Our very first weekly recap of 2026 has arrived, and this one included the bridge between 2025 and 2026, year in review and all. That’s an awful lot of recapping, so I won’t belabor such an onerous proposition of links any longer – have at it.
The latest clue is that without approval or discussion with Congress, Trump bombed Venezuela and extracted their President to the US. What the actual fuck? Part of his reasoning is that he did it because the guy was selling drugs here – which is at odds with the pardon Trump gave to former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was actually convicted of trafficking 400 TONS of cocaine into the US.
Anyway, Trump has bombed multiple countries in his time as President, and has his eyes on Greenland next. Anyone who thinks, or thought, he would be a President for peace is fooling themselves, and has a bit of blood on their own hands now.
All this just to distract from the growing furor over his thousands of mentions in the Epstein files. Are the American people going to allow him to start a war just so we never find out if he’s an actual pedophile?
PS – Check out the ‘situation room’ below at Mar-A-Fucking-Lago: in place of a SCIF, a black curtain secures the main players. And is the phone cord not actually plugged in into anything? This is a fucking clown show.
A moment of laziness beneath one of the most deliciously soft blankets we’ve had in years.
It’s always the most cozy and comfortable mornings that require us to get out of bed before we are ready. The luxury of sleeping in happens maybe once a week if I’m lucky – there is usually too much to be done, though I find myself wasting time at many other given moments in a day. The mind travels more the older I get. It’s harder to focus, more difficult to stay engaged. Part older age, part decreased attention span, part general malaise and madness. The colorfully eccentric kind-hearted old lady with an edge I’d always fancied myself to be as I entered the latter stages of a lifetime is starting out as a basic, cranky old man devoid of passion or patience.
I dive back under the blankets for a few more minutes of not having to face the world.
Where is this wretched winter taking us? I wish I knew – or maybe I just think I wish I knew, because to know might actually ruin my life entirely. I once read of someone who was going to a psychic medium who knew so much and was so eerily accurate that they had to stop going.
If we all knew exactly what was in store for us, how many would bother going through the motions? An exercise in futility is just another exercise of which I want no part.
That said, a little guidance is always appreciated, so I’ll heed the mystics and soothsayers, and take cues from astrological signs and events. Today is the Wolf Supermoon – one of the three supermoons for 2026, so we are starting out with a bang. This year there will also be thirteen full moons (two in the month of May) so my plan is to harness the benefits of these, while rolling with the lunacy that typically accompanies them. As Violet Newstead once proclaimed, “I’m a tree I can bend!
Granted, that came right before she thought she poisoned her boss, but the sentiment is valid.
This happened a while ago, but the justice system in our country is, ahem, slightly fucked. What can we expect with a convicted felon leading the high office? Makes my minor speeding bump seem like cake compared to a fucking insurrection (see January 6 if you’re totally ignorant). Anyway, I digress…
This story began on a beautiful October morning as I was heading out to see my friend Missy in Connecticut. I’d programmed the destination into my phone and was heading out the prescribed route along Albany Shaker Road when I decided to take an earlier left onto Osborne, as that route was prettier and I hardly ever went that way. The phone would re-route me, so I turned left and then immediately remembered I’d forgotten the requisite bag of Chex mix (in Bold, thank you). Making a quick turnaround to Price Chopper, or Market 32, or whatever that ill-thought-out switch resulted in, I picked up the Chex mix and headed back out. Once again the phone’s route wanted me to stay straight on Albany-Shaker, and for the second time I ignored it, opting for the earlier left turn along a seemingly prettier path. Sunlight dappled through the fall foliage and I was losing myself in the old-school fall musical mix I made for the ride when I suddenly realized my toiletries bag was back at home. Turning around again, the leisurely trip was becoming a bit too leisurely. Once the bag of lip balm and fragrance was in the car, the original route on the phone was still me to stay the path on Albany-Shaker, and for a third time I dismissed the plan, insisting on going the more beautiful way.
By now a bit behind on my scheduled departure, I was going over the speed limit by let’s say approximately 18 miles per hour, and before I could slow it down, a police officer was frantically waiving his hands and pointing at me from across the street. (I’d learned the hard way that this meant pull over, as opposed to a friendly officer just telling me to pass on and keep moving, which I’d once mistakenly assumed was happening in a speed trap on the Massachusetts Turnpike many years ago.)
