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