January is long. January is cold. January is also something of a let-down. The best holiday is the first day of the month; after that, depending on where you live, you’ve either got a cold gray slog or a lukewarm gray slog to trudge through. There are good days tucked into January’s nooks and jagged crannies, but you’ll have to really reach for them. The time in between is filled with peril; invest in a SAD lamp and breathe deep.
January 7 & 8
How can the new year’s first weekend be the worst days of January? Because the only thing more depressing than the week you go back to work is the weekend you put the holiday decorations away. However: you can bypass this despair by simply leaving them up until Spring Break. (If you live in a place with an HOA and your HOA forbids this, now is the perfect time to move.)
January 3 – 6
The year’s first work week. Whatever energy or clarity of purpose you gathered from the dawn of a new year is dashed like dust off a flying reindeer’s ass.
January 18 – 19
Gray #3. Cinereality. Scrooge makes more and more sense.
January 23 – 29
The end of the month is a clammy haze of drab skies, dead grass as beige as an outdated kitchen and as brittle as an addict’s constitution, and the most garish pink-and-purple Valentine’s Day displays your preferred grocery store can conjure up. There is nothing as painful to the eyes and the soul, stumbling indoors from the warmth of a parking lot, as an overcolored cuddly presentation. If January breaks you, this is when you will be broken.
January 20
The third Friday of the month. Friday is no longer the start of something; it is merely another horizonless curdle. It is blank like trauma, not blank like canvas. It is the eleventh item on this list. Fuck the third Friday of the month.
January 21 – 22
The third weekend of the month. Weekends are extra sleep when all sleep is troubled by memories of the waking world. Then: ashen light; troubled sleep; ashen light. When you find yourself reading The Road, lean in.
January 14 – 16
MLK Weekend AKA Gray #2. Your diet is corn chips. Your clothes will not change but they will emerge with more sauce and sodium stains than they had before. If you are lucky, you will spend Sunday afternoon in a fugue state convincing yourself that the spatter of grease across your shirt’s tummy looks like Maryland, and that the impossible significance of this fact is itself impossibly near, like a memory from your youth on the tip of your brain’s tongue. If.
January 30
The madness washes over you, then breaks. You will spend the day giggling without apparent reason. Suddenly and completely, Klaus Kinski films will appeal to you. The way Phil Connors reacted to treating Ned Ryerson the last time they see each other on the street in Groundhog Day is how you will treat everyone with whom you cross paths. If it’s also a warm day, smile. It won’t last.
January 9, 10, 11, and 12
Gray #1. Foggy and clammy; cold without snow. The world takes on a Soviet tinge. The period you spend every morning stumbling into furniture while rubbing sleep from your eyes, that is your whole life now.
January 17
A Tuesday. Another Tuesday to start the work week. Your calendar is a jumble, but your head is a miracle of tranquility. Don’t question it; embrace it. By sunset this tranquility will have been displaced by the return of winter’s sluggish awareness. Life is to lethargy as water is to wet. Be a goldfish.
January 13
Friday before a three-day weekend? Not bad! It’s like New Year’s Day in miniature: 72 hours of beautiful possibility stretch out in front of you; no matter how many chores, errands, or obligations you intend to cross off of your list, there’s also time enough to convince yourself that you have time to do everything. You will spend most of this weekend within a twelve-foot radius of your couch, but you don’t know that yet.
January 31
You are delusional, but that’s OK. Are there Winter Olympics this year? Is it a Leap Year? Will there come a freeze big enough and strong enough to save our poor fractured climate, our poor broken selves? The answer to all of those questions is “No,” but what matters is that tomorrow brings something new. February may be even grayer and almost as cold a month – but it’s something new. If you’ve ever spent all night on I-81 through Virginia and hollered as you crossed over to Maryland at daybreak, you know what this means.
January 2
Second-best this year because it’s an “observed” holiday, which I assume is for the rest of us what a Cheat Day the day after Christmas is to a bodybuilder. We get a legally sanctioned 24-hour chill period, complete with the dregs of holiday leftovers clogging the fridge and pantry. This is the closest most of us will ever get to an ancient Roman vomitorium.
January 1
The best. The laziest. The calmest and/or silliest and/or coziest and/or happiest. It’s the beginning of the year – the very commencement of hope. All is potential; nothing is waste; nothing is wrong. Your every best mistake remains blissfully unmade.
