Author Archives: Alan Ilagan

It showed up as a FaceBook memory, but I had recalled it quite vividly even prior to that. It was Inauguration Day 2017, when that wretched inciteful criminal was being sworn into office, and the country felt like it was being enveloped in some Orwellian nightmare. Those feelings would prove to be well-founded and mostly came to sad and unfortunate fruition, each and every single step along the way. I’d made reservations for dinner at 677 Prime that night, and after work I made my way to the bar to have a cocktail before Andy arrived.

Lifting the olive-festooned martini to my lips, I did my best to ignore the television station playing the inaugural event, but every now and then my eyes glanced up at the sad not-quite-spectacle that played out on the screen. Who could have foretold all the evils and atrocities that man would commit or attempt to commit? (Well, me.) Who could have foreseen all the disasters and deaths that he would single-handedly allow on his watch? (Again, me.) And who would have predicted that this would be the sorry state of the world four years later (Same.)

Today we stand in all the swampy muck and awful mess that he left, the shambles he and his family so heinously made of America, and we look to someone – anyone – to help clean up the disaster. In so many ways, it’s too late. The monster has been unleashed. The hatred has been given light and space in which to move and breathe and spread. It happened in ways large and small, from the liars themselves to the media who gave it a place to exist in the first place. That doesn’t mean some of us won’t fight back and work to return to the essence of what made America great from the beginning. Those basic tenets remain in place, standing despite the reckoning they’ve been given: freedom, equality, and opportunity for all of us.

I’m tentatively hopeful for the first time in four years, and that in itself is a feat worthy of respect and honor. We move forward to greater unity, essential accountability, moral come-uppance, and a better future. 

“Hygge is about fostering a long-term sense of happiness and general well-being; material consumption and ambitious striving are ephemeral distractions that lead us not to happiness ~ but to hurriedness. Hygge gives us the opportunity to step back from our overly busy lives and instead, start to value the small, daily joys we are surrounded by. It encourages us to be present in our own lives.

Philosophically speaking, hygge is about comfort and coziness, preferably in the spirit of fellowship and family. Practically speaking, hygge is about designing a lifestyle that is simple and serene, warm and happy.” ~ Barbara Hayden, ‘Hygge: Unlock the Danish Art of Coziness and Happiness’

This winter I am taking a deeper look into the Danish concept of hygge, which is as much about finding coziness and comfort in the familiarity of friends and family as it is about learning to embrace the winter and turn the idea of darkness and cold on its head. I’m all about changing perspective as the best way to changing circumstance. Winter has always held a literal and proverbial chill – diving into hygge turns it into a season of light and warmth and joy. A candle just isn’t quite as brilliant in the summer.

This Martin Luther King Jr. Day coincides with my Mom’s birthday (that post comes later), so it is very much a day of heroes for me. January requires such lofty inspiration to lift the spirits and propel us through the winter. The past week has proven emotionally wearing on me for some reason, and since not anything particularly specific has been pinpointed as the root cause, I’m left wondering if it’s the simple accumulation of emotion over the past few months, and the realization that a full year of living in a COVID world is coming up. That’s a heavy suitcase I may unpack at a later time. Or maybe I won’t. On with the recap…

The Bundt cake deserves a renaissance. 

This Señor Breakfast Sandwich is a blessing for late-mornings in January. 

Greenhouse candlelight. 

Moonlight, faded by snow.

Eating a slice of humble pie. 

Words of inspiration in a barren land. 

The saddest day of the year.

When a Cape Codder is a cookie instead of a cocktail. 

Comfort food in the form of enchiladas. 

In the bleak mid-winter.

My website turned 18 years old, and my 45-year-old naked ass turned it out. 

All winter sparkle and pizzazz.

The week had its way and wore me down. 

Summoning a spirit from its slumber. 

Sharing Country Flowers with Mom.

Floating like the Butterfly Amaryllis.

Once upon a year ago, I journeyed by my lonesome into the mountains on a gray winter day. The morning, overcast and threatening snow, was a dismal one, yet something drew me out of Albany at a time when it was still all right to do so. I couldn’t know the impending storm that would ensnare the entire year to come. Driving east, just over the border into Massachusetts, I veered off the turnpike and wove my way into the beginnings of the Berkshires. Several summers ago we took a similar route up to the Mount, summer home of Edith Wharton. This was a different path, into a different realm. I made it on my own, to reconnect to my soul at a time when I was most afraid.

The route I had taken took me through Stockbridge, where I would later pause for a cup of tea at the Red Lion Inn, but something pulled me away from that cozy spot, further toward the mountains. I drove off the main route and took a few side roads. Seeking solitude and silence, I wanted to escape the more-frequented space, and eventually I wound my way into relative seclusion. Winter whispered to me there, as snowflakes fell delicately through the air, silently and without wind to move them the least bit sideways. It was entrancing, creating an effect that was as beautiful as it is has proven elusive ~ wind so often acting as a companion to snow.

The world stood silent, the sky stood gray, and the air stood still. There, I saw what I thought was a wolf or a coyote, and I couldn’t tell for quite some time. It paused in its own path, turned to look at me, and shared a moment of wild communion. Someone once remarked my eyes reminded them of a wolf’s, but that suddenly felt far away. In that instant, I rekindled a certain fire within, and knew I would be all right, no matter what happened.

