"tiny moments, kept in small containers shaped like letters of the alphabet"

Each entry I wrote during the Holidailies period had a title that had something to do with the topic being written about, in the form of song lyrics.

Here are the songs, in case you were curious:

we all must learn from small misfortune
“The Closing of the Year”
Wendy and Lisa (Toys soundtrack)

the velocity of time turns her voice into sugar water
“Sugar Water”
Cibo Matto

and all we ever were – just zeros and ones
“Zero Zum”
Nine Inch Nails ♥

suki plays with leo, sacha plays with britt
“Games Without Frontiers”
Peter Gabriel

only a steel man came to recover
“The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts”
Sufjan Stevens

the shameful lowlands of the way i’m drifting
“The Sun Always Shines on TV”
A-ha

a cheap renoir, a fake van gogh, a pop monet, a blue degas
“Jack’s Valentine”
Over the Rhine

i love your slinky spoilers, they really speak to me
“Autophilia”
The Bluetones

with half-closed eyes, things looked even better
“Waiting for the Night”
Depeche Mode

there’s nobody on this flat earth would ever want to win it
“Hold Me, My Daddy”
XTC

cold station all of my life, forever i fear
“5:15 The Angels Have Gone”
David Bowie

try whistling this
“Try Whistling This”
Neil Finn

more and more i’m secretly just me
“Goodbye (This Is Not Goodbye)”
Over the Rhine ♥

handed down or made by hand
“Mystery”
Indigo Girls

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So, you’ll see the links back to the entries from this season, along with, as best as I could do, some link to some version of each song – they’re pretty worth clicking through to, in my humble opinion.

(the hearts indicate entries that were considered part of the best of holidailies – so thanks for that, panel!)

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Normally I just write my heart out no matter what, when it’s come to Glitter/Glitterbook – that’s the way it’s always been since I first started writing for the web in 1998. Sometimes I wrote as if the entry were a letter to someone specific, but mostly it was unedited, rambling crap that was a stretching of writing muscles with little artifice or effort – a way to get stuff down before I forgot it all completely.

I’ve sort of lost the thread, lately. Diminished returns on interactions with people online are a huge part of it – it’s so easy now to self-publish, and just as easy to dismiss, diminish, or filter out someone else’s words completely. It’s all part of the big cycle, but I find I get so little back, an itch that goes unscratched. It’s a weird process, not without a sense of loss, of shouting into a void.

Paper journals are still a portal, thankfully.

But it’s still nice to tuck into the warm blanket of routine, when the darkest nights of the year are sub-zero cold and glittering with stars, and attempt to remember what it was like when this sort of thing was food to sustain me, when people said, yeah, I’m listening, and now I want to tell you a story …

It’s still nice, even though these past years have been hard and sometimes ugly and very, very empty of things that I counted on and thought were true.

In other words, I have a lot of work ahead of me. The words want to be written, but when it’s cold and blustery and my stuff is still in moving boxes and I am still crawling out from under the wreckage, it’s daunting to find that safe place where we can all sit around and recount our lives, connect human-to-human.

Each time you’d pull down the driveway
I wasn’t sure when I would see you again
Yours was a twisted, blind-sided highway
No matter which road you took then

Oh you set up your place in my thoughts
Moved in and made my thinking crowded
Now we’re out in the back with the barking dogs
My heart the red sun, your heart the moon clouded

{Refrain}
I could go crazy on a night like tonight
When summer’s beginning to give up her fight
And every thought’s a possibility
And voices are heard, but nothing is seen
Why do you spend this time with me
May be an equal mystery

So what is love then, is it dictated
Or chosen – Handed down or made by hand
Does it sing like the hymns of a thousand years
Or is it just pop emotion – Handed down or made by hand

And if it ever was there, and it left
Does it mean it was never true
And to exist it must elude
Is that why I think these things of you

{Refrain}

Oh, but you like the taste of danger
It shines like sugar on your lips
And you like to stand in the line of fire
Just to show you can shoot straight from your hip
There must be a thousand things you would die for
I can hardly think of two
But not everything is better spoken aloud
Not when I’m talking to you

Oh, the pirate gets the ship and the girl tonight
Breaks a bottle to christen her
Basking in the exploits of her thief
She’s a very good listener

And maybe that’s all that we need is to meet in the middle
Of impossibility
Standing at opposite poles
Equal partners in a mystery – Handed down or made by hand
We’re standing at opposite poles
Equal partners in a mystery

The settling in portion of the move is finally gaining momentum.

