fret, popular science writer Simon Singh suggests that we celebrate the season scientifically by tuning into the static between radio dials—one to two percent of which, in case you didn’t know, is creation’s echo.

It’s a nice sentiment, and I’ve always been a sucker for that, “we are such stuff as supernovas are made on,” idea, but science and reason need some help to help us with the other 98% of the static—that electromagnetic mess we call living.

If you’re feeling uncharitable, you could call the holiday season a wish-fulfilling Freudian bonanza. We wrap our beneficence in foil to subvert the surprise, since most of the surprises we’re bound to receive in life aren’t beneficial. We go crazy with lights like ex-lovers who doth protest a little too much about all the fun we’re having since the sunlight dumped us. We sing “let it snow,” when there’s not a goddamned thing we can do about the snow. Most of what we deal with in life is dealing with the things we can’t do a damned thing about, so we create rituals to give our impotence a marketable face.

Time bequeaths too much to us: a vast history, a complex language, an unforgiving biology, flawed parents, flat feet, funny noses, and overwhelming choices, so by the end of the year we’ve had it. Our processes have oxidized; the stars have shifted; the continents drifted, and at least half the projects on our to-do lists are no closer to finished than when we wrote them down in January. So we slurp some eggnog, swap some trinkets, drink too much, call it quits and start the calendar over, counting again from one.

But we don’t have to be uncharitable. Intellection has limitations. Sometimes a mask is more honest than the face who wears it. We can choose charity, lean into the revelry, spin up the carnival, and drink spirits for clarity rather than stupefaction. In faith I promise to come back here every year, to you. Chisel away at the blanks, together. Pick at the sentiments and update the tragedies, together. Sup on this language, together. Turn this me-shaped space into a we-sized love that someone someday might call a life well-lived.

To begin, let me confess that I believe different spirits mask different selves, reveal different truths. Perhaps it is the character of the fruit’s fermentation, the grain’s zymurgy, the oak barrel’s history. I don’t know. I am doubtful of scientific support for my experience and accept that the variation is based on nothing other than my prejudices, but still, the effect on me is palpable.

Beer, in general, makes me happy. Its influence on my constitution is sufficient that my teenaged son knew the best time to tell me bad news was when I’d had enough beer to drink. It’s also what I tend to drink when I write, but not when I read. Beer is what I drink when I feel like dancing in this wrack of a universe. If I were going to the cross, I’d want a pint.

Whiskey, however, makes me melancholy in a bracing British sort of way. Never maudlin, just, “yes, you’ve been kicked in the teeth. Yes, I’ve found your molar and part of a bicuspid. But your canines are lost. Yes, it’s horrible, but let’s get you to a dentist. Don’t cry. The dead outnumber the living and always will.” When I’ve had enough whiskey, I’m great for game theory and dominating sexual play, but my mentation is more machiavellian than munificent.

Wine, now wine unlocks something else entirely. Under the vine’s sway, I understand the proximity of desire and spirit. When I drink wine, I am hungry for a flesh that transubstantiates the spirit—a reverse communion. After wine and the grace of a ravenous woman, you could pull the wafer from my mouth whole. There’s a reason Dionysus was the god of wine and not beer. The Greeks had both. Sophocles cautioned against too much beer, but not wine. Wine is the claret of tragedy’s sweet hunger. It’s what makes of an orgasm “the little death,” what draws us so near to beasts in the throws of pleasure that our lovers appear angelic, and our bodies become, in that death, matter’s lucent surface staved in God.

We hide so much from ourselves and one another. Spirits reveal some things, but hide others. There are truths we can’t hold onto for very long, as individuals or as peoples. For most of my life I didn’t believe in fate, but I don’t know what I believe anymore. Don’t know whether I believe there’s a pattern, or if life’s apparent orchestrations are just a confabulation of the humdrum-drumming that beats no rhythm at all.

What I do know is that I am regularly astonished by grace. Stupefied by it, actually. Perhaps its origin is autographic. My secular education has trained me to see it so, but I often see it another. The holidays always bring me back around to some aboriginal memory. A reminder that calendars were the tribe’s first mask, the mask that made civilization possible, concealed chaos and revealed the invisible order of time’s gyre. What but the grace of a billion strangers organized about festivals, rituals, and feast days has made this moment possible?

There was a time when shaman sent men and woman out into the wilderness on vision quests to pursue the truth in seven directions (North, South, East, West, Up, Down, and Center), but now the best we can do is a binary: left and right, progressive and populist, black and white. How spiritually poor we’ve become. Our vision blinkered by these secular winds. Yes, the nights are brighter but the days are darker. For me and those like me there is no shelter in a church or mosque, temple or synagogue. You must find grace your own way, not because Jesus or the Buddha walked some way, not because Rabbi Akiva said such and such, or Mohammed visited some sacred spot, but because you walked your way and thought the path worthy because you walked it.