In that wilderness, at the base of the land where the mountains began to climb, I summoned the spirit that had been eluding me. Conjured from a winter world where warlocks and wizards floated in castles filled with fire, a little spark set off a proverbial tendril of spiritual smoke – a shroud to rival any woolen cloak – which would protect my heart like a powerful talisman. It felt like I was being made whole again, forged from some crystalline mountain magic of ice and snow, laced with the wonder of winter, a season which I never embraced as much as I should have. It took me in then, it made me partner and friend, sensing what I needed and imbuing the soul with the wherewithal to survive all the winters to come. When the animal retreated, it was time for me to go as well.  

Later that day I would find a piece of rose quartz shaped like an egg – a sign of rebirth – that fit the palm of my hand, nestled and cradled like it was molded specifically for me to hold it. It would form the heart of my meditation – a new way of life that was setting me off on a journey that was more than mere survival.

‘There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.’ – Jane Austen

Every time I get an e-mail from Regal Cinemas, it’s like a little jab to the heart. A bittersweet reminder of our current state of affairs, it seems to affect Skip the same way, as he texted he couldn’t follow the Regal Twitter account anymore because it was too painful. I knew exactly what he meant. We have lost our movie nights for the moment, and so much else in the midst of this pandemic. That finally started hitting home with me this past week, when the weight of the winter, and our current conditions, fell fully upon my countenance.

Maybe it’s just the accumulation of almost a year of living like this. Maybe it’s just the void of those human connections which I’ve had such a love-hate relationship with all these years coming into irrefutable existence. Maybe it’s just a simple case of stir-crazy restlessness caused from the lack of going anywhere all these months. 

To combat this, I’ve been formulating and working through several remedies, all top-secret in the event they find fruition in a project or something else, and living in such mind-scapes isn’t fancy or make0believe – it’s survival. 

Skip has hopes we will be back in the movie-going game in some way shape or form by next fall. I’m hoping for something even sooner, because hope is all we have, and I’m going to indulge and refute pessimism for as long as I can. We’ve had enough of that here. Let’s have hope now. 

This month my website turns eighteen years old (despite some miscalculations over the years), and here’s a cheeky bit of fun to mark the occasion. Actually, we seem to be going the opposite direction, as eagle-eyed regulars may have noticed. While I’m a pro-sexual-expression kind of guy, and have no hang-ups when it comes to nudity and nakedness, I’ve been drawn to more spiritual and ethereal concerns of late, and that has likely bled into the content that’s been produced here. Such concerns have always played a part here, they’re just becoming more prominent and important, while other more salacious turns fade into the background.

The sparkle of a glistening male model emerging from the sea a la James Bond may always be a thrill, but there is sparkle in other things as well – and a spiritual sort of sparkle seems to last longer and resonate more deeply with my frequency these days. Not that there isn’t room for both to happily coexist, and there’s a valuable lesson in that too. Binary limits are so early 2000’s. With that in mind, here are a few cheeky photos from roughly a year ago, when I was still able to go to Boston without care or worry, a time that feels very far away, when it was but a year. It’s amazing how much can happen in a year. And it’s even more remarkable for how much can happen in the eighteen years since I first put this website into the world.

The year was 2003, and websites and blogs were only beginning to take off. I didn’t do much online in those early days – it was mostly a repository for my writing and photographs – and I definitely wasn’t updating anything on a daily basis. There were also no projects on display, which made for a sparse and rather sterile environment. Social media itself was in its infancy, and FaceBook, Twitter and Instagram didn’t even exist. In this brave new world, a personal website seemed rather quaint, and those early long-lost posts were surely the stuff of such innocence. While the posts have populated and grown, and the intertwining links have created an extensive web of its own, the main simplicity and sparse format has remained, and is one of the reasons it’s lasted this long. Avoiding the bells and whistles of the online world, and aside from a brief experiment with comments that didn’t last, not much has changed here as we begin our 18^thyear.

In some ways, this blog has become a diary of sorts, and there are entries where I’ve revealed more than I probably should have, and lots where I haven’t. It’s a ritual and habit that is now second nature, and while that once held albatross connotations, I’ve reconciled myself to its soothing, consistent nature. As a Virgo, if you believe in such things, I enjoy organization and structure. As a human, I enjoy working within and without those constructs, challenging and pushing and rezoning as necessary. There is something thrilling about contained chaos, of operating within a prescribed space, and in that prescription feeling the freedom of knowing anything can be done within such a safety zone.

Now that we are eighteen, and have been doing this longer than any other personal blog I can think of, I feel even more freedom, but instead of going hardcore full-frontal, I find bigger thrills in other forms of revelation. A new honesty in what can and should be tolerated, a new honesty in what exactly I want in life, a new honesty in how I’m working to better myself – and a few new tweaks in the logistics and features we’ve had here over the past few years.

The first of these changes is the reconfiguration of our not-quite-venerable Hunk of the Day feature. What started out as a simple eye candy/guy candy display has, at its best, turned into something deeper and more honorable, where the recipients were less interested in showing off their physical features and more about doing something that made a bigger difference in the world. To that end and purpose, I wanted to open it up to women and non-binary persons, which always made the ‘Hunk’ moniker problematic. More on that shortly.

As for our 18^thbirthday, it is a low-key if cheeky affair, as befitting life in the time of a pandemic. We will find other ways to celebrate and mark the occasion, and I’d like to draw it out. There is pleasure in anticipation, joy in elongating a moment of calm and peace and waiting.