New Year’s Catharsis

It was the dwelling of lost lives and broken spirits. Well, maybe not lost lives. We were all still alive and spirits can be mended. We lived in a complex of moderately priced apartments. A large number of us had just gone through divorces or had broken off failed relationships. We started playing penny ante poker at night, and we were soon joining each other in other recreational activities. Someone said we had formed a catharsis club, and the name stuck. It was a bit of a misnomer. Although we did encourage each other and there were serious discussions at times, most of our activities fell into the category of diversion rather than therapy. Holidays are particularly difficult for people going through what we were experiencing. Most of us joined relatives for Christmas, but we decided to get together for a New Years Eve party. Betty was the organizer of the group. I helped her make the invitations, but calling ourselves the Catharsis Club suggested a theme to me. I sat at the computer and typed the following letter:
 
"Dear…

In the course of any given year there is invariably one genuinely rotten day, a day in which you have the Midas touch in reverse and everything you touch turns to shit, a day in which objects and events conspire to cast a pall over your very existence, a day so vile that Count Donatien de Sade roars with laughter and envy over its cruelty. It is high time that we gave this day its proper due. It deserves to be a symbol for everything that went wrong during the year. It deserves to be scorned, reviled and destroyed by fire so that it will never rear its ugly head again and the memory of its awful events will fade away.

Enclosed is a gift certificate for this horrendous day. Please write your name and the date of your worst day on the appropriate lines of the certificate, and return the certificate to us before New Years Eve, the sooner the better. On New Years Eve we will give you your bad day. We will expect you to make a few appropriate comments at that time. So be prepared to direct your best and funniest insults at your bad day when that day is presented to you. Please note that although this exercise offers something in the way of catharsis, its real intent is to poke some fun at the adversities we have faced.

You do not have to tell us why your day was so bad if the reasons are too personal, but we do expect you to give it your most heartfelt insults. It deserves no less.
 
Your bad day is uniquely yours. It may have been a good day for the rest of us, but we will still share the revulsion you feel for what it did to you.

Just in case you are unable to be here on New Years Eve, we should like to say to hell with your bad day. May the New Year bring you happiness and prosperity, and may you never suffer another day as terrible as the worst one you suffered this year."

Betty loved the idea, and we both signed the letter. She scanned a picture of the screamer into her computer. The idea was to give each person a single page printout that consisted of that picture and a calendar of the appropriate month. The calendar was modified so that the name of the recipient and the date of his or her worst day were at the top where the name of the month was normally placed. In the body of the calendar we drew a circle around the bad day. We left plenty of room to write comments below the calendar. We then arranged those pages in the alphabetical order of our participants’ names. Ron made a huge bulletin board where the pages could be posted. We placed ink pens near the board. Everyone receiving the invitation and letter chipped in for a keg of beer and some Champagne.

The apartment building had a detached recreation or meeting room where the party was held. Betty waited until everyone arrived. She then stood on a chair.

“Ladies and gentlemen:

We are about to hand out your bad days. Please step forward when I call your name. Accept your day and then tell us about it. Since Steve is the one who came up with the idea I think we should make him go first. Here’s your day, darling.”

She handed me the paper. This took me by surprise, but I was prepared. I had printed out my comments in advance. I pulled the paper out of my shirt pocked and unfolded it. Everyone laughed.

“I know,” I said, “but I’ll become more spontaneous after I’ve imbibed a bit more. My bad day is the thirtieth of June. It’s the day I was laid off. I’ve found another job, but it pays a lot less. So the thirtieth of June is not just a symbol for everything that went wrong this year; rather it’s the beginning of everything that went wrong. It blew in like a demon’s wet fart, befouling the air and making each breath an unpleasant necessity of life. It’s the broken bed-spring of my nights and the empty toilet paper roll of my mornings. It’s a day so ugly that its disgusting face looks like something someone threw it at its head in anger. If it were a person the committee for civic improvements would gleefully banish it to a rival city, and the committee would be accused of committing crimes against humanity for doing this. So utterly devoid of all decency or any socially redeeming value is this day that any insult or abuse directed at it is totally justified. Indeed, the only the thing keeping me from pissing on it is my fear that it would not dry in time for me to burn it at midnight.

Please join me in booing and hissing my June thirty! I might add that a blast of flatulence would not be inappropriate. No takers, eh.” I reached down and picked up the glass of beer sitting on the table, and I took a large swig. “Well, the elixir of choice ought to cure that in short order.”

Tim let out a loud belch.

“Not as poignant as a statement emanating from the other end, but I applaud the vigor of your effort.”

The next person to receive his bad day was Mike. He was quite a bit younger than the rest of us. He told us he was at a party where people were discussing absurd fads of the past. Someone brought up the nineteen twenties’ fad of swallowing live gold fish.

“I told them it’s not that difficult if the fish are small,” Mike said. “Someone asked if I would care to demonstrate that, and I was just drunk enough to accept the challenge. But that was not my bad day. My bad day was the next day, the twentieth of April. That’s when I woke up with a hangover and Salmonella. God was I sick! The twentieth of April is a snaggle toothed cock sucker! May it roast forever in the flaming shit of hell!”

This was greeted with a mixture of booing and laughing.

“I guess I should’ve added that we need to hold each other harmless for any and all profanity,” I said.

“Agreed,” Betty said, “but I didn’t expect people to start using it so early.”

The next person to receive her bad day was Jan. She was an aspiring writer. She was close to finishing her first novel, and she decided she needed to retreat to a quiet place to complete it. Her uncle offered her the use of his vacation cabin in the mountains.

“It went well,” she said. “I completed the rough draft right on schedule. But the frigging storm they were predicting arrived early. I woke up to find the ground covered with snow, and it was still coming down. I walked outside and saw the high berm the plows had piled up in front of the driveway. I was looking for a shovel when I noticed something else. My car had a flat tire. So how do you jack a car up in the snow? Easy, you call to have someone come over and do it for you. Ah, but what if they want me to knock down the berm first so they can get to my car? I was contemplating that as I walked back into the cabin to take a pee. I must have put my keys in one of the pockets of my trousers, and they must have fallen out of the pocket when I dropped my trousers. I say this because when I went to flush the toilet I saw my keys sitting in the bowl filled with my pee. That did it. I decided right then that I was not going anywhere.

A few hours later I changed my mind. I thumbed through the phone book until I found the number of someone to come and plow me out. I considered this the first step in getting someone else to come out, change the flat tire, and put on my chains for me. I was just dialing the number when the phone went dead and all the lights went out. Somebody must have taken out a pole. That’s when I learned that forced air heaters do not work without electricity. I started a fire in the fireplace. I continuously fed it logs during the day, but I fell asleep that night. I woke up freezing my ass off! It was really a shitty day!”

One of the members of the audience offered the observation that it seemed more like a pissy day to him.

“Be that as it may, I would appreciate it if you’d join me in telling my fifth of February to get stuffed!”

Some of the crowd obliged her by yelling, “Get stuffed!”

The festivities continued in that manner until everyone received their days. We had a CD player, and people danced to the music. At midnight we placed wood chips in the barbecue outside and lit the chips on fire. Each parson then uttered a parting insult and threw his or her bad day into the fire. Adding the fire ritual was a wise thing to do. The comments people wrote on their bad days became increasingly obscene as the evening progressed. I do not think the written comments were nearly as funny as we thought they were in our alcoholic haze. The fire probably saved a lot of embarrassment by destroying the evidence.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, a toast,” I said. “Let’s put the past into the past. May the worst day of this year be better than the best day of last year. Happy New Year!”

First published in macsbackporch.foxtail-farms.com on Dec. 26, 2009