The tops again.

As previously lamented, I have not very much enjoyed a lot of the music released this year, most probably, I will admit, out of ignorance. I have been listening to a lot of the recommendations that my friend Brendan has given me over the last week or so, but I don't think I can draw a week of listening into a tops list. As well as this, I have not even seen enough good films released this year to populate a Top 5 list. I've seen how out of touch I have become with popular culture--aside from the inclination to create a tops list, of course--and from this consider myself to have found another New Year's resolution. Though that is doubtful.

So, let's see. Rather than attempt to collate a list from my slim pickings, I'm going to travel a decade backwards (1.21 Gigawatts) and give you my Top of the Tops list of the sweeter days of 1998. It was my transition into baggy jeans, skateboarding, and cutting my own hair. Some photos remain, but we are currentl tracking them down. But let's forget that and get to business.

Top 5 albums:
Neutral Milk Hotel, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
Finger Eleven, Tip
Project 86, Project 86
Pedro The Lion, It's Hard to Find a Friend
Refused, The Shape of Punk To Come

Top 5 Songs:
At The Drive-In, "Napoleon Solo"
Neutral Milk Hotel, "Oh Comely"
Mineral, "Unfinished"
The Gloria Record, "Torch Yourself"
Pedro The Lion, "Secret of the Easy Yoke"

Top 5 movies:
Saving Private Ryan
SLC Punk
The Truman Show
Can't Hardly Wait
The X-Files

Top 5 video games:
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Pokemon
NHL '99
Space Station Silicon Valley
Breath of Fire III

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Now that was a good year. 2008, though, has been both the longest and the shortest I've had. Hmm. On we go, and into what we soon shall see.

With the wind.

The wind can disregard you, diving through your many layers, through your very bones, and right out the other side. There has been such a wondrous cold of late that it and its factoring chill do so with ease and encouragement, cross your arms about yourself as you like.

During a perfect snowstorm I trudged across the tundra of nearby undeveloped land [you know, 'undeveloped' is an interesting and accurate word in more than the common sense--I remember a time when it was developed, moderately wild, though penned by roads, but has since been un-developed (hyphen, of course) to a vast, craggy wasteland] to purchase supplies. Soup supplies, that is, as in butternut squash and pears, as well as cinnamon sticks, and beneath my knitted hat while walking, I listened to and thought about 'building a still'. Now, still, and still I do. Stillness is a thing that I think can be brought about, but in a way that is not an interference with movement. Hmm.

Yes, then, that is what I will do: paint, write music, write stories. Make things that move by standing still. But we will still just wait for the winds to decompose. We must, for as long as we are walking they will bend us to corners.

--
At times I believe that things are simply clarifying a more valuable vision.

And a very rare species.

It is easiest to be taken away by long winds, down sleek tunnels, into questions of the weight of realness. Such ease there is, in slipping into a lack of light and lightness.

Now that I am (sort of) on holidays I have been, in the midst of organizing my room, my life, and its dark orange walls, flipping through the beginnings of a dozen books throughout the day. I read The Unbearable Lightness of Being a while ago, and flipped back to random passages within that book this afternoon. This, among the Watchmen, Pascal's Pensees, some Steinbeck, and more Levinas than is good for me. But Kundera's title pervades.

Anyhow, now, questions and realness. How interesting it is, that it works so well to imagine words coming from the mouths of others, words that do not yet exist and might not come to be, but will still affect an entire string of actions, paving them out of a striking fear or a slim hope. The weighted impression that the unreal, mere imaginations, such weightless brevity, can have on the real, the day, the things a person walks with. The unreal is keeping the real.

The same is in dreams. A person could wake from a bad dream with a terrible start, furrow their brow, and determine themselves to fall back to sleep and change that dream. Or to have one that is fresh and new from which they may inspire the day's real activities. But that might bring them, in returning to sleep, to a worsened state than was before, in an independent happening.

How dire, then, would the circumstance be if that person is unable even to sleep, prevented from such bad dreams for fear of them--perhaps a benefit, then. But is still stuck with imaginations that, like dreams, follow their own plots, and slip and stick in their muck. Muck, or an electric fence. At least there are plenty of books to read.

The snow goose need not bathe.

The other day I was telling someone I know about a thought I had. A couple Tuesdays or Wednesdays ago there was a really nice snowfall. I was watching it happen and thinking about this clean whiteness that stuck itself, clinging so quietly to the objects that it fell upon. I wondered what it must be like to be an evergreen or a fire hydrant, spending a few months under the mask of beauty. Just standing there, making other peoples' breath catch and slow when they look and notice. But you know, they know that it isn't themselves that is being looked at and admired, but is the glittering blanket that lay over them. Maybe those objects cling back, standing still as they can.