The full moon called to me last night, without warning or preparation, as I found myself on an errand and looked up to find her there, low in the sky, dancing with the bare tree limbs of late winter, and playing hide and seek as if it were possible for a full moon to hide in the barren sky of winter. She ducked behind branches, obscured herself in evergreen boughs, but her light shone through it all.
She followed me as I finished my errands, rising and changing from a soft shade of canary to a pale white as the night turned black. I captured her on the rise, when there was still blue in the sky, when a hint of spring rode on the breeze.
This is the Lenten Moon – also called the Worm Moon – and it’s the final full moon of the winter. Another sign of the season of slumber winding down. While this moon was going up, I saw Jupiter and Venus descending in the sky. All this planetary action feels exciting, signaling the earliest shift from winter to spring.
At this time of the year, my weekly pilgrimages to Faddegon’s are the only thing keeping my plant-loving soul alive. Starved for greenery and life as we await the slow-to-come end of winter, I whisper a prayer for an early spring, or at least a respite from the winter weather we’ve had of late. Speaking of prayers, the stunning foliage pictured here is from the prayer plant, a tricky plant I won’t even attempt, as much as I love the way it folds up its leaves at night as in prayer, giving it the common name. They are rumored to be too finicky for my basic plant care routine, and the spider mites love them, so I just need the stress.
They remain, however, ravishing, as you can glean from these glimpses. The mottled pattern and varying shades of green of their leaves look like a visual essay on painting – a vital jolt of beauty while the outside world remains gray and brown and barren.
A Monday in March, when the calendar still reads of winter, can feel like one of the sadder days of the year, especially when the time change is still on the horizon (is this really the last one ever?) The question hangs in the air, like Monday takes its time to pass, crawling to a slow but hopefully inevitable end.
Outside, the pool looks like a little pond, a calm and quaint version of the riotously green visage that will return in just a few months. Winter’s slumber is not quite done. The re-charge continues…
Here we are at March, the month in which spring will arrive ~ whether or not the weather will mirror that remains to be seen. At the moment, it very much feels like winter, with one of our bigger snowstorms having just dumped a fresh crop of white stuff on us. With that in mind, let’s rush through this next week, on the way to spring, the sooner the better…
The tea kettle whistles from the kitchen, beckoning me to deeper warmth. Pouring the steaming water into a tea cup, I embrace the ritual, finding solace in the customary motion. The body and the mind lead one another – when the mind is stubborn and unwilling, putting the body into motion sparks the familiar sensations, and the mind follows. Alternately, when the body is not up to the motion, the mind may lead, and the desire for those same sensations sparks the movement. Taken together, the happy denouement of a warm cup of tea in hand staves off the coldness of another winter night.
“I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do. If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me.” ~ Oscar Wilde
The water in the crystal vase long ago dried up, but the roses largely held their form, still recognizable as roses, and from a distance still giving off the approximate form of their lush beginning. The rich rosy resonance has dissipated, any scent that remains is tied to decay and desiccation – a not-quite-fragrant embodiment of the word ‘faded’, the way you expect an antique to smell – dusty and ancient and dry.
Memories fade in a similar way, regardless of how many times we go over them in our heads, trying as we might to hold onto every detail of events and people that matter to us. In the end, all we have are hollow approximations of what came before, and they grow more hollow and empty with each passing hour.
“I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.” ~ Oscar Wilde
Youth fades too, and the plump full faces and skin cells of our younger years become gaunt and tired and saggy. Hair grows brittle and gray, as if being drained of life, and our senses grow dull and weak. It’s been a process that I haven’t been as bothered by as some had predicted, myself most of all. Perhaps that’s why it doesn’t seem as scary as I thought it would be. I was preparing for worse, and maybe that’s still to come. No one is spared the indignity of age if we are lucky enough to achieve it.
“But we never get back our youth… The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.” ~ Oscar Wilde
And so we attempt to still time, to create something that lasts, a way to enshrine our memories, a method of preserving what has happened with the keen eye of what is current. This blog has come to embody the stilling of time in a certain sense, the way it freezes a moment, a memory, a photograph. These are the many pictures of Dorian Gray but in reverse – they stay the same while the rest of us grow old and whither away. It’s the way life should be, no matter how much we may rail against it.