Books, my dearest friends, are filling the shelves, tightly-packed together, by genre, by look, by chapter of my life. Many of my books are well-worn, especially the children’s books I still have – the Scholastic Clifford the Big Red Dog books, the Mother Goose tome with the black and white checkered border, the small tidy stack of Cricket magazines. Each small book box I collapse is a victory against the spectre of moving house, which I admit still looms over me like a droning bully of a ghost. Just shut up, moving ghost, your spirit tires me, and makes me itchy at the smell of cardboard. Shut up.

I found the other little plastic bag that had the rest of the pegs to brace the bookshelves, which was also a victory. I have to leave some of the pegs in the shelving units every time I move because they’re wedged in there, too difficult to pry out. So I leave them, but I worry that in the jangle-rumble of a moving truck, they’ll be rattled loose and will roll away, never to be seen again. But no, the little baggy of extra pegs was found, with a few still left over.

The last time I lived here, I had three bookcases. I moved all three to California, but ditched the smallest one almost immediately, as it was pretty broken up and worn after being shunted around to 4 or 5 different places since it was first purchased almost a decade ago. It’s been tough, getting my books to fit in the two that remain, even though I left several paper shopping bags full of books in the trunk of the car I donated when I left Cali.

It might be prudent to start setting free all of those theatre books I keep holding onto. It’s tough, though: they’re a part of my craft as a storyteller, and they were expensive. They’re also several editions old, which means reselling is almost certainly out of the question.

But enough about the books – I am also seeing to the light. I am moving lamps about, and I even hung up this wacky IKEA chandelier I bought some years back but never had a good place to display it until now. Earlier this evening, I was perched on my kitchen counter, using the cordless drill to start a screw hole for a ceiling hook, and so now there’s a lovely soft blue light for that corner of the apartment. Andy had the exact same light in his old flat in Aberdeen, see:

We’re at the end of this year, now, aren’t we, and people keep saying, “Oh, it went so fast! Where did this year go?”, etc., and I just don’t feel that way at all. I have been waiting for this year to spend itself, spool itself out, run its line until taut against the spindle, and then snap.

These months have been so long, so much waiting for relief, so many weeks and days spent worrying over money and family and personal ambition. A shipwreck in bright, brisk salt water, cold waves lapping in an endless foamy gurgle. Armed with a bailing bucket, fingers pruned, I had eyes strained from matching the sun to the hour. Each month was a trial.

January was death, February was smashed pipe dreams, March was oblivion, April was stubborness, May was hope, June and July were fire and smoke, and August was exhaustion.

September, which I can recall so clearly, is all green, fresh rain, cleansing, squeaky skin and the wide expanses of flooring in an empty apartment air-cooled and sunny at just the right times. October was doubt and hope and a tamping down. November was humility. December is impatience.

Oh, you, oh, this December is the grip of small, fumbling fingers, gripping a blue plastic cylinder wrapped  hundreds of times around with dirty off-white string. There are weals on the skin where the string has burned, and that damnable kite is still swirling and whirling above. It’s a clever, smarmy thing, made sharp and cold by the currents. When that string snaps, when those fingers can loosen their grasp, all that was made here to dive and swoop will be free.

All of this will then (finally) begin to be The Past.

One of the things I love doing lately is taking my time. If I were a superstitious sort of romantic, I would think that the very molecules of the South had invaded my psyche and pulled time in a slow, thready, sugary-grainy taffy, forcing my limbs to wade through molasses-years’ worth of contemplatory seconds and minutes.

But I’m not the superstitious sort, so I’ll just chalk this one up to, sure, being in the South. Period.

You see, this is the place I was never really meant to be. Yet here I am. I am here in spite of expectations, and in spite of various desires. Hell, after my wacky Californian adventures, I decided to be here twice.

And so I savor that – I take my errands around town seriously: I go to the bank, I go to the store, I make little lists, I don’t overburden myself with the notion that there’s too much to do and no time to do it in. Things can wait, because things will make themselves known as important. It’s a luxury, and I am luxuriating.

