2012

It's a new year. It's another day. What makes the transition from 2011 to 2012 any different than the transition from Tuesday to Wednesday? What are resolutions but failed attempts to console one's self by swearing the future brings adjustment? Why not repair the flaws in July or April or the 3rd friday of October? A new year brings little more than an increase in alcohol sales and wastebaskets full of worthless calendars surrounded by the wrappings of their newly arrived replacements. Paper. Torn scraps of paper that count us past 364 to the one day where change becomes effortless and self-repair takes no struggle. This year's going to be different. No more cigarettes, learn to tango, re-plant that failed garden you started last August. It frightens me, the blindness to self-empowerment that the modern man possesses. Change occurs when ready; not when some squares of paper and self-pitying avowals command it to. The resolution is imperative; the concept is flawed.

We read Dickinson and Poe on the floor of my bedroom and talked effortlessly until the sun arose. We filled in the death dates of poets still living and helped the drunkards find their way home. We must have walked for miles, through endless paths of nothingness and neighborhood. Through streets where the houses had no driveways and the homes looked like movie sets. What vast, soulless dwellings they were. We welcomed the New Year each hour while the world caught up with Tennessee. It was a New Year in the mountains then; the mighty Pacific still awaited its celebration. Time passed and the coast caught up and the clouds blew by. Birds awoke and papers were delivered. The museums all were closed so we sat in my bed and talked about obscurities; hitting men with cats covered in glue and other methods of idiosyncratic assault came to mind. How does one react to that? Probably loudly, I'd assume. She left and the day went by. Blake and I moved things awhile as a disappointing season came to an end. Paint covers the wooden floor but the playoffs prove more intriguing every second. The years change and the hours pass. Nothing changes. Still the hours pass and nothing changes. Hours turn to days, days turn to months and months to years that turn again and nothing changes. I still haven't slept this year. See, nothing changes? Nevermore, never sure, never exactly correct. Time moves on and still, nothing changes...

  ...One day you're just barely coughin'...

       ....the next day you're laid in a coffin...

                     ...I know that that's a dark way...

                              ...to tell you that we can't wait...

                                     ...there's no time to waste anymore...