Officer Red Head was livid – and so unfathomably angry from the outset that I wondered if I should call Andy. These are dangerous times.
“What are you DOING?!?!” he screamed. And I mean SCREAMED. There was a time, decades ago, when I was rather accustomed to irate cops who had pulled me over, but this was extreme and out of proportion for a speeding charge. My loose plan of asking if it would help if I my husband was a cop, while batting my eyelashes, went out the window as it suddenly felt ill-advised, so I held my tongue and tried to think of de-escalation exercises in the face of this crashing out cop.
Officer Red kept going on a tirade, even after procuring my driver’s license. “You live near here!! You know there’s a school here!! You’re going 18 over the speed limit!!!” His anger seemed to be growing on top of itself, making him more and more angry, and I was unsure how to calm the shit-show down. “I’m sorry officer,” I said calmly, not wanting to set this temperamental person off any more. He wasn’t quite done, but the yelling had turned to a stern lecture. Maybe he realized he was the only one yelling and getting upset, and at that point he told me to wait there (as opposed to fleeing the scene without my license?)
When he came back a few minute later, he seemed like a totally different person. Handing me my license and a ticket, he spoke like human being and said I could just pay it or go to court, but they were always crowded there I might just want to pay it. I said thank you because at that point it felt best to get away from this person as soon as safely possible. His over-the-top anger had shaken me a bit, haunting me for the whole ride to Connecticut.
Cut to this week. Andy had insisted on going to court and not pleading guilty in an effort to get as few points as possible. After sitting in a packed court-adjacent room at the Colonie Courthouse, the proposed four points were whittled down to zero points, and instead of speeding I’d get a parking by a hydrant citation, with a fine and court fee. Relieved and grateful for no points, we got out of there and waited for the bill to arrive. It came a few days later, and the cost of ignoring the universe after its repeated attempts to keep me on Albany-Shaker was a whopping $325. That’s a whole damn bottle of Tom Ford Cologne.
The lesson for me in all the yelling and screaming, aside from keeping within 10 miles per hour of the posted speed limit, is to listen to the universe when it gently tries to guide you – pay heed to the seemingly minor nudges it makes. In this case, if I’d following the original route after two warnings, I’d have been fine at my 48 miles per hour, and entirely avoided a run-in with Officer Crazy Cranky Pants, as well as the hefty price tag that came along with it.
(The clown show at the court might have to be a totally separate post – oh fuck it, I can sum it up by saying that a stomach-baring half-shirt doesn’t work on every body, and not for any court of law ever.)
The vast expanse of emptiness that acts like vacuum and diamond-rendering pressure at once…
A force of force, turned in and on itself…
Pushing from without, pushing from within… and the end result, far from balance, is just more unbearable pressure…
Body and brain, both basically hollow, the way we carve out our live without regard to what we’re tearing out of ourselves in service of what we think we want to add…
How much of ourselves do we throw away like that?
The moment of destruction is finitely beautiful – it almost makes the aftermath worth it. This world favors those who dare to prolong, or even find, such moments.
I dwell in waves of silent despair Reborn in matter and time, a starless universe Onward, into eternity A nocturnal light will set my spirit free…
Well, let me pull back a little – I’m older. Maybe not old – it’s all so relative anyway.
I definitely do feel older, and it hits me when I try to do something like figure out all the new editing options for photos or the latest app. My phone is probably about four or five years old now, and I still haven’t accessed all the photo capabilities because it’s just too overwhelming. When I was younger, I would have jumped at the chance for more filters, accessories, apps to make life easier – now, I just feel overcome by the vast sprawl and unending options now available. It sends my brain into overload, which stops things completely.
My solution to feeling overwhelmed isn’t typically to shut down, but rather isolate and focus on one single goal to be accomplished, or one finite problem to solve. The older I get, the more options there seem to be, and the more opportunities for getting overwhelmed. My mind isn’t as quick and nimble as it once was, nor is it able to absorb or learn things at any sort of quick pace. I’ve intentionally slowed things down in my world to find a more peaceable way of living, so I don’t want that to change – I’m simply going to have to accept the fact that I’ll never access all the paths now available to us. A spiral accented by FOMO now seems to rear its head in my head, and overthinking everything is a bleak downward trend. The only way to stop it is… to stop it.
