Holiday Season

OK. Thanksgiving's bird is still in my stomach, and here I am thinking: the holidays are upon us again and, shit, nothing's resolved, we're broke, it's Christmas present time and no scratch, the ugly prospect of more credit card debt. On an errant, I see the pewter Porsche convertibles out on the road, the horse and trailer in the stable over at Echo Farm where Sophie's taken a group riding lesson. We are surounded by conspicuous signs of affluence. For a fleet moment, instead of remembering how much I have, I got lost. I can never have that frame of mind. It is sick. How much we have, mostly in ourselves and our great health, taken for granted most of the time, and in real estate. But I wonder, why, when I see something that I like, say a nice blue sloop, about 30 feet in length, or that great car or a dreamt of, never taken trip to the sunny Carribean, I immediately conclude that it is an impossible dream. Relatively mediocre people do the same thing. Apparaently lusting after a material goal, they achieve it. I see this all the time on the television or in the news, and on informercials like "no money down" and so on. Why am I not good enough to earn such rewards? Low or limited self-esteem must be the issue, otherwise, what separates me from my dreams, why is my reality always so desperate? This Holiday season will be the one, the upturn of the wheel of fortune. It only awaits my saying it is so. Why not? What's to lose. I always think of the Thoreau quote about the mass of men leading lives of quet desperation. Even knowing this, I am still unable to subvert its bitter taste, its mean reality.