Eternity in each.

There are mugs on our desks and atop our drawers. Empty mugs, but enough to keep these things weighed down. They held tea or coffee or something, held over a good novel or an essay or some conversation. Held over to augment and reflect a goodness that can be felt beneath an accompanying blanket, and there is such goodness there. I have this collection of mugs now that I am almost keeping to know that the odd, dusty residue at their bottoms still lays low to show the warmth that was transferred into moments. I'm keeping them down here and adding more.

What we see is what we are.

Perhaps I don't know much about photography.

Some of the photos I like the most are those where the figure within is blurred in motion. Where what we are looking at, now pinched between our fingers, is the capturing of two separate moments, gnawing at and into each other.

Perhaps I don't know much about time.

The way forward is sometimes the way back.

To celebrate, my workmates and I became Secret Santa's for one another. We would prepare gifts and leave them behind in the back room for their recipient to open the next time they might come in to work. This is an odd thing, because it is best to open a gift when with the person who is giving it, but the rules of secrecy do not allow it, not until the gift has already been opened.

Mine came in a handled paper gift bag, stapled shut with several dozen efficient fasteners to prevent a getting in and a getting out. I left those and tore the bag, choosing another entrance for myself. And I withdrew a Labyrinth. I small game in which I have to balance a shiny orb across treacherous holes along a shifting platform. A labyrinth, with no accompanying note from whomever I was receiving it. Given to me anonymously. Hmm, I thought.

Hmm. I think it is a dangerous thing to open. But, I am sure, I owe it to the benefactor to try, though rickety, and keep balance enough to reach the end.

If you hold a cat by the tail.

Someone I know was telling me about someone they know who believes that all things learned should be self-taught. The only things worth being educated on are those you do yourself. Learning through doing, the only way to be taught. Experience. That most brutal of teachers, as someone else has once said.

But there is instead a person, the quietest, who deigns to avoid such brutality. This one sits in a comfortable, aged chair with a warm mug, listening to every story told about activities never personally partaken. These stories and their secondhand characters, gathered only through such tales, are the ones come to love or loath, who are emulated, who are repaired. Watching the lives of others swirl in a swift vividness, never noticing the passing of his own sun or the changing of his own moon. All of what he learns comes through thoughts and imagery, from hearing others' events, shouts beyond his walls, and wondering at how he himself would act while never doing so. Such a wondering, it is supposed, determines his outlook in case of application. This is a person who sits still, skin grown taught with inactivity, but feels a weathering windburn to have travelled lifetimes. Feeling without doing, but a life, the same vehicle, permitting such similar brutality.

Here, perhaps, whether one does or does not makes no matter. What comes will come as it may. Perhaps, perhaps, that person there, sitting secure, should stand and step into that what is coming. Its waves are breaching nonetheless. That step may be an entrance into a fatality or into a rejuvenation, where both might ease the creak in those bones. To be wondering in the dark keeps them creaking all the more.

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

--

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.