When I call and text my friends that I need to talk to them, I usually get crickets.
When I give advance warning not to call because I’m about to head into a movie or show, they will invariably call and text.
My phone is ridiculously pointless.
My pathology originates here.
(PS – The featured photo shows the average number of spam calls I get of a day, which is why the ringer is always off. It won’t even vibrate because I don’t want to know.)
I happened upon two knitting clubs in the span of three days, surely a sign that I need to get back into the yarn game. The first was at a yarn store, the second at my usual cafe. The yarn store group seems a bit more serious – the members sat quietly and intently at their work, the leader guiding them with a general stitch comment, while the cafe group seemed looser, with food and drinks and more talking.
My knitting journey will likely not be part of a group, and will actually not be knitting at all, but crocheting, as I can barely handle one hook, much less two needles. The loose and gentle plan is to improve and practice technique with the basic granny square and grow from there. My first project – this blanket that took literally forty years to complete – was too long and too ambitious to be a good starting point. In the end, I conquered it, but I’m not going to do it again; I don’t have the years left. So granny squares it shall be for now. Baby steps, baby stiches… they pass the days of winter.
I long for the days when my social media feed was how to tie scarves, Tom Ford underwear, garden meditations, and Madonna.
Please, algorithm gods, return me to such a happily innocuous realm.
Unpopular opinion #8,547: I don’t love pie.
No matter what kind, I’ll take a slice of cake over pie any and every day.
I don’t hate a pie, it’s just not my preference. And if it’s a humble pie in the metaphorical sense, I’m just as un-enamored of it, even as I find myself eating them more and more the older I get.
Personal unpopular opinion #5,711: I’m not perfect.
That’s a bitter little pill to swallow, and I’ve had a persistent and lifelong prescription for it because I make as many mistakes as anybody else. The most difficult lesson for me to learn has been in acknowledging those mistakes, and then learning from them. The learning past has been easier than the acknowledging, but both have come a long way these past few years.
Life teaches you when you are ready to receive the lesson, and it will keep trying until you get it.
How much of our lives are simply about being busy? Whenever I wax philosophical about human beings and what occupies our time, I’m struck by how silly and trifling our pursuits are when presented in context with the basic requirements for survival.
Take sports – and the mass hysteria for events like the Super Bowl or World Cup. If some alien from another planet were to study humanity, and why we do what we do, how would one explain something like the Super Bowl – or the celebratory parade that follows in the days after?
Or take sports out of it, since so many will be offended by any criticism of their favorite past-time, and think of any parade. How ridiculous it would appear from a place of distance and disinterest. Animals don’t parade around without purpose – they do so to get somewhere, to stay safely together, to protect themselves.
Humans parade for arbitrary dates, self-imposed days of import, man-made holidays. We are a strange species, and I often think our subjects for activity and celebration, perhaps even purpose, stems from a fear of not being busy, not having to something to occupy our time – when really we should be embracing moments of not having anything to do.
To simply be.
To breathe.
To exist.
Why is that no longer enough for us?
The business of being busy is like a hamster wheel for humans, and too many of us are afraid to get off.
I have a friend who only eats the tops of muffins, leaving the rest in the wrapper or cupcake tray in which they were baked. When he visited us once, we awoke to find a pan of muffin bottoms only, like some wild animal had come in and ravaged them in the night. I don’t want to embarrass him by naming him outright, but it’s Chris and he knows it.
The sound of a lawnmower will always be sweeter than the sound of a snowblower.
Both are better than the sound of a leaf blower.
Neither is as nice as the pool pump kicking on.
Comparison remains the ultimate thief of joy.
This marks the first time back at the cafe since the morning we departed for Maine last week. More on that wonderful trip to come – for now I’m getting back into the schedule of writing and working after the magic spell of Ogunquit in winter.
Happily we have reached the one-month mark of our season of slumber – that means only two more months before spring – and February is the shortest one in the calendar year. Happy thoughts all around, and rather than focus on that faraway future I’m taking the morning as slowly as it comes – the gray, barely-there lightening of sky, the slow warming of the house as Andy gets up and clicks on his coffee, the comforting hug of a hot shower while those who don’t rise as early sleep unaware and unbothered.
My own little covenant with the break of day, when it’s just the two of us – dawn and me – each deciding what sort of day it will be, each in perfect control of it in our own way.
Andy says that when you hit one red light after another and traffic is backing up in the late afternoon, the light cycle is out of sync. It happened the other night, and by the fourth red I just let out a deep sigh, reminded myself there was no rush to get to cafe culture, and proceeded to hit three more.