Blasting eardrum-shattering technical death metal might seem like an antithetical means of clearing the mind and finding peace but I’m in the mood for trying new things, and sometimes an enormous wave of a song, crashing down upon the soul and rushing the mind’s processing of stimuli, is the precise antidote for a proverbial cloudiness in the head.
Is this the reason then that some love death metal? The absolute abandon of the brain while it’s being so beautifully bombarded into oblivion through the sheer pounding of a sonic fit of wrath and rage?
This selection is from the band Obscura, whom I stumbled upon when researching this Winter Obscura theme – and it arrived at moment when I needed to assault my senses with something different, something jarring, something jolting, something more…
A slap out of it, a shock wakening, a reckoning to ravage… a desperate act to feel again, to reset the mind and reboot my entire system when Control-Alt-Delete no longer does anything.
I didn’t want melody, I didn’t want lyrics, I wanted only sounds – tons and tons of deafening sound – pure sonic abuse and attack – aimed directly at my chest – so loudly that I could feel it there, pounding away from the outside while my heart pounded back from within. Sound so striking, sound so strident it feels like skin being ripped off the body. Sound so potent, sound so petulant it spits in your eyes and probes uninvited into every orifice of your body. Sound that turns you inside out.
Is this the sound of Winter Obscura? Too soon to tell… but it’s the sound for today.
There is something disturbingly comforting about being in a drunken haze. Not that I miss the drinking in any way, but there’s a darker side of me that misses the option of blacking out on occasion. An unflinching look at the world presently around us, and what’s going on in this country in particular, invites the notion of such glorious oblivion.
In place of drink, in place of drug, in place of meditation and mindfulness and mourning, I offer this winter theme to act as a balm upon the callous, cruel, ruthlessness of the world at this moment: this is our Winter Obscura.
Haze and smoke and obfuscation.
Backlit-befuddlement hopelessly and intentionally out-of-focus.
A veil, a scrim, a cloud – perpetually out of reach, out of touch, out of the realm of what can be seen or contained.
A screen unseen, a film of gauze, a filter that removes the very soul of a subject.
This is the unsettling landscape of Winter Obscura – less a place and more a delirious frame of mind, where our main purpose to is to stay hidden and safe behind a smokescreen of abstract notions and obscure philosophical meanderings.
There is mystery and confoundment in these parts, and a road that splinters into trails largely untread – in so many ways I’ll be walking new paths right along with you, and putting it out here as it unfolds is treacherous work, risky in all the worst ways. That will make it difficult to read sometimes, but seeing me in difficulty is what the world seems to enjoy most. As I said, we’ll go through it together, no matter how much it hurts, no matter what the repercussions, no matter where it decides to take us.
Won’t you pull the curtain of obscurity around our four-post bed, enveloping us in a cocoon of winter fuzziness? Confusion bleeds both ways. There is no mystery in the relentlessly hyper-focused clarity of this overly-documented world. That which we need to see shall always be hidden – that which we don’t want to see parades before us at regularly-promoted intervals.
The beauty of our messy lives resides in the blurry haze, the peripheral vision, the exact moment that focus recedes and mystery begins.
A mad professor, a homeless person, and Albert Einstein on a decent day – my gray hair is a combination of all these archetypal idiocies, and I’m not mad about any of it. On the contrary, I’m rather happily befuddled by how to even style such a growing monstrosity, simply running my fingers through it with some leave-in conditioning cream, and calling it a day. I peer at the bedraggled results in the mirror, the slightest bit dismayed but mostly bemused. Equal parts frightful and frightened, but unafraid to say as much. Bleak and blunt too. A strange start to a New Year and a new winter, and somewhat powerful in that. A man with nothing left to lose is still just a man. Power comes from something more.
What you are about to encounter on this website as it turns the page on the calendar year may be a stark and shattering change – with an emphasis on words over images, structure over surface, and subtle shading over colorful saturation. Bleak of vision, blunt of delivery, and devoid of sugar-coated sweetness, all I can say is that the new year of this blog will not be for anyone of honesty, truth, and the raw, messy reality of this moment.
