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.

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.

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 loveliness of Laufey.

Snowflakes of paper.

The one who speaks in memes should not be tolerated.

Hastening to hilarity.

The Madonna Timeline returns with a little help from Britney Spears.

A little crow post.

Karma police.

If Onlyfans.

Cry of dog, wail of wind.

Mom’s birthday.

How suite it is: a blast of Victoria Beckham.

This interminable edging session has gone on long enough.

The words of Angela Davis.

Dazzlers of the Day included Amber Glenn, Conor McDermott-Mostowy, Hayden Williams, and Erin Jackson.

Outside the single window of our attic room, sole portal to the winter world, the wind made a guttural moan. It rattled all, as judging by the barks of a dog that followed, nipping on the heels of those retreating moans. Aural signs of an unsettled evening: wails of wind and cries of dog. Both were comfortably muffled enough to be but mild reminders that life and movement existed beyond the confines of our attic.

These were the sounds of Winter Obscura – faded, abstract, fuzzy – if sound was a color these would be some drab and depressingly unremarkable gray.

Like a battleship, like an ending, like a dark pearl.

There is beauty in the unremarkable, and subtlety carries its own grace. Delicate renderings and minor reckonings. Winter upheavals run the gamut from life-altering to microcosmic. Sometimes the same event can be both at once. The power of perspective is too often unharnessed. I wear it around my neck like an ox wears a yoke.