Jeremiah looked down on the people of Judah, and told them their future was bloody and cursed

It seemed unseasonably dark.

In the past, I had viewed Advent as a sort of miniature Lent, as it was my understanding that this was the ancient practice, until people got weary of fasting, and the Enlightenment and Protestants came along. But this year I couldn't deal with any additional dietary restrictions.

 

I had given up enough. I had decided to stop using a social-networking website for Advent, but, after a week, the Holy Spirit descended upon me like a dove (or, to be more specific, a pigeon flew into my head while I was walking to work), which moved me to go back online (in fact, I was just dying to tell lots of people that a pigeon had flown into my head, since a "that's nice" from Asaph was not sufficiently satisfying).

I wasn't sure how the Episcopal Church treated Advent before we started emulating Rome -- which we were doing less and less, instead looking back to Sarum and over to Constantinople (ἡ Νέα, δευτέρα Ῥώμη) -- but ever since I'd been a registered Episcopalian, we heard every year that Advent was a time of waiting and watching. I'd never really been sure how that was to be put into practice, other than spending a lot of time in the subway on nights and weekends, but I liked the apocalyptic readings and the countercultural admonition to slow down and not get worked up into the late-capitalist consumerist frenzy. A priest who used to work at my church lamented on the social-networking site that it was "never easy getting the house ready for Christmas when you live with the Advent police", as his non-priest partner had forbidden any mention of Christmas before Christmas Eve. Most Episcopal churches made a smug point to emphasize that they would not be celebrating Christmas until December 24, at the absolute earliest.

Unless of course you were even smugger and counter-countercultural, like Richard Fabian, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa (Ἅγιος Γρηγόριος Νύσσης) Church in San Francisco. I had had mixed feelings about my one visit to that church, in 1998, since it seemed to be the epitome (ἐπιτομή) of everything that annoyed me about San Francisco, although I liked the words "ALL THAT IS PRAYS TO YOU" written above one of the doors, from a poem by Gregory of Nazianzus (Γρηγόριος Ναζιανζηνός):

For you exceed all intelligence. You stand alone, inexpressible. All that is said, comes from you... All that is, prays to you. Towards you, all beings, reflecting on your Universe, lift up a hymn of silence.

Gregory of Nazianzus was Gregory of Nyssa's friend, and also a big opponent of Emperor Julian, the Apostate, of whom I was quite fond, in spite of or because of his anti-Christian views, thanks to Gore Vidal.

Anyway, Richard Fabian wrote: 

Christmas and Epiphany, originally two dates for the same feast, later acquired distinctive readings from the nativity cycle, rather accidentally following a season of eschatological readings labelled "Advent," the name for the Roman imperial judgment review. Rationalizing this arrangement is difficult—and superfluous now, because the medieval western four-week-Advent-twelve-day-Christmas has vanished in all but name.  Popular custom and scholarly reform now extend both seasons months earlier into the year. Unlike Easter, Christmas has become a folk festival, which popular culture celebrates during the weeks before, not after, December 25th. Christian evangelistic priorities press official worship to follow suit, and the actual history of our Church year gives no grounds to resist such a popular choice. 

But I wasn't inclined to agree with this, because, predictably, I didn't really care for the popular "folk festival" version of Christmas and its corporate enablers. I was a terrible gift giver under pressure (I had still not found a present for my mother's 70th birthday, which was the previous February), and I hated going to crowded stores. I didn't like most American Christmas decorations, although, in New York, in deference to taste and wealth and Jews, they weren't as bad as they could have been.

And, ever since I'd been at my current job (20 years?), December was the absolute busiest time for me at work, owing to Parkinson's Law and the end of the fiscal year. So I didn't have much time in December for the frantic purchasing of deadweight loss to the economy, let alone so-called holiday parties.

This all worked out fine when I lived with Centfocs. He liked being countercultural, and the tradition in his small Catalan village was to give gifts on January 6 anyway, in commemoration of the Epiphany (Θεοφάνια) or the Feast of the Three Kings (Nit de Reis). And as our friend Vince had held a large Twelfth Night party every year, it was relatively easy to move most of the holiday to the traditional medieval Christmas season.