“There is no such thing as a good influence. Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtures are not real to him. His sins, if there are such thing as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.” ~ Oscar Wilde
In a high scratchy collar decidedly not made of silk lace, in ropes of pearls around neck and wrist, I bind myself to another past, to another world, to another life. Tethered by trinkets and all that is trite, I have tied myself to an image entirely of my own making, and even if I have devised it to be shape-shifting and morphing and boundlessly expansive, it remains limited by my own failure of imagination. It is a trap, laid carefully by desire and fantasy, made pretty and frivolous and silly so as to mask its terrifying necessity, and the only way out is to become someone else.
If you’ve been yourself for as long as I’ve been myself, you’d be tired too.
“It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us.” ~ Oscar Wilde
The first whispers of wisdom, when we finally start to listen to them, are naturally upsetting. There is no way to face the reality of this life without feeling sadness, a sense of fatality, and futility. The second whispers of wisdom, if we haven’t given up listening, are the ones we hear when we realize that we are not the end of the world, that the wonder and the horror and the glorious muck we have made of things will not end with us. That comes with its own menace and regret, but wisdom’s work is not quite done. It will follow us around until we are finally ready to listen again – and if we are still alive, and still listening, the whispers reveal the wisdom of those at peace, who have reached a certain stage of grace and happiness and contentment. The beginning of enlightenment, perhaps, if you believe in that sort of thing.
Sadly, I’m nowhere near that last bit of wisdom, however I am starting to listen again. The music is faint, but I know it’s there. Maybe it’s a song for another time, and another blog post. Maybe it’s a song you don’t want to hear. Maybe it’s a song I’m not quite ready to hear. And so I leave it here, for however long this fading corner of the internet remains in place. When we are ready for it, and I hope we will both be ready one day, may we find our way back.
Truth be told, Angela Bassett has been doing the thing for years. She easily earns this Dazzler of the Day thanks to another year of winning performances on screen, including her award-winning turn in ‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’. From her star-making role in ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It’ through spellbinding work in ‘Waiting to Exhale’, ‘How Stella Got Her Groove Back’, and dozens of other movie and television roles, she has amassed too many award nominations and wins to name, and she remains at the top of her game.
“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.” ~ Oscar Wilde
Courage and sin sometimes go hand in hand. Unlikely bedfellows, their dance is often as incendiary as their uncoupling. When two things that don’t seem to go together find union, the results are unexpected and jolting. It presents something new to the world. New things, at this late stage of life (and it is definitely starting to feel like the end times) are strange and wondrous and welcome. We each seek the thrill of a new experience, no matter how old we get.
“I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.” ~ Oscar Wilde
A ring and an earring dance on a saucer below the shade of a tea cup. Delicate steps of gold and pearl leave dainty taps against a landscape of porcelain, while shimmering light shards of diamonds cut across the curve of a cup. What simple magic there is to be found at the bottom of a tea cup… and beneath it.
“Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.” ~ Oscar Wilde
We say we want to know everything, we say we want to learn, but we don’t really mean it. How much peace comes from understanding? Solving a mystery rarely brings the complete satisfaction for which we supposedly strive, and the mysteries that remain in life are the only things that carry much interest. When you discover the secret of the magic trick, the magic is instantly erased. I wonder why we want so badly to excise all the magic from the world.
“In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.” ~ Oscar Wilde
A smoky candle burns beside a dried rose. A string of pearls winds its way around a silk scarf, an exquisite study of spheres, serpentine like the tendrils of some gorgeous perfume trail. Flecked with gold, the tea cup refuses to spill its secrets. When confronted with certain moments of beauty I don’t know whether to flee or cry. Beauty makes the heart hurt.
“Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.” ~ Oscar Wilde
Muted are the sights and sounds of winter. March may bring storms and wind and other such fury from time to time, the proverbial lion making its dramatic entrance and roaring its arrival, but there are still a few weeks of winter left, weeks that may likely be gray and drab and colorless. There is beauty here too, though, something I’ve only recently discovered in trying to making peace with winter. The beauty of winter, for me, is in these quiet scenes – before or after a snowstorm, when the world is bracing itself for something, or creaking a sigh of relief beneath a pretty snowfall. There’s a hush that happens unlike the quiet of any other time of the year, buffered by the snow cover and aided by the hibernation or migration of noisier summer residents.
