Well, here it is, Xmas eve 2011 and me all alone in the apartment, pecking away at the ol’ keyboard and feeling kinda lonesome and forlorn.

My original plan was to maybe go to the liquor store next door and pick myself up a bottle of something festive (probably some of that yummy Captain Morgan’s Spiced Rum, and some apple juice to put it in) in order to smooth the evening over. But I lack the motivation and the funds to do so, plus by now the liquor store is surely closed (even the booze fairies have families to go home to) and while I joke about needing to start drinking if I want to be a real writer, the truth is that turning to alcoholic beverages for companionship when you are feeling lonely is probably a very bad habit to get into, especially at my age and with all my health problems.

Fat and drunk is a stupid way to go through mid-life.

As is, though, I am not doing well. I feel cold and lonesome and tired and sleepy and isolated and forgotten and neglected and excluded and pushed out and unwanted and unloved and unlovely and unworthy.

So, par for the course for my Christmas Eves ever since moving away from home, really.

It sucks to have nowhere to go and nobody to be with for Christmas Eve. Tomorrow evening, I will be dining with my roomie Joe’s family, and that will be very nice. It’s good of them to take me in every year, and I anticipate a lovely meal and a relaxed evening.

But there are a lot of cold and lonely hours between now and then, and so here I sit with nothing but the Internet and my words to comfort me.

And other things have gone wrong for me lately. Lost $100 of sweet, sweet AdSense money (my first payout ever) to my own stupidity. Feeling all out of sorts because I am in one of my sleepy tired deep dreaming phases. Been too tired to eat properly, which is a bad combo.

And to top it all off, I have some sort of nasty infection under the fingernail of a finger on my left hand, which makes even typing these very words very painful. I am not exactly a touch typist, because I never took a course or learned all that “home keys” jive or anything, but I am much better than your average hunt and peck tentative typist, and I use every finger but my pinkies when I type. So it would be pretty hard to not used this particular finger when typing.

It’s the one next to my left thumb. Index? Ring? Pointer? Whatever.

I probably gave myself the infection, too. I trimmed my nails recently, and for whatever reason, I have a tendency to over-trim my nails and end up nicking the cuticle, and with my diabetes weakened immune system, that leads to this minor but highly painful and annoying infections.

Nothing like pain from one’s own carelessness to make a person feel lovely.

And to top it off last night, I learned some very depressing things. At Xmas dinner at Denny’s for my little group of friends, no less. Always a wonderful time to get bad news.

Turns out, the money I have been paying Joe has not been actually covering the rent, bills, and groceries. He has been paying the extra himself, and what’s more, resenting me because he somehow convinced himself that I knew about it all along and I was just willingly taking advantage of him and his good nature and fear of conflict and unwillingness to upset the applecart.

But I had absolutely no idea. I paid him $300 a month, which is what he asked of me, and assumed that covered things. It absolutely horrifies me to think that I have not been paying my own way (via government money, but still) for a long time now, and Joe has been resenting me for it, and I owe him a whack of money (which he has graciously waived as an xmas gift), and I had absolutely no idea.

I do not have much to keep my fragile ego afloat. But one of the few things I thought I had was that I was paying my own way and not living off others any more. Now, it turns out, I don’t have that, either.

And the knockout blow is that in order to get right with Joe and really pay my way from now on, I am going to have to start paying $380 a month, an increase of eighty bucks.

Bad enough for you employable types, but I live on less than $8000 a year, around $675 a month, and so a loss of eighty bucks of disposable income is a very big deal in my life. I have been just barely hanging on to the edge of the cliff for a while now, and life just came along to stomp on my fingers.

No wonder my finger hurts.

But I’m not suicidal. I have not been suicidal for a long time, thanks to the drugs, I suppose. I get attacks of that crazy panicky desire to try to escape from life itself now and then (existential claustrophobia?) but they pass pretty quickly and I am learning that those often come when my energy is blocked and what they are trying to tell me is that I need to do more things, not do myself harm, let alone do myself in.

Still, it’s nights like this when the barrier between me and the darkness seems the thinnest, and I find myself staring across the frozen abyss within me and wondering what lies on the other side of it, if I but had the courage and the stamina to cross.

I am in no hurry to learn, though. I will find out some day, and that is enough.

Just wish it wasn’t so damn cold on this side of it, that’s all.