Now that I lived with an Israeli Orthodox Jew, this was no longer possible. Even though we observed the anti-Seleucid (Σελεύκεια) Hasmonean (חשמונאים‎) propaganda holiday, and one of the most meditative practices I engaged in all Advent was cleaning the wax from the hanukiah (חנוכייה) with boiling water, Asaph loved Christmas. His only knowledge of Christmas came from the mainstream "folk festival", so any discussion of Advent, or the fact that the Twelve Days of Christmas began and did not end on December 25, was of zero interest to him. So we had to have lots of presents by December 25, a wreath on the door, and a Christmas tree (although I bought blue lights and restyled it as an Advent tree, telling him that the blue was for Israel and not from the Sarum Rite).

"I know we always have to do the weird thing, because of you, but, can't we just be normal for once?" he pleaded.

I was slightly concerned, since I had bought a magazine in the hopes of reading an article about the international mutual aid movement for alcoholics, but that issue had not come out yet, and the one I had purchased instead had an article about detecting psychosis, and I read that one of the questions used to determine if someone was schizophrenic was: "Do you think others ever say that your interests are unusual or that you are eccentric?"

(Later in the article I read something reassuring: I gave the correct answer to the question "What do an apple and a banana have in common?" Both are fruit. Evidently the incorrect, schizophrenic answer was: "Both have skin.")

But Asaph didn't appreciate my eccentricities. Not that I saw myself as a misunderstood genius; I knew I was no genius. I thought of the sardonic commentator Fran Lebowitz, who I once saw in the subway and who had been in the news a lot. I read that she said that AIDS had killed the first three levels of artists, and that culture was now made by "the fourth, fifth level".

I think of a cultural generation of being, like, ten years. And there are three generations below that but they didn't grow up seeing almost anything good. If you were maybe a stray genius — which I know everyone thinks they are, especially people your age, but they're not, there have never been that many, they're not going to start now — the cultural environment is so debased, it has an echoing effect for many generations. I don't know if the world ever will recover, frankly. I really don't.

I wished I could meet her, although I was sure she probably wouldn't like me too much.

We went to Washington for Thanksgiving, as my brother and his wife and children would be there, visiting his wife's sister.

We stayed on a beautiful ginkgo-lined street.

I thought of a section of a Julie Hecht story about a Christmas party that her vegan, teetotaling narrator drops in on:

“He needs more ginkgo!” the red-faced man shouted.

I must say, I was impressed that such a man was acquainted with ginkgo the brain-and-memory stimulant. On the other hand, health properties of ginkgo and garlic have been trickling down to the pharmacy level for quite some time. That's the real “trickle-down effect".

“More ginkgo for everyone,” someone said.

“And less drinko,” I said. I meant it. Alcohol affects the brain as well as the liver.

On Thanksgiving morning we took that shit back to Virginia for a five-mile run. We were picked up by some of Asaph's business-school colleagues, one of whom had an extremely Japanese wife who barely said a word in the five hours we were together. As we drove to Alexandria (Ἀλεξάνδρεια), I thought about how several persons had written gobble gobble in emails to me. If I couldn't even say take it easy to people (what, exactly, are we taking easy? I always wondered), there was no way I could ever say gobble gobble. Nor could I say or write 'tis the season. I thought back to the test for schizophrenia.

The run was comparatively easy, although there was a lot of pressure to go quickly. Still, it was fun. Asaph was proud of a young colleague of his.

I finished in 1320th place, and my gender (sic) rank was 815 and my age rank was 172. Asaph came in 1352th place, and his gender (sic) rank was 829 and his age rank was 219. I had no idea how to interpret that data.

We had Thanksgiving dinner in my sister-in-law's sister's tiny apartment, where my brother and his family were staying. Asaph seemed a bit shocked by the squalor, but he didn't mind that my nephews were running around screaming the entire time.