There’s a lot of people, family members, a few others, who haven’t quite made the leap with me, for whatever reason. I have pushed people away, I have definitely drawn lines in the sand. Part self-respect, part survival, part simple frustration. Tiny flecks of self-doubt and regret sometimes flavor things, but I’ve become more comfortable with the idea that we’re living in many worlds.

The me that you’d love me to be … she exists. She’s just not here with you now.

It’s hard to hold this steady, this sure grip on a life chosen for reasons that make sense to me, instead of giving the lion’s share to what Other People Think. Being closeted most of my younger life had a lot to do with it, as did having a creative background with a drive to do art and performance at the expense of a great many other things. It was a challenge, shaking this feeling that I was passionate about the wrong things.

End of the year noodling has me throwing skeins of memory nets back over previous chapters in my life: where I stayed near my childhood, where I stayed in that relationship, where I stuck with that horrible desk job, all compromises, all passive hope woven in that things would break, and I would be free to rise, to swim to the surface, to break into the air, gasping, lungs clear, sky blue.

And that was one of the things about Dad, you know. We didn’t get along. We probably had a million things in common, and many of them still might occur to me down the road, but our relationship was not very productive, was not really a path we were journeying together. Before I came out to him as queer, every mass e-mail to his ‘mailing list’ about the ‘gay agenda’ broke my heart, every single one. I would hear from other people about how I was a disappointment to him, and how he was worried that my liberal arts college was going to brainwash me into becoming, I don’t know, a pinko commie? Never you mind that I went to a state university with a population at that time of over 25 thousand students!

Those were the things I carried with me as I went to work and eked out a living and did all the things I loved in the evenings and on weekends. My passions were my hobbies, and I was supposed to be happy with that.

Every day when I walk into work I am walking right into an environment where I have things to do that are challenging and sometimes quite tedious, and certainly hard work when it calls for it. But it’s also fun, and it also makes sense to me, and even though I’m not really getting to tell stories right now, or getting to create massive amounts of content, I am in the middle of a splendid chaos, and I am surrounded by good people.

And that was one of the things about my Dad, you know. He’d had these mini strokes, and suddenly I was flying to California every week to work, and he wanted to take me out to dinner, to celebrate. His voice had gone a place I didn’t expect to hear for another twenty years – wobbly, soft enunciation, old. But he looked just fine, a bit greyer, and he was tidily dressed, still driving his car. We went across the street from the 42 office to Gordon Biersch, and I regaled him and his girlfriend with tales about the job, about what it was like to travel to different cities and create puzzle pieces out of buildings and signs. What it was like to make a fictional city come alive for thousands and millions of people.

Occasionally, he’d … yawn, or something, a strange open-mouthed stretch of a tic – I can only assume it was a side effect of the stroke, these strange, sudden out of context facial expressions. But then it would be gone, and there’d be Dad, smiling at me with a light in his eyes that I never really got to see turned towards me before. I mean, there I was, funky colors dyed into my hair, heavier than he’d ever seen me, so obviously not any sort of model for conservative values, but … he looked proud of me. I was simultaneously ecstatic and heartbroken. Finally, I was a daughter he wanted to know, a daughter he appreciated. And yet it had taken such an inroads on his health to meet with me on the path, to smile in wonder at what were truly accomplishments in my life.

The question knocks around my head like plastic blocks tumbling in a clothes dryer, ugly and meaningless when spoken: why should this come now, when it’s so, so late? Why would it take this for him to see that I have worth?

He had a lot on his plate at that time – a host of frustrations with this terrible neurological decay that is so rare they still don’t have numbers for it, the complete cessation of activity in his life, the drawing inwards of all his expression as his muscles stopped behaving, as his speech became reduced to half-formed vowel sounds with hints of consonance. I accepted that celebratory dinner as a hint of what might have been in another life. My pride and my defensiveness were resolutely stacked in a back room while I spent what precious little time I had away from the office driving over an hour each way in a busted car to see him for a few hours here and there. It was never enough, as it happens, but that’s not really even a story for another day. It’s memory trapped in the murky vile fog of when things got so much worse, so much more personal.

Through the worst of it I held onto those moments at dinner, of Dad honestly smiling at me, in spite of himself, in spite of our crazy political differences, in spite of all logic, I had this guy rooting for me, understanding that I was really doing something I loved, and well.

The first thing he did when he saw me that night was to hand me a bottle of champagne in congratulations, and then to awkwardly kiss me on the cheek.