Some days you just get all the red lights. Rather than rail against it bitterly and pointlessly, I’m doing my best to take it as a friendly reminder to slow down. Being that I usually run on the earlier side of my schedule, very rarely am I in a genuine rush; shaving a few minutes off an errand is never going to make that much of a difference.
Channeling moments of frustration into opportunities for mindfulness and possible pockets of meditation, is one of those challenges that a younger version of myself would have laughed or scoffed at; this older me rises to accept the gauntlet.
There are still people out there who exclaim, “Holy mackerel!” without a shred of irony or snarkiness.
This makes me happy.
I heard one of them say this at the cafe the other night. The marvel was real; the reassurance in humanity was brief.
It’s more difficult for me to capture an intentionally out-of-focus and backlit portrait in service of Winter Obscura than it is to get a clear, well-lit shot. All efforts for artifice. All in the name of grit and raw reality – and all in vain. By the time I got it to anywhere near a natural, on-the-fly catch, it was already a pose – a pretense – an assembled portrait. After fifty years of artifice, it’s all I know now. And maybe that makes it more real than not posing.
I don’t remember a time when I didn’t have an image.
This winter was supposed to tear all that down, and all that I find is more layers of protective artifice, more distance, more removal from the moment at hand. In trying to catch up to myself, I’ve only given advance warning and the opportunity to escape, right under my own nose. Mr. Oud has nothing on me; he was quicksilver, I am light. And shadow. And an unfixed heavenly body dangling far in the distance, and moving further away the closer I sense I’m getting to myself.
What if I never catch up?
More frightening, what if I do?
It’s not as easy to lose yourself as you might think. It’s like playing yourself in chess or checkers.
It takes years, it takes effort, it takes repetition and commitment to the process. It takes a reckoning and a ravaging, and a certain penchant for self-destruction and utter annihilation – neither simple to authentically effectuate. And when you do, when you finally attain the state and status of being lost, all you want to do is find yourself again.
A phrase struck me from ‘The Lioness of Boston’ by Emily Franklin – a novel on the life of Isabella Stewart Gardner – and it reminded me of cherished friends in my inner circle:
“…a potpourri of people who woke up and knew themselves to be more than the sum of their societal roles.”
What a wonderful grouping of words. On with this delayed weekly recap following the dullest, drabbest featured photo ever…
Madonna dominated the whispers of my algorithm, beginning with this madgical moment.
Unlocking a whole new level of gay.
Upon re-entering the world of the living.
The one who speaks in memes should not be tolerated.
The Madonna Timeline returns with a little help from Britney Spears.
How suite it is: a blast of Victoria Beckham.
This interminable edging session has gone on long enough.
Dazzlers of the Day included Amber Glenn, Conor McDermott-Mostowy, Hayden Williams, and Erin Jackson.
“Movements are most powerful when they begin to affect the vision and perspective of those who do not necessarily associate themselves with those movements.” – Angela Davis
“If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you in the night.” – Angela Davis
“You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” – Angela Davis
“We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.” – Angela Davis
“But the important word here is probably not the one you are thinking of. It’s trying. Trying and trying again. Never stopping. That is a victory in itself.” – Angela Davis
“We will have to go to great lengths. We cannot go on as usual. We cannot pivot the center. We cannot be moderate. We will have to be willing to stand up and say no with our combined spirits, our collective intellects, and our many bodies.” – Angela Davis
The interminable edging session that this wait for the new Madonna album has become…
Ever since Tom Ford stepped away from his eponymous brand, allowing Estée Lauder to temper the potency of his Private Blend releases, I’ve had to look elsewhere for the more challenging scents that can stand up to a harsh New York winter. Enter my favorite Spice Girl – Posh – also known as Victoria Beckham – and her line of fragrances. There are four of them, and the sampler set I received for Christmas has opened up a whole new world of desires, starting with ‘Suite 302’ which was a gift to myself. Sometimes, as on a dreary winter day to this already-dismally-insane year of 2026, you need to treat yourself.
Inspired by Paris visits and hotel suite stays, along with whatever she and David Beckham got up to in the 90’s and since, ‘Suite 302’ has a rich and voluptuous scent profile, with a powerful punch of black cherry, red peppercorns, leather and tobacco. This feels like what the Cherry line of Tom Ford Private Blends was meant to be (but fell short, as I never did end up wanting any of them after a disappointing sampling run).
‘Suite 302’ brings that smoky cherry vibe to delicious life, with a gloriously-dark tobacco and leather heart tempered by a sweet, but not overly cloying, sweetness and fruitiness that is precisely my current winter mood – nicely balanced with enough heat to cut through these cold and dry winter days. A bit of richness for the stark and austere season – and a beautiful accent piece to punctuate the frigid moment at hand.
Further proof that one should never count Posh Spice out.
