So where the hell did this year go? Ok, sure, I spent a quarter of it out of the country - about a third(!) of the year traveling total - but still, wasn't I just lamenting not having a date for last year's New Year's celebration, and then getting frustrated with getting the idiots at the body shop to replace my car window after some vandal broke it out?
I have retired to the Judge's Bench to consider the question. Thought about heading down to Leadbetter's or something, but goofed off on the computer until almost 11, and decided I didn't want to stink up my clothes with cigarette smoke. Not a trivial consideration when the laundry facilities are disrupted by construction and you have to rely on the laundromat.
Went to one last week. Odd how using a laundromat in some odd way makes me feel young, takes me back to when I lived in the dorms or apartment. Two notable things about this one. First, my first exposure to standard daytime TV in quite a while. Ellen Degeneres had on a kid with a talent for jumping, leaping over cars, whose great wish was to have his own Nike shoe and commercial - and I'm thinking, is this what we've come too? I dunno, maybe it's the contemporary equivalent of the Wheaties box - but as far as I know, Wheaties never used sweatshop labor...
Second, the bulletin board on the laundromat wall. All the notices, the ads, in Spanish. Every one of them.
Past few days - Solstice and Xmas stