Pink and purple tissue paper lines the floral-festooned box. Buffeted by feathers and deconstructed silk flowers, with perhaps the faintest wisp of Tom Ford’s ‘Lavender Palm’ Private Blend (and just the slightest dash of ‘Beau de Jour‘) it makes a formidably frivolous collection of little gifts and letters. A few books line the bottom of the box – including one on ‘Peaceful Places in Boston‘ – which actually includes a pretty comprehensive list of some wonderful spots.
This is a collection of frivolity assembled for Alissa’s daughter, in the hopes of sending some cheer in the midst of this desolate winter. Mostly it’s empty prettiness, but there’s a value in being pretty if you know not to take any of it too seriously.
Posing like a fucking boss, this is my tribute to the Super Bowl, and I’m taking the lazy way out with a simple Monday morning recap. A lot of stuff went down this past week, most of which didn’t make the blog. Read between the lines of this recap, and strike a muscle pose. Like a meathead. Wearing spectacles. (Oh, and follow me on TikTok or whatever you’re supposed to do there – I’m on it, I’m into it, I’m TikToking for you – for all of you!)
How is it that Dolly Parton has not played a more prominent role on this website in all these years? Who doesn’t absolutely adore Dolly? As part of the gay population, I believe it’s in our handbook that loving Dolly Parton is one of the mandatory non-negotiable requirements. A minimum qualification if you will. Luckily, it’s always come rather easily to me, having been raised on her movie ‘9 to 5’ and its accompanying fingernail-clicking title track. Plucky, kind and fabulous beyond all get-out, Ms. Parton has defied the limitations of country music, and even more impressively the rules of the entire entertainment industry, surviving and thriving in a successful career that has spanned decades, without ever really going out of style.
Case in point is the viral Meme seen below, where she cheekily shows off the various versions of herself that she would use for social media and immediately rendering her relevant once again. It is as much a showcase for her chameleonic nature as it is for a modern-day flourish of social media savvy. (For the record, I’ve never been on Tinder or Grinder or a 3-ring Binder, but oh if these social media sites had been around during my dating hey-day… actually, I think we all – the whole lot of us – offer unending gratitude that they weren’t. Think: hot mess minus the hot.)
PS – Follow me on TikTok under ‘alanilagan’ and be in awe. I just love the TikTok!
Mercifully, this is the shortest month of the year, and as the last full month of winter that is a blessing without disguise. It seemed like we should present something fiery for February, and these scarlet berries mirror the cardinals that occasionally visit the yard and spruce things up with their fiery plumage. Though the gardens remain in a state of slumber, the cardinals and finches have been providing bits of their colorful carriage, creating temporary gardens whenever and wherever they alight. The blue jays add to this as well, mimicking the blue of the sky, etched with their striking stripes and patterns.
Even the squirrels want to get in on the winter show, traipsing along the fence and digging in the snow for a stray acorn or errant nut. Their gray coats are better at blending into the surroundings at this sad time of the year, but their actions are just as interesting as they are in the sunnier months.
In our home, we are already getting antsy for spring, which still feels a long way off. We’ll see what the groundhog has to say tomorrow, not that it’s wise to put anything of substance in that one’s paws. Winter will take as many weeks as it takes and there’s nothing much to do about it. The best thing is to find its rare pockets of beauty and enjoy them as they come.
Earl Grey tea ebbs and flows in my existence. There are periods when I’m all for it – craving and demanding its floral notes in tea and cookies and scones – and then there are long stretches when I want nothing to do with it. Lately, I’ve come around to it again, maybe because a nice floral tea seems designed for winter mornings like this one. Unexceptional Tuesdays when a sweeter, quieter start of Bergamot is needed to cast its exquisite spell and see us through the rest of the week, or at least the remainder of the day. Such moments of peace are by their nature smaller and more elusive, and so I value them more. Let’s sip on that for a bit and not rush ahead just yet.
It was a week filled with sickness and a slow but steady recuperation. Felled by the flu, I spent half the week alternating between chills and sweats, and the rest of it racked with overall body aches. That made for hours of bed-bound contemplation and feverish deliberations, none of which came to much. It’s not good to be inside your head so much, or inside the house so much either. I had no choice in either, and so I did my best to get better – drowning myself in hot green tea with lemon and honey, regular doses of Tylenol in the morning and NyQuil at night, gallons of water, and freshly squeezed citrus in whatever else I was drinking. On with this sickly recap so we can leave it all behind…
It’s been a fun point of contention, debate, and occasionally-serious attempted-reconstruction over the past several years. We’d narrowed it down to a few films, and finally two finalists: ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ and ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’. One of them would have been the first movie that Skip and I saw together, and we have spent way too many subsequent movie nights trying to figure out which one it would have been.
The truth is we had known each other for a few years prior to that fateful evening. I’d started working with Sherri in the summer of 2005, so it must have been the holiday party of later that year at which I first met her then-boyfriend Skip. Sporadically seeing each other at parties and work events, it was always a fun and easy camaraderie we enjoyed, but we didn’t hang out on our own until that first movie, casually agreed upon, likely at some party or gathering where we would have been talking and plotting a future plan.
Our first salient memory when we began to look back was of a guy, one of the only other people in the theater that night, who fell asleep repeatedly during ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’, and gave up a very loud series of snores which left us both in hysterics. But while that made for a memorable outing, I wasn’t sure it was our first, but when the memory popped up on Skip’s FaceBook from January 2012, it seemed like that might have been the case.
However, on my third day with a flu that had me housebound, I wandered unsteadily into the guestroom where my date planners were roughly organized on a shelf, and I pulled out 2011 to see if I wrote down anything prior to 2012 about seeing a movie with Skip. Once upon a time I kept detailed notes on the daily events of my world (I’m a Virgo through and through) so I perused the pages and days of 2011. It took the whole year, but eventually I found the very first documentation of that first movie night, on December 27, 2011.
It made sense – we would probably have been talking about the new David Fincher film at a holiday party, and our shared love of dark and disturbing directors and their films instigated the movie date a couple of weeks later. I didn’t know then that one of the best friendships of my life was emboldening itself, gradually becoming a happy foundation and fundamental part of my adult years.
“Elegance is usually confused with superficiality, fashion, lack of depth. This is a serious mistake: human beings need to have elegance in their actions and in their posture because this word is synonymous with good taste, amiability, equilibrium and harmony.” ~ Paulo Coelho
Way back in 2003, when I first put this website up, I didn’t have any notion of how long it might last, but I certainly didn’t envision the year 2020 and a personal website’s endurance for such a stretch. That said, I’m happy to have had such an outlet. Artistic and creative expression is worth years of therapy – really good, intense, helpful therapy – and I will always find a way to express my artistic ambitions. Yet to the observant visitor, my posts have generally been on autopilot of the past few months, perhaps years, and my heart may not be in it as much as it once was. It began a few years ago when I took my first summer off from daily blogging and it was so wonderful. Reconnecting to daily life and living each moment as it came without thought of documentation or blogging about it reminded me of what we should be doing. Ever since then, it feels like we’ve moved into the fall, and now winter, of this site’s grand trajectory. It puts me in the mind of this music – ‘The Malady of Elegance’ by Goldmund. Do give it a long listen.
Winter is good, no matter how much of a bad rap it gets, and I’m as guilty as others have been in condemning it. Its stark harshness, its unrelenting viciousness – it all has a purpose. Yet as much as I know how necessary it is for the true enjoyment and health of a proper spring and summer, I still dread and recoil at the horror of its frigid days, its icy winds, its way with chilling the heart. But there is beauty in the cold, a beautiful crystalline truth and clarity that only comes when you strip away the leaves and foliage and flowers and examine the bare bones and structure of the world. It’s frightening, and I can admit that I’m a little scared, but it’s absolutely necessary, and ultimately it will prove beneficial.
And so we enter the wilderness of winter for this website. I’m not sure how it will all pan out, whether it will simply fade slowly away with diminishing posts, whether it will go out with some big glorious bang, or whether I’ll simply disappear without a word, vanishing into one of the hidden corners of the anonymous world wide web. I’ve been pondering my own mortality of late, wondering what might happen if I suddenly got hit by a car, my life instantly and unexpectedly snuffed out by some freak accident or tragedy. This blog would sputter out a few more pre-populated and then posthumous posts, a ghostly trick of our technological world. Those who only knew me here might think I was still alive, still writing and creating, when I would have already gone.
Such pondering of my own life found a focus in the past week when I was stricken with the flu, missing a couple of work days, a therapy session, and limiting the usual three-posts-per-day schedule this blog has managed to maintain. It put all those things into perspective, most especially the latter, and it suddenly dawned on me that the only person putting pressure on myself to do three a day, to maintain this pace and volume, was me. As I get older, and hopefully wiser, I am learning to let go of such perfectionist goals. I’m also learning to look ahead to the eventual end of this website as we know it. As far as personal blogs go, or websites in general for that matter, this one is a dinosaur, and I say that and own it with pride. Name your favorite blog right now and I bet I have it beat. This site is older than Twitter and FaceBook and Instagram. Think about that for a moment.
