Laughing with the sinners, crying with the saints.

And so the Earth completes its long journey around the sun...more or less.  We don't rectify the remainder until 2016.

All my life I've sort of flip-flopped between the concept of resolutions and marking the "end" of a particular moment in time while allowing for a "fresh start", and using a lot of "quotation marks" to imply that I have any relevant understanding of how society interprets New Year's Eve.  I suppose I have a different outlook each December 31st, depending on what happened in the preceding 364 days.  But the only lasting impression, each and every goddamn year, is that they are

Just.
Too.
Long.

Venus.  Life on Venus would knock down a calendar year to about 225 days.  That would be ideal, even if the atmospheric pressure would crush all of us.  But, even if we all end up looking like a Dali painting, wouldn't you rather finish off the year in mid-August?  If it was a fulfilling and rewarding year you'd limit the possibilities of life going down the shitter by four months.  If it was dull, or painful, or catastrophic then you'd be 160 days closer to closing the chapter.  I know that outlook is pretty damn pragmatic, which I suppose could be explained by my persistent sense of cautious optimism taking a long walk off of a short pier.  Don't solemnly shake your head at me, mister.  I can still laugh.

I'm wary of being reflective...because it's getting redundant.  The breadth of my year has included numerous nights of introspection and self-assessment, promises to myself that I am doing a so-so job at keeping, trying to navigate the turbulent internal waters just so I can, for a change, see what's underneath, and overusing metaphors.  I'd like to believe that we are always, or we SHOULD always, be leaping, high or low, and falling somewhere new each and every time, but my development must have needed a pretty big boot to the ass.

The point is that some shit happened.  Some of it was serendipitous and cultivated serenity when I could really use the peace, and some of it tore holes and left them exposed for the world (or the six people reading this) to see, and both were compulsory.  Not in the everything-happens-for-a-reason sense, but because each year is, I believe, training for the next.

I know I'm not a great writer, because so many other great writers can express my own thoughts better than me.

The world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places.
But still there is much that is fair. And though in all lands, love is now
mingled with grief, it still grows, perhaps, the greater. - Tolkien

Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird,
That cannot fly. - Langston Hughes

But you ARE creative!" <puts hand on my heart> "...in HERE. - My daughter

You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming. - Pablo Neruda

It is important to have questionable friends you can trust unconditionally.  - Chuck Klosterman

Take what
you might give
and be damned
to you.  I'm
going elsewhere. - William Carlos Williams

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.  - Douglas Adams


Awake, arise, or be for ever fall'n. - John Milton