I went to various museums with them the next day, while Asaph studied. At the National Air and Space Museum I noticed that one of Charles Lindbergh's dinners seemed relatively paleolithic.

I wondered if that was why everyone was so skinny back in the olden days. I had watched the three-hour Italian film Il Gattopardo, starring the non-Italian Burt Lancaster, who was 50 at the time, and even though I enjoyed the film for other reasons, I couldn't stop thinking about how thin everyone was, especially Alain Delon.

It made me feel a bit sad to see current photos of Alain Delon, but, that's life, I thought.

I met up with Asaph to study, futilely, myself. An attractive man saw me studying Ancient Greek and stopped to talk to me. Asaph rolled his eyes.

The next day Asaph and I took my nephews to the National Zoo. They ran from exhibit to exhibit in a crazed fashion. For all of their constant talk about the expulsion of intestinal gas, I was amazed that they didn't notice that one of the gorillas we observed was eating its own feces.

We took them on the metropolitan underground railway to meet their parents for dinner at a restaurant owned by the North Dakota Farmers’ Union.

We decided it was too cold to walk from the Foggy Bottom station (the name of which, surprisingly, triggered only minimal snickers from my nephews) to the restaurant, so we ended up ducking into the George Washington University hospital cafeteria to wait for my brother.

Once we got word that my brother's van was nearby, we went outside. The kids started to run around, so I grabbed Zack's hand as we went to cross the street. He started to pull on me harder and harder, fighting to break free so that he could run to his mother. Since I knew that they lived in the country and had no understanding of traffic and no instincts regarding the dangers of automobiles, I held on tight. This made him enraged, and he reacted by struggling even more. But I couldn't let go, since I knew that at that point he would bolt. I didn't want to be responsible for his death! (Also, I didn't want him to die.) He started screaming and crying, and eventually I had to pick him up, as he writhed and hit me with his little fists. I carried him over to the van.

"Let him go!" screamed my brother.

Good grief, I thought.

That night we went out to a large dance club with our masculine/muscular/military friend. We had to wait in many lines, which was humiliating for a man my age. Our friend was nothing like me: fun and happy and rough and rowdy. He brought a very young date who drank alcohol steadily until he finally whispered to me, in reference to a shirtless guy who was talking to our masc/musc/mil friend, "I'm going to punch that dude in the face."

I spent Advent 1 at the National Cathedral.

The sermon was a tad too evangelical, but I liked the service.

There were smug reminders that it was Advent, and that tourists shouldn't expect any Christmas anything.

I wandered around a bit afterwards.

It's a wonderful place, I thought.

Asaph and I met for brunch. On the way back to where we were staying, we passed a mansion where I had almost lived, back in 1996. It would have been an extreme culture shock -- it was a multi-room house that had been inhabited by all sorts of different young non-heterosexuals. It would have strained things between my college boyfriend and me, although they were strained by then anyway.

I went for a run before catching our train back to New York.

I was supposed to go away to the monastery on the Hudson River for Advent 2, but I got a terrible cold and was unable to make it. I was comforted by the fact that I could keep my eye on Asaph for the weekend, even though I spent much of it in bed. Asaph didn't believe that I was sick at first -- my quotidian wolf crying had had the prophesied effect. He finally did believe me, and then he got sick himself, and much worse than I had been. I tried to take care of him, although I projected my hypochondria onto him and got very anxious about his symptoms.

I slept on the floor of the living room, since he was coughing quite a lot and couldn't handle the running of the fan for white noise that I needed for sleep. This made my back and shoulder hurt, although I thought it seemed kind of paleolithic, so that maybe I would eventually get used to it and that maybe it would even have some beneficial effect. (My cousin went to Korea to visit some pen-pals a few years ago, and she insisted that the entire family slept on the floor with no blankets or pillows.) I had to go alone for sessions with our trainer. He accused me of being a "sweat addict". He made me flip a 240 pound/110 kilogram sandbag back and forth around the gym, nearly killing me, while fancy non-heterosexuals looked on in judgement.