I’ve always been rather revealing here – literally and figuratively. I’ve delved into stories in which I don’t always come off as heroic or even basically decent. I’ve shaded the hurtful actions of others so as to protect them, putting a rosy tint on events where others could have and perhaps should have come off as the thoughtless perpetrators of inadvertent cruelty.
It’s not even clear to myself why I felt such a need to turn bad experiences into something good, to turn a shitty moment into something golden, but it’s an art form I’ve come close to perfecting. I can take a cutting instance of wrong, attach some pictures, and write it into a moment of prettiness and beauty – a lesson to be learned, wrapped in a lovely ribbon and packaged with the most exquisite wrapping. There are times that call for such a re-framing, and perhaps that was my purpose for a whole; there is certainly more than enough ugliness in this world wide web of social media mayhem.
But it’s not my job to make your world pretty. I don’t get paid to put a handsome spin on things for your enjoyment or ease. I find greater peace in stating things as they are and portraying people by their actions, not how I want them to be or what my feelings or personal interpretations of them may be. This reads, on the surface, as a very good shift. For those whose actions mirror their intent and line up with their proclaimed values and words, it will be. For those who say they care but whose actions repeatedly hurt others, it may not go as well. Happily, there is no point in getting mad at the truth. Too many of us operate in that hazy, obscure shadow of emotional confusion, creating obfuscating distractions to get away with questionable actions and behavior. I’m simply not tolerating that anymore, and the wild sort of abandon and freedom I feel is going to be the messy sort of fodder that often results in some must-read blog posts.
Nature cleans her house with violent storms and dramatic motions. She tears down old tree limbs, sending them plummeting to the ground (and sometimes somebody’s roof), clears swaths of brush with cutting winds, and fells entire growing seasons of delicate flowers with a single freezing night. She is gorgeously, diabolically ruthless, and decidedly unsentimental about it. Pulling no punches, she delivers her death blows in heartless fashion, seemingly void of compassion.
It’s what I’d mistakenly thought of as ‘The Cleaving’, and there’s some argument to be made that that is what’s happening – a brutal pruning of spent and unproductive objects, things in need of rejuvenation or entire excising or retirement. It’s important to know when to leave the party, and nature always knows. That’s not the actual definition of cleaving, however, which has a deliciously double meaning that can be either a splitting of something, like wood, or the sticking or adhering of something to something else.
If all goes according to Virgo plan, that may be what’s coming up on this new season of ALANILAGAN.com, and for the start of the 23rd year of this online mayhem, there will be our own little cleaving – a splitting off of that which we no longer need, and a holding close of all that remains dear. It will absolutely cut both ways. The excess and rich colors of Mr. Oud’s sumptuous and perfumed finery shall be relegated to memory. In place of that will be a blank canvass, cleared of fussy clutter, sparse of accessories and accoutrements. An expanse of emptiness, an expanse of clarity, a meditative space where I will decide what needs to go, and what needs to remain.
That makes this season sound more ominous than I hope it will be. There is no threat here, there is no danger. What needs to happen will play out as it’s all meant to happen, and there’s no sense in worrying or wondering why or what might be. If this sounds confusing or unclear to you, it is just as confounding to me, and that’s sort of what I want to explore for the next few months – not only here on this blog but in an upcoming project as well. Finding my footing in writing again has brought me back to basics, and putting things down on paper, both literally in a coffeeshop, and proverbially on a personal website, allows for a helpful introspective examination of what’s happened in the past, and what continues to happen. It’s a diary, it’s a therapy session, it’s a messy fucking Broadway show – and it plays out in plain view for anyone who wants to click on over here. A new year of analyses and awesomeness has begun –
The weight of snow on evergreen branches will always be more than the weight of the tree’s history – a striking and simple illustration of how nature doesn’t let the past move it as much as the present. The snow, ice and wind of the current day will always be the biggest battle – not what came before or what might come tomorrow. That’s the proper way to end the year.
Putting this year into the past cannot happen soon enough, so without much further ado and fanfare, and with no more than one linky post (as opposed to the usual two posts that a year in review typically deserves) let’s rifle through our weekly recaps instead of giving a more detailed encapsulation. Some people want the comprehensive links – most of you don’t bother with comprehensive anything (and right now I am joining you in that).