I know that even a moment’s sober survey of the world reveals a monstrous, insouciant, boorish, infinite range of terrible ascents surmounting our grandest aspirations. The stars are too far. Peace too long. Violence too bright. Comity too dull. Stereotypes too easy. Misfortune just up ahead, waiting on the floor of your guest bedroom in a heap of limbs called “Dad.” I feel you. I am as wary as the next man. Somewhere up ahead there’s a day with my name on it.

It’s probably true that my dad’s death has quickened my thinking in this way. Talking to your father about life after his lungs have stopped working and he can’t manage enough wind to whisper can be clarifying. It brings all your haughty little opinions about life and meaning to an ugly point.

Of course, when I found my dad on the floor last winter just after midnight, February 2nd, 2025, in our guest bedroom, dropped like a rag doll face down and barely breathing I didn’t, yet, know he’d broken his neck. I didn’t know so I helped him onto his back. That may have been a mistake. I don’t know. He wasn’t moving. I didn’t notice that, but he wasn’t. The doctors said it probably didn’t matter. But I’ll never know for sure. It took them two days to figure out he was paralyzed. They thought it was a stroke that caused the cardiac arrest. But it wasn’t. It was that broken neck.

911 was fast. But not fast enough. Within minutes my dad wasn’t breathing. I had to start CPR. I don’t know for how long. Probably ten minutes—maybe less. I heard him die while I was working his chest and forcing the air back into him like a failing balloon. That death rattle you’ve heard about, it’s real. You can make it yourself if you’re curious. Make a “k” sound, but further back, not your palette, where your tongue attaches to your throat, back there. There’s a little bit of moisture there that colors the “k” sound, gives it some character, some life, a little gurgle. You can hear the breath leaving if you try it, slipping out. Only yours will come back. My dad’s didn’t.

I loved my dad. I respected my dad. I admired my dad. He grew up in the back woods of Arkansas without indoor plumbing to a son-of-a-bitch child molesting polygamist. But my dad never raised a hand to me in any way. My dad dropped out of high school. Joined the army. Earned his GED. Got an AA degree. Stayed married for 50 years, built and sold a business, and liked to golf. There aren’t a lot of good stories about dads these days, or at least it feels that way. But my dad was really good at being a dad, so I want to kick that out into the cultural ether and let it ripple.

It took him five months to die. Ventilators eventually kill you. They’re designed to save you of course, but give them enough time to work and you’re done for. Along the way there were a lot of plans, and positive thinking, a lot of hope followed by downgraded expectations. We were realists. Willing to deal with the universe as it is, and accept whatever mercy it would give. But in the end the universe just had better things to do than dispatch mercy for my dad. Sadly, the universe often has better things to do.

Not long before my wife and I were married we stayed in this little cabin in Idyllwild, CA. There’s not much to do in Idyllwild but drink, hike, and fuck, so that’s what we did. And this would be unremarkable except for one detail. The walls of this particular cabin were covered in carvings.

Lovers primarily, but there were families too. Lots of “Joe + Mary” enclosed in a heart, followed by a date. When I say covered, by the way, I mean covered. They were everywhere—dates and strangers as far as the eye could see. There was barely space for us to leave our own mark—but we did, and we have three times now. We took an old dull knife out of the utility drawer and found a way.

No matter how overcrowded the field, no matter how many times we’ve carved our names in the wall, no matter how many times we’ve loved or written, or failed, there’s always room for one more. Though scraped clean, we remain, curling the “Q” of Quincy, mashing Molly’s “M,” squeezing our voices through the rock and the hard place into the day’s brief light. We are all, each and every, love’s palimpsest.

We have our mother’s hair and our father’s eyes, and the nematode’s gastric simplicity in our guts. We may slide through the world’s warm chutes like some transitional species in an evolutionary chart, but we will remain. We will remain. Although remainders, we will remain. Although gone, we will remain. Drink enough wine, and you’ll believe it. Drink enough wine and the world comes back around. As bad as it gets, the dirge swells, curls up on itself, spins tipsy, syncopates the minors and turns to a ditty. Drink enough wine, and you can even bear your dad’s banana peel slip from the world, because different fruits bear different truths.

And the truth is this. Here on the high side of winter, as the sun reverses its long dying and begins to rise sooner, again stay longer, we remember that the ruin of clouds which have been accumulating all year will fizzle and fade. Thinned by the sun, the light will burn them to wind. But the light won’t stop there. It will burn everything. Even time, like water, will evaporate on its forever-wave. And though it’s hard to remember, we must, we must start the year over and recall, once again, that everything is just light under the various sways of gravity, and gravity is just the density of bodies in rapture, and rapture is just the madness of love, and the madness of love is the reason of creation.

—Memento mori, memento vagari