Category Archives: General

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.

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.

Every once in a while I see something on social media that reminds me of its original wonder. The other day it was a fleeting sentiment posted by someone whose name now escapes me, and I can’t find it anymore, but the words live on, and they have wisdom:

“I need to be best friends with a crow.”

This is the energy I want to see, this is the attitude I want in my social media feeds.

Self-amusement is the simplest and fastest route to happiness that I’ve found. This was evident to me even as a child – not so much the way it led to a happy life – what could I know about life at six or seven? – but the basic mechanism of amusing myself was something I figured out relatively early. If there was one thing I had and honed more than most people around me, it was my imagination. Many children do, but we drill it out of them as they grow older, not trusting those flights of mental fancy found in frilly tea parties and the lives of dolls or stuffed animals.

Of all the rooms I inhabited as a child, my imagination was the one in which I spent the bulk of my time. As such, I would conjure lands and realms of fantastical adventure and delight, all within the space of solitude, and it was quite simple to turn this space into one of amusement and fun.

These days my imagination remains blessedly intact, taking the form of further self-amusement, which finds me laughing kindly at the foibles of myself and others, imagining the silliest of scenarios or reactions of friends to my various nonsense, and I’ll laugh – alone, in public, at inappropriate times, such as when I took these selfies during cafe culture – and I’ll absolutely love it.

The one who speaks in memes should not be tolerated.

#TinyThreads

Paper snowflakes hang in the window of the cafe, the kind we used to make in grade school, of folded white paper and intricate yet simple cut-outs. I never had the mind to know what sort of design would result, so mine were always a mystery until the final reveal, and never as lovely as some of the more beautiful ones that other kids created.

The decorative demarcation of seasons and holidays, hung on the walls and windows as a way of guiding our children and ourselves, of making some small semblance of sense from a world gone all disorderly chaos and meaningless madness.

Childhood memories are trapped in all that papery snow, hidden in the little holes and etched in every line of this approximation of frost.

Someone at the counter asks if they have lemonade.

“We only have lemonade during summer,” comes the friendly let-down.

Suddenly I miss summer, as if I’d forgotten to do so in the rush of holiday mayhem.

What an unpleasant reminder.

It had been a full week since I’d ventured outside – meaning it had been a full week since I left the house in any way. To be honest, as we all should be because what’s the point otherwise, two of those days had been totally lost to the haze of sickness – the rest of the time I was slightly more aware, but only slightly, and all was shaded with the cloudiness that has come to represent this Winter Obscura. Never let it be said that when there’s a theme I don’t lean all the way into it. Extra is my only mode of existence.

It strikes me, having been away from the daily rituals of life for a bit, how much work and effort is involved in simply getting out of the house, and as daunting as it felt first thing on a dark Monday morning, I did what I usually do: broke it down into manageable bits and sections, and slowly charged my way through the day, minute by minute, hour by hour.

Baby steps upon re-entering the realm of the living.

No definitive verdict yet on whether it’s good to be back.

A look at my antiquated WordPress dashboard leads the weekly recap (and gives a sneak peek of several future Dazzlers). This was a week where my body forced me to not just slow down, but completely stop, as a non-COVID flu-like thing ravaged me for a full seven days. My body tends to do that every few years, as I’m not prone to sickness like this (I can count two bouts of COVID since 2020 and maybe one flu in all that time). Luckily, most of the weekly posts were written before I was out of commission – have a gander at that nonsense and let’s start 2026 the right way this week.

A new tea cup proved a good friend during times of sickness.

For the love of lunacy.

My 3 AM vice. What’s yours?

“Even when I feel like shit, they still love me.“

A seemingly-unadorned bundt.

“You don’t have to ask us to forget what you just said. It’s the damn default.”

Look who’s killing the white women.

Abstract obscura.

How do you eat an English muffin?

I am Woodstock, hear me chirp.

Smells like Madonna.

The lost art of cursive.

In sickness and in mess.

The age-old battle: who’s hotter, David Beckham or Ben Cohen?

Saturday night right.

The road to the Winter Olympics in Milan, Italy begins with this spotlight on Ilia Malinin.

Our country is a cartoon, and I say that with hard love.

A wonderful winter read.

Dazzlers of the Day included Ari Seth Cohen and Alysa Liu.