If you look closely here, you can see the buds of the Chinese dogwood. I’m hoping the worst of the cold temperatures are over, as a spell of sub-freeing temps may mean disaster for this spring’s crop of flowers. That’s always the risk at this time of the year, and after all this time I should have learned not to worry about that over which I have no control. The buds aren’t concerned, so why should I be?
These blues are not the sad and sorrowful sort, but rather the bright and hopeful tints seen in the sky on a recent winter morning. While we’ve had some snow of late, with more scheduled to come, we have arrived at March – the month in which spring comes with all its bluster and tumult. Far from being out of the woods, it’s still a good place to look ahead and focus on the coming spring and summer seasons, and that does my heart good.
As antsy as Andy and I are for the weather to soften and the sun to appear in full force, I’m taking a moment to appreciate the beauty of a winter morning. The wind has been kind enough to leave some of the snow on the pine boughs, mirroring the scattering of clouds in the sky. Considering how beauty works so wondrously makes me believe the world is more than a bunch of random acts and images. There is purpose here, and design, and meaning. It speaks to all the senses, even the metallic taste in the air signaling snow on the move.
“That’s the thing with a diary, though. In order to record your life, you sort of need to live it. Not at your desk, but beyond it. Out in the world where it’s so beautiful and complex and painful that sometimes you just need to sit down and write about it.” ~ David Sedaris
Whether you break the time down by acknowledging that I am teetering on the upper side of middle-age, or do the math that the two decades of this website have documented about half of my adult life, this website would only document about half of my existence.
In fact, that doesn’t even come close. Had I posted all of my diaries and journals since the Garfield-the-cat one I had in grade school, you still wouldn’t be able to get more than a slight glimpse into my life. Whenever I read biographies or autobiographies, I always find myself wondering about all that isn’t said – and that’s a tell on myself. The vast majority of my life is lived off-line; I come here to regroup and summarize, and to try to make sense of specific parts of it. Then I share that with the world, in as palatable a form as possible while eliciting some silver thread of entertainment. Through that process comes a sort of catharsis, a way of talking abut things not that far removed from therapy, but void of any guidance or challenging questions that therapy so helpfully provides.
“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” ~ Oscar Wilde
“The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.” ~ James M. Barrie
Putting my messiness down in words here has absolutely helped me figure certain things out over the last two decades. Aside from the simple documentation of what went down on any given week, I can look back and see how various events shaped and influenced various moods, and vice versa, then better deal with similar incident in the future. Life is repetitious in many aspects – too often we get bogged down in repeating our own actions and reactions without realizing what we might change or learn from them. Seeing it here, in printed searchable format, I can analyze and become better – and isn’t that the whole point?
But even that’s going further than necessary: most of the time the act of putting it down, regardless of follow-up analysis, is enough, and I’ve been consistently surprised at this when it happens. It just came up when I was reminded of my childhood friend Jeff who ended up committing suicide in high school. That incident, and that lost friend, haunted me for years – far longer than this website has been I existence – and try as I might, I could not shake it. I never revealed that, however. I had written a lot about it, without noting how much it had affected me in the ensuing years. Last year I did just that, and in heaves of relief and regret, I put it all down in this post. Ever since that moment, the ghost has never returned, and I haven’t thought of Jeff in that way for months. Far more happily, when I do think of him, it’s not in a frightening, this-must-be-blocked-immediately-and-forcefully-because-it-hurts-too-much way. Rather when I pass his old house or our elementary school, I find the hurt has for the most part healed – never fully forgotten, but no longer the debilitating force it once was. When I formulated all of that into words, the relief was instant and tangible.
Similar catharsis came when I wrote this letter out to the first man who ever kissed me. Tom had been my first gay experience, and for all of the romantic innocence I exhibited at the time, and all the foolish first-steps of finding my gay footing, it was not the wonderful and fabulous foray into the community of which I might have been secretly dreaming. In fact, it was fraught with doubt and danger, and Tom did nothing to offer guidance or advice – in fact, he clearly and coldly told me he wanted nothing to do with educating anyone, and since he had to find his own way, he thought everyone should. It took me years to forgive myself for not standing up to such a selfish stance in that moment, and then more years to forgive myself for thinking I had to forgive myself. In the end, it was the simple writing of his name in a letter which set that ghost free. I haven’t thought of him since then, until trying to conjure this post in fact, and now it no longer hurts to recollect that time in my life.