At 44 years of age, I’m way older than those social media sites as well, and some would, not inaccurately perhaps, proclaim that I’m too old to be doing a blog, and that blogs are all but over anyway, and that’s a fair take on the whole scene. The idea of a blog has likely passed its highest point of potency. There are too many easier outlets to make a creative name and channel for oneself. I’ve also grown a little too comfortable with the format and limits of this site, and any time the hint of stagnation rears its still head, I get a little restless and look for a new challenge. At this point in our technological history, that new challenge may be a return to a mainly off-line existence, an unplugged life not lived for documentation or recaps. Where not everything must be noted or annotated for future reference. When I think of the freedom involved in that, I get a little giddy. I almost want to slip away without word of warning or notice, in the middle of an otherwise ordinary night, never to return again, never to explain or say goodbye. Yes, that appeals to me as someone who has always preferred an Irish goodbye.
I don’t intend to go out in such a way, if I do in fact even have a say in it, so I’m hopeful I’ll get to design my own exit strategy, and we have a few more months or years to figure that out. It’s good to have a little preparation though, a plan of how this journey might go. The best thing about winter is that it is the springboard for spring, for the next rebirth. We will honor that in the snowy world. We will honor that in our slumber. We will rest and prepare for the next igniting of the phoenix.
As if the universe knew exactly which test to administer at a moment when I need it most and want it least, I’ve just been ferociously and furiously felled by a fever of 102.2 degrees and croaking a prayer that it’s not the dreaded flu. I’m typing this post out on my phone- a handy little trick about which I know the bare minimum, so bear with me as I alternate between chills and sweats. If you could see me now… anyway, cue Shirley MacLaine because I’m singing her song and seeing her visions and I’m way way fun to the casual observer when I’m sick, not so much to the devoted caretaker.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. ~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
One of the more noble-minded holidays we have in this country, this is the day on which we honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for all the work he did in helping us move toward equality for all. While it may seem like certain people are doing their damnedest to erase that work, it lives in anyone who carries on Dr. King’s dream in practice or in heart. We need to be a little louder now.
As for the past week, it was calm in reality, but somewhat tumultuous based on the blog posts. Some of them were written a couple of months ago and are only now being posted, while others are more vague ruminations on things that have been in the works for weeks. That sense of distance and detachment from the time that events happen to the time they get posted here is a necessary safety buffer for me, and once that I embrace. On with the recap…
January 6 has been reported as the saddest day of the year, and for a lot of reasons that’s tough to dispute. Everyone is throwing out their Christmas tree carcasses, the blush of the holiday season has long since passed, and the endless winter lays ahead without much hope or promise. For me, though, early January is filled with a freshness that’s not present at any other time of the year. I find early March or mid-to-late November the periods that strike me as the most depressing. In March, one is keenly aware of the length of winter, and it often brings its worst storms then. By late November, the trees have all turned brown and mostly discharged their leaves, leaving the landscape stark and barren, and the skies gray and dirty.
In January, there is still the freshness of snow, when it drops its white cloak on the ground and lights up the surroundings when sun or moon reflect their glow. It’s still possible to embrace the cold, to find wonder and beauty in the formations of ice, and to enjoy the winter wonderland. That won’t last long, and I see and hear a lot of complaints already. I suggest we find the good in what is at hand. The alternative is bitterness, and that won’t make the winter pass any quicker.
Between winter slumbers, we bide our time until the weather turns palatable again. This is when my attention shifts to the cellar, where the creative process finds expression and fruition, near the warmth of the fireplace, on the mid-century sofa, ensconced in a fuzzy robe. There are several projects on the horizon, but not on any grand scale. In fact, I’m starting with the embellishment of a favorite coat for an upcoming Broadway show. Nothing ould be simpler, nor more spectacular at the same time. My fingers have been aching from all the beading and needlework, but the coat will sparkle more brilliantly in New York City than anywhere else in the world. (Trust me, I have experience with beaded coats in the city.)
There is also planning afoot for the multitude of spring events set for 2020 – a year of anniversaries and milestones that will be done in a quieter manner than previous extravaganzas. An anniversary should be a lovely echo, a reminder of the original but not anything to match those early moments. A diminished set of expectations lends for greater magic.
Still, there is a hum happening already – a buzz, if you will, growing in intensity and excitement, and I will do my best to keep it in check. The bees are still asleep; the rest of us are quietly at work. All good things to those who wait.
