I want for this day to be over with already. I’ve never equated being alone with being lonely before, probably because as an only child, I’ve always had a knack for entertaining myself with whatever happens to be on hand. But I have to say truly and honestly that there is no other lonelier day to spend a day alone than Christmas day. I did wake up late this afternoon feeling quite excited about a vivid dream I had just had and thought: “wouldn’t it be the best Christmas gift of all if this dream actually prompted me to write a novel??” But then when I switched on the voice memo application on my iPhone and started taking verbal notes, those dream sequences which had seemed so full of story potential just fizzled away into random incoherent sentences.

Eventually, I decided to surf around the net to distract myself from all the unpleasantness going on inside my head. For some unknown reason, I had a Wikipedia page about Chlöe Sevigny up on my web browser. I’ve seen her in the movie Boys Don’t Cry and in the HBO series Big Love, but other than that I can’t say I’m a fan of hers, or that I know anything much about her and her body of work. I’ve never quite understood why she acquired fashion icon status (though I do know she was one of the original icons of all things fuggly back in the early days of the very funny site Go Fug Yourself). Reading on out of sheer boredom and curiosity, I found out that she sparked controversy with her lead role in a 2004 movie called The Brown Bunny, which involved Sevigny performing unsimulated fellatio on co-star, writer, director and producer Vincent Gallo. After the film’s release at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, the William Morris Agency dropped Sevigny as a client, one source stating: “The scene was one step above pornography, and not a very big one. William Morris now feels that her career is tainted and may never recover”. Ever the trouper, Sevigny went on record after the Cannes screening saying “It’s a shame people write so many things when they haven’t seen it. When you see the film, it makes more sense. It’s an art film. It should be playing in museums. It’s like an Andy Warhol movie.” I viewed the scene in question—all in the name of research of course—and I must admit that I couldn’t help but wonder what drug cocktail might have convinced Miss Sevigny that taking part in this project might be a good idea. That being said, I will not join the ranks of Sevigny-bashers based on that performance. Not today. Instead, I wish to thank Chlöe Sevigny for the fact that she still continues to make a living as an actress and a public figure, and to this day defends her performance in a project which would have been best left to die in Vincent Gallo’s mean little egomaniacal head.

Mistakes, we’ve all made a few. On this lonely Christmas day, I can always console myself with that fact that in this, I am far from being alone.