That’s the power of a diary when done with care and intent and deliberation. It’s not enough to write the daily machinations of a day – one has to write what one fears and does not yet understand, and in the release of that comes a certain exoneration. It’s a tricky process, however, at least for me. I’ve written about many things over the years and they will continue to haunt and nag at me – only when I hit at the specific issues, and the things I’ve hidden even to myself, does the release and magic happen. Knowing what that is, and what it feels like, is what keeps me doing this.
“In the diary you find proof that in situations which today would seem unbearable, you lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand moved then as it does today, when we may be wiser because we are able to look back upon our former condition, and for that very reason have got to admit the courage of our earlier striving in which we persisted even in sheer ignorance.” ~ Frank Kafka
“Keep a diary, and someday it’ll keep you.” ~ Mae West
A streak of amber would-be-warmth if the rest of the world wasn’t conspiring entirely against it.
The carcass of a seagull, desiccated and hollow, sits forlornly on the beach – a veritable embodiment of the shells our bodies are. At odds with all other memories of seagulls, and a disconcerting juxtaposition of all my memories of beaches, it somehow brings peace to us.
Brutally ruinous winter has ravaged this crux of land and sea, sending tourists to warmer climes and natives to their hearths, while we stand unbothered and alone in the wind and the sand and the flying flotsam of ice and salty water. The tip of the tongue can still taste life in the air that way – in its salty, mineral, most basic elements – clinging to the chapped lips and waiting to be devoured.
There, with the entire world and twenty years ahead of and behind me, the sea birds soar beyond the beach that still holds their missing brethren. A fleeting thought of panic rises, when it all feels useless and futile, then it falls away as the ocean laps gently, as the wind takes pause, as the sun feels like it will return after all.
In the winter of 2003, I started writing it down here.
While a stomach flu threw a wrench in most of the plans for this past week, shit still managed to get done, and as we close out this wretched and final full month of winter I want only to race forward. Big things are happening this week, as we mark the official 20th anniversary of when this website went live way back in 2003. Two decades baby! But first, a look back at the last week as we always do on Monday morning.
Things began in fine family form with a sleepover with the twins, a trip to Saratoga, and a family dinner wherein Jaxon Layne made his first visit to our home.
From there, it was shit city, as that nasty stomach flu that’s been going around hit me hard. I’m still awaiting that first solid bowel movement, which I’m confident will be as glorious as everyone is imagining it to be. #StayStrong
Andy happily left the platform months ago when that idiot-savant-minus-the-savant Elon Musk took over and began its long slow drive into the ground. Musk seems hellbent on taking down Tesla along with Twitter, as both companies are tanking in the real world. Oh well, this is why we can’t have nice things. The whole platform is slowly crumbing, as evidenced by messages like the one below, which is becoming more and more common. Social media society… I still don’t know…
This is that time of the year when everything outside starts to feel icky. Whether it’s another snow/ice storm (or something called graupel that a certain wimp in Santa Monica, Cali-fucking-fornia was bemoaning because it wasn’t 75 degrees outside), the weather is turning on its rollercoaster-like menace, zigging when we want to zag and vice versa. It’s also the time of the year when the streets turn to absolute crap, filled with treacherous potholes that are always bigger than they seem, and caked in dirt and salt and grime that will then cement itself to your car before you even get it home from the carwash.
My apologies – this hasn’t been the calming Sunday morning post I wanted it to be, but winter is a necessary reminder that life isn’t all sunshine and lollipops. The sooner we realize that the sooner we can get on with it. The initial bitterness that began this blog is being tempered as I look outside at the snow gently falling. It’s not at all unpretty. It gives pause to the day, presents the helpful conundrum of determining whether what I had planned is truly necessary. Do I need another shopping trip to Homegoods? Isn’t our home already good enough? When I think in those terms, ‘good enough’ becomes the new goal. I am finding comfort in that, great comfort, and such a reframing is a wonderful thing, especially at the end of winter.
Despite this dip in temperatures, and winter’s reassurance that it isn’t quite ready to budge, my heart remains hopeful, and my thoughts will indulge in the coming of spring. February is almost done… the pavement is coming, dirty or not, and the snow will go. It’s all happening.
