Flowers and Prayers

I give 2012 the award for giving the most psychological and spiritual beatings I've ever witnessed. It's been brutal. I have seen loss in life, marriage (Danny Devito and Rhea Perlman?! WTF!!! Is nothing sacred?) and friendships.

The number pulled on me this year (It was rough for many others that I know, too) has deeply wounded me, bled me, tossed salt on me then walked away chuckling.

When the tail spin stopped, I hobbled towards what kept me from stealing a car and crashing it as many times into as many things before I stole another one and repeated the process-God-spirituality-spiritual cleansing. Oprah's Super Sundays was designed especially for me. I clung to comfort where ever I could. My vision has become painfully sharp. My awareness, already acute, has pin point accuracy. I understand the thin veil between life and after life. I've also taken in copious amounts of Ghost Adventures, Celebrity Ghost Stories and anything else that would give me a stroke if any of those stories actually ever happened to me.

When December rolled around, I let out a giant exhale. As though the miraculous line between December 31st and January 1st will be the magic bullet that will solve it all. Even if that's not the case, I need to believe that it is. In the state that I'm in, if anyone so much as tells me that the Easter Bunny isn't real, I'm going to beam them in the head with a two by four. I need to believe in all that is good and happy more than ever. I need rainbows like never before. I'm willing myself to feel love. I'm ready to exchange fear for joy; to believe that humanity will prevail and rise up out of this darkness.

Then I woke up on Friday, December 14, 2012 to discover that a hopeless maniac murdered the curators of our future and large ripples of our future-a principal, psychologist, teachers and little children. It's no surprise that after being hit at this magnitude, we've all run for cover and clung to each other shivering from the sudden awareness of how cold this world can really be. Just two nights before, the Hurricane Sandy relief benefit concert had occurred. Everyone seemed to be on the same page. From here on out, we were going to get better and hold our hand out to our neighbor-unite and rebuild. No man or woman left behind.

Now the question of why he did it swirls among us all as we struggle to make sense of it. But guess what? The harsh reality is that he did it because he wanted to. Even worse, he's not a monster. He's human. Experts say he was mentally ill. I say, "no shit." Really geniuses? These people get paid to make these theories. If a sane person suddenly commits an unspeakable act, for the time that this act was done and forever afterwards, they are now criminally insane. End of story.

Instead of spending all this time on what was a poor excuse for a human being, let's figure out how we can help the families; how we can do something to help fix the things that we can change for the better. As I write this, I am aware of the sudden wave of shooters since that day. Last night, fire fighters were gunned down by another loony. It's like the bag of nuts has been opened and all these deviants have spilled out everywhere.

In the meantime, the NRA gets silly, and I only wish I can just tell them to shut the f*^k up and do something useful like pick up all the blood splattered shell casings that lay scattered everywhere, and while they're at it, they can throw on some hazmat suits and do some crime scene cleaning once the bodies have been bagged and the evidence has been taken. Our nation is currently being held hostage by this morbid trend. The lyrics to the Pink Floyd song Brain Damage is our new anthem, especially this part, "the paper holds their folded faces to the floor and every day the paper boy brings more."

Now I wake up Christmas morning and dully wonder where my holiday spirit is? A little bit of it collapsed when my grandmother passed. Some more of it was drown in Hurricane Sandy. Then more of it got shot up by dip shit who was born in the 90s who had mommy issues.

Do I still have holiday spirit? Of course I do, but right now I'm tired. I need to recoup, reassess, release and rejuvenate. I've decided that once I am ready, I'm going to dance, sing and laugh more-every day if possible. What else can I do?

Come next Christmas, I hope to be the initiate of a Conga line. I want to wake up with glitter in my underwear and an empty, extra large bottle of bubbles on my night stand. My cats will be wearing wigs and the doorbell will play Groove Is In the Heart by Dee Lite in it's entirety. Am I saying that I naively expect nothing horrible to happen? No. I'm just hoping that the Grim Reaper has reached his quota for a while (let the good ones live for a while, dude), Mother Nature will take anger management courses and the dick heads who are inclined to shoot up a mall, movie theater, school etc will inexplicably drop dead. That also goes for rapists and pedophiles. Let there be a disease that strikes those despicable characters dead two hours before they act out on a vile, nauseating fantasy. Die Psychos Die, but before anyone innocent gets hurt and after they've donated themselves to science.

Let's get up, dust ourselves off and pay respects to those who left us. Flowers and prayers need to be given to the living because we need it to heal our breaks and bruises. We need it to lift our spirits. We need it now... 2013-please be gentle.