Kristinehamn Brain Frog

Ribbit

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Average Read Time: 7 minutes

It’s Christmas morning and I find myself waking up in a dark closet they qualify as a hotel room near Central Station in Stockholm, but hey, it was only 5,749 Chase Ultimate Reward Points. The light of my phone screen in the stark darkness illuminated my face as my partner asked me what time it is. It’s 8:30 AM.

In Sweden, they celebrate Christmas on the 24th, but that’s when we were flying from LA to London to Stockholm, so when we awoke on the 25th, stores were open! We walked to the nearby cafe chain, Bröd & Salt, for some jet lag coffee. The streets were wet, cold, but no white Christmas and for some reason I wasn’t in LA eating a breakfast burrito in some delightful Fahrenheit weather (damn you Celsius!). Oh, that’s right. My wife is Swedish.

In the coffee shop I notice two gentlemen in the back corner preparing some white powder on their table and I tell my wife: “I think those guys are doing cocaine.” Then they rolled up some paper and made a cocaine nose straw (which I swore was a Beck lyric, but he says “cocaine nose job”) and sniffed up a few lines. It was a white Christmas after all!

We finished our coffees and walked back to our closet to get our stuff ready for the near three hour train ride to my wife’s hometown, Kristinehamn. There’s an English translation for the name of the town, but get fucked! I’m not translating shit! Unless you think that’s too aggressive—my mom does—in which case, don’t get fucked and please keep reading (and if you don’t, get fucked!). Not everything needs an English translation. Besides, it’s pretty obvious it translates to Kristine’s Ham. It’s a small town somewhere in between Stockholm and Oslo known for a large sculpture of Picasso’s wife by Europe’s largest lake—Värnen—if you don’t count Russia (they don’t).

When we arrived at the train station we were greeted by my mother-in-law. Moments later, my wife’s life-long best friend and her two brothers popped out and surprised us with a song. Which song? I can’t remember, but I bet it was a Christmas song and one of them was playing the recorder! After the song was over we exchanged hugs and pleasantries which led me to telling them about the two men we saw doing cocaine in Stockholm at Bröd & Salt. They were shocked. Then I hit them with my white Christmas joke for a quick hit of dopamine.

This will be my second time spending Christmas and New Years in Kristinehamn and my fifth time overall, which is hard for me to comprehend, but comprehension is overrated I guess (what?). When we come to Sweden, we generally come for two weeks or so. Made possible by the corporations and pandemics that brought us remote work.

Our trips are usually filled with walks in the woods, dinners with family/friends, board games, second hand shops, longing for the sweet spray of our bidet, and finding me things to eat. Sigh…I am a burden. I was looking forward to this trip to Kristinehamn because we were renting a sauna by lake Värnen, so we could participate in the Finnish (Swedish?) tradition of sweating in the sauna and jumping in the cold lake.

These days, and by these days I mean my late 30s (I think 36 counts as late—Jesus Christ!), I find myself looking to anything that might heal me, or make me feel better. Including: Yerba mate, therapy, Taco Bell, psychiatry, Mountain Dew Baja Blast, getting sunlight in the morning, quitting meat, using an app (Yuka) to scan food items at grocery stores to root out the poison products (all the food is poison), quitting soda, texting my sister for updates on her dog, Dottie, disc golf, reneging on quitting soda, and more! Suffice it to say, I was really looking forward to getting in the sauna and jumping in the lake. It did not disappoint. If you think it’s scary, think again!

You get so hot in the sauna you look forward to a plunge into lake Värnen and then you scamper back into the sauna to do it all over again. The first few times at the sauna we could jump right in, but the next few times we had to open up the hatch on the dock, break the ice, and climb down the ladder into the lake. I loved it. It was so refreshing. Leaving LA for the cold and dark Swedish winter got a lot better and even has me considering Swedish Christmas as an annual tradition for our family of two. It’s only fair we spend Christmas in Sweden. After all, she did move to the Capitalist Hell-Scape States of America (a new name I think we should consider) for me.

One of the games we play with her family is a card game in the Rummy family called Shanghai Rummy. One of my favorite of their family traditions is to make sure you show everyone when you get dealt or draw a joker (a wild card). It’s that kind of behavior that makes me feel comfortable with my wife’s family, even though we don’t get to see them so often. The first time we played this game this visit I didn’t feel as sharp as I usually do. I felt foggy. A feeling I’d been feeling a lot in 2024. The next morning I told my wife: “I think I might have brain frog.” We both laughed at my verbal faux pas and laughed again when she made the same mistake when bringing it up later. The four or five other times we played, I mostly dominated (partly because jokers kept finding their way into my hand), so maybe it wasn’t brain frog. Mayhaps, in this case, it was jet lag.

Even though I think New Years resolutions are hokey and dumb, it’s hard for me not to look back at the year and think about what I could improve on in the next year. 2024 was supposed to be a good year for me and even if I try to look at the overly positive bright side of things and look at everything I accomplished, I’d still say my year sucked. God dammit.

In November of 2023, with the support of my partner, I quit my project management job and kissed my 70k-90k hourly/commission paying job goodbye so that I could focus on writing full time, which is why I moved to LA in the first place. It was something we always talked about me doing, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t overanalyze my decision.

One of those over-analyzations was: What would [insert person here] think about me quitting my job? My wife had the right answer: "Who cares what anyone else thinks?” But man…is that a hard hill for me to climb. (This is my anxiety speaking now.) I can sense what people feel even when they don’t say it to me directly and it’s hard to process, especially when they’re the people I feel closest to.

I feel that pressure a lot when I visit Kristinehamn. No one asks me why I don’t have a job. They all know I’m a writer, but even still I can’t help but think that they would prefer I have a job. Add in one cup of recurring major depressive disorder, eight tablespoons (that’s 1/2 a cup) of anxiety, a crumbling democracy (Maybe it’s always been crumbling? Maybe it’s not even a democracy?), chronic back/calf pain, and you have yourself one quarter of a book that you thought would be a full four quarters by now (or five quarters getting edited down to four). But excuses are like buttholes, we all have one, and mine is just not quite right without my bidet.

I don’t regret my decision to quit my society job to work on writing full time. It still feels like the right move. I’m blessed—I don’t like that word, “blessed,” feels too Christian…starting over: I’m fortunate to have a partner who supports my decision and has afforded me this opportunity to chase my dreams in my 30s. And also supports me through my near constant bouts of depression, anxiety, and now brain frog. All of which I am working on, so that I can be a better me in the new year. A better me, with a finished book.