The bottle’s sitting in my fridge. Part of me wants to have a quiet toast sometime soon, to the rare moments when the path sincerely taken can trump every other path chosen for you, and it’s obvious to everyone. Dad and I were different and conflicted in very important ways, and I will never gloss over that, but at least I got a taste of what so many other daughters get to feel.

I carry that along with the heartbreak and frustration. All a part of this life, this too short life.

Oh, I’m just blue today.

I am grateful for a great many things, but at the end of the day, I sometimes feel like my hands are empty. I have nothing to show for myself. It’s ridiculous of course; it’s just a mood, and it will pass eventually. All things must pass.

I still play that little game, though, of finding small, normally inconsequential things, and holding them to the light. If I magnify all the many mundane things, they begin to sparkle in the light of my attention, and it’s not quite so gloomy in my head.

So, today, I realized as I was driving home that when I take that left turn from the middle turn lane into my apartment complex, the car’s not squeaking like crazy. Back when I first lived here in NC, I had this Grand Prix that was already a decade old, and had not exactly weathered being towed behind my Penske truck when my friend Dave and I drove down from Chicago.

It was an alright car, with its share of problems: no air conditioning to speak of, and an incredibly messed up driver’s side window. (And then, after the vents stopped working once I got the car to L.A.? Oh, it was murder in the summer). But somehow, towing it all four wheels up on a dolly, chained in place, taking our time, it still pulled the whole frame just enough out of wack that the car began squeaking. It also occasionally thunked and made a grindy noise as well, but I am still in denial about that, so let us draw a veil over it.

But now I have this ridiculously-pristine Saturn that I bought off my friend Nova in Durham, and it’s probably the nicest car (overall) that I’ve ever owned. It doesn’t have the V6 get-up-and-go that the Pontiac had, and it’s a bit longer than the parking dream the Geo Metro was, but all the windows work, and it’s got air conditioning, and every time I drive home from work and make that left-hand turn into the complex, I don’t have to slow down nearly so much from the bumped incline of the entrance drive. I don’t need to ease the steering wheel back around so that the tire doesn’t thunk.

So even though I am a little blue today, I still laughed as I swung the car smoothly into the turn, remembering the ridiculous squeaking and thunking of that poor old Grand Prix.

It’s sort of ridiculous, homesickness. I keep telling myself to get used to it, but part of me is resigned to always having these unexpected moments of nostalgic pull towards another place.

See, I’ve been cruising right on through the last two seasons of The West Wing, and today I happened to be watching an episode where they had some B-roll establishing shot of Chicago. It wasn’t a skyline shot, or a landmark shot showing the Art Institute or Lake Shore Drive or even Water Tower. It was a backside shot of the Loop – unassuming office buildings (one stood out only because it was bright red brick), and the El train, with a few cars most likely running westward on the South end of the block.

And can I tell you, I still gasped, and tears still sprang into my eyes, and I didn’t even know why until the caption appeared, telling me I was in Chicago, even though I knew that already and didn’t need to be told, my brain and my heart were clearly already in the scene. The next shot was a top-down of a hotel lobby, with part of the sidewalk outside showing through windows, with little crustlets of snow, and everyone wearing overcoats and rubbing their hands, cars just outside the shot emitting those huge poofy white clouds of exhaust that are common in sub-zero temps. And even though I am pretty sure they shot that bit in L.A., I let my mind wander to downtown, to the way the wind feels whipping through the tall buildings, the movie-perfect river bridges near the Opera House, etc. etc.

Over the years it feels like I’ve made myself fall in love with my own city, but while I was busy looking for my heart’s delight there, I loved it anyway, in my own way. I keep having this reaction to it, after all, when I see the city in movies or TV: back in the months before a certain comic book movie hit the theaters, I had the opportunity to get in an early screening in Burbank. That first shot, sweeping over Jackson St., the old post office, I’ll never forget it. I gasped aloud, and my co worker sitting next to me patted my arm and grinned at me humorously, half-seriously asking, “You OK?”

I gotta get back there at some point. I don’t know when, and I don’t know how, but I need to fill up my eyeballs with, I don’t know, snowdrifts and wheezing articulated buses and Navy Pier lit up like a painted lady tourist monstrosity (with a really decent Shakespeare Rep house). Me, standing there, breathing deep, soaking up as much home as possible.