My Canadian friend and correspondent had placed a link to my account of the obstacle course competition on a community weblog. This had dramatic results.

It was interesting to be openly judged and critiqued by others. Some people seemed to read things that I didn't know that I had written, such as that my account had "'I am homosexual' frosting all over it". Others, or maybe the same person, thought that I was bigoted against non-heterosexuals, and that my writing  "smack[ed] of some deeply ingrained internalized homophobia and ageism which the author hasn't managed to really grasp within his own psyche". I couldn't really argue with that. Nor could I argue with someone who said that I had many "precious affectations". 

Guiltyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy! I thought.

A woman who described herself as a "fat, adrenaline junky chick" -- the kind of person with whom I have almost zero familiarity -- thought that I "sexualize[d] every fucking person in the story, fucking who knows why". The most concise critique was: "His whinging is tiresome." I took it all under advisement, to use an expression I never used before.

A different Canadian -- a woman with whom I had gone to college, whom I had not seen in 15 years -- came to New York to visit, and we went to dinner and to a rock musical about Andrew Jackson. The musical was full of anachronistic slang and youthful bravado, and the star -- despite not being able to really hit three critical notes -- was extremely charismatic and sexy. I loved the show, although it aroused some of the nostalgic longing for youth and masculinity that had been triggered by the obstacle course competition.

My friend seemed not to have aged a bit, so it was a bit surreal to talk with her about her two kids and her life in the years that had passed. We both concurred that the human lifespan isn't really very long.

Advent 3 arrived.

I had not been spending the month in quiet, watchful anticipation.

I tried to pause when I could.

I often had to work on both weekend days.

At least I have a job, I thought.

We managed to squeeze in a few so-called holiday parties, including the parties sponsored by my employer and Asaph's employer. They were both relatively lavish and almost ostentatious affairs. At my office party, Asaph made many indiscreet jokes at my expense in front of senior management. We brought a change of clothes and then went to the dregs of the party at the Eagle bar, where we saw many people we liked a lot. We saw most of them again the next night at another party, where I drank three Coca-Colas and ate five broccoli florets. I noticed that I tried to hide some of my eccentricities from some of these guys, and I thought of the character of Lucía from Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios, who faked recovery from madness to get out of mental hospital.

My friend who is like a gentle giant revealed that sometimes he did an imitation of me for others. He showed me the imagined expression on my face were I to win the lottery.

"The taxes will be so high," he said, in a mopey voice. Everyone laughed. I was flattered to be worthy of imitation, but, although I would probably be full of dread upon winning the lottery for a variety of reasons, I wouldn't complain about the taxes.

Luckily my popular and anti-Zionist friend Darius was at both parties, and we were able to talk about Romance-language etymologies shamelessly. Darius could speak Italian, French, Spanish, Catalan, Armenian, and English fluently, however. I only dabbled; he was the real thing. Yet, somehow, he didn't come across as a nerd or weirdo.

Probably because he doesn't keep an online diary where he writes things like "Advent 4", I thought.

The next day, for Advent 4, we had the Ugandan Bishop Christopher Senyonjo as the preacher. The Bishop had been very active in the fight against laws against homosexuality in his native country, and he was touring the United States preaching and seeking support. I thought about how the American anti-theist Left believes that all anti-homosexual sentiment in Africa comes from white American Evangelical influence -- I even read someone who blamed anti-homosexual sentiment in the Muslim world on American missionaries, somehow. But I was happy to provide white American Anglo-Catholic support to this brave Ugandan man fighting on the other side. It seemed funny that the Ugandan conservatives were blaming Americans for spreading homosexuality in Uganda while American leftists were blaming Americans for spreading anti-homosexuality. Can't we give the Ugandans some credit? I thought.

As part of our drift towards Constantinople (Κωνσταντινούπολις), a new icon was dedicated.

The type was appropriate for Advent 4. The bishop's sermon had been about the Gospel reading, which included, in reference to Joseph: he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son.

I thought about marital relations and then remembered some of the gifts that Asaph had asked for for Christmas.

We went to a dinner party at Darius's house later that night, where we saw most of the same people we had seen the two nights before. There was a very attractive and young and French man at the party. He was a physical therapist.

"Oh, so you must like touching people," Asaph said to him. The young French man did not respond.

I ran into someone I used to work with. He had just completed an elite business school program and was now working for a global investment banking and securities firm on the "trading floor", a thing I pretended I knew the definition of. His work days sounded very arduous, and I imagined that the environment for a non-heterosexual must have been difficult, although I wondered if I was putting an 'I am homosexual' frosting all over everything again.

"You have to be very tough," he said. Much tougher than to run an obstacle course competition, I thought.

I remembered that he had studied Ancient Greek in college, so we talked about that. I told him that I had taken a course but failed to retain anything. I made sure to show him to Asaph, as an example of a normal, smart, successful person working in an extremely practical and high-paying job who saw the value in studying Ancient Greek.

"It's really great exercise for your mind," he said. Asaph wasn't convinced and went back to interrogating the young Frenchman in a lecherous manner.

My former colleague had been able to read not only the works of Plato (Πλάτων), but the much harder works attributed to the quasi-mythical Homer (Ὅμηρος). I felt a lot of admiration for this young man, despite his career in finance.

We said goodbye to our friends and went to catch a taxi home. I felt happy. Earlier that week, a medical professional had said to me, "you know, you have it pretty good", and I knew that I needed to be more appreciative.

In the cab, I thought of a scene from a poorly reviewed and subsequently non-renewed cable television show that I had enjoyed watching, in which an intelligence agent translates a speech given in Urdu at the wedding of some persons in Pakistan with terrorist connections.

Happiness, to love and be loved, these are the pursuits of life.  They cannot be achieved in solitude, and that is by design.  Life was not meant to be lived alone.

I got a bit choked up and thought about how the Ancient Greeks wouldn't have approved of this sort of sentimentality.

Comments

[Stan]

My father, the cradle Episcopalian, insisted on a tree with only blue lights. It was put up on Christmas Eve after I had been put to bed. That first memorable Christmas, I was brought down in the morning darkness to see a tree shimmering with silver tinsel and blue lights. Absolutely the best image to fix in a young eye and mind. Merry Christmas.

[Hugh Elliott]

although i don't know you, i have to say i felt rather defensive and proprietary towards you against your armchair critics (as i've been following your writing delightfully for years now). your (for lack of a better word) eccentricities are what make you fascinating and an engaging writer who i wish i'd met when i lived in NYC. please, change nothing.

and have a wonderful holiday season and new year. you deserve it.

[Blindman]

If I had your talent and sensibility, I could write something that might give you encouragement and affirm your unique perspective. Sadly, I can only echo Hugh Elliot's (what a fine name!) expression: your loyal readers are indeed proprietary. Ef 'em if they can't take a joke.

[Édouard]

Joyeux Noël à vous et à Asaph de tous vos admirateurs francophones !

[homer]

I am quasi-mystical.

[Jzy]

Did you pledge at the mausoleum-like frat house?

[R J Keefe]

The taxes WOULD be dreadful!

[Jack]

I am glad that you are finally realizing that you really do have it pretty good.

[Bourgeois Nerd]

"I felt happy." What, what, what, WHAT?!?! Happy?! Eric Sheeperson? It truly was a Christmas miracle!

Seriously, though, about those people and their comments: whatEVER! They don't know you like we do. It can take a while to catch on that you're poking as much fun at yourself as anything. Even now, sometimes your dryness goes over my head.

"Precious affectations" sounds absolutely adorable, BTW.

[Queerconstruction.wordpress.com]

Your Canadian connection printed this entry in B&W for me because I'm so fussy about reading anything off a screen.
The food photos now make sense.

Wonderful piece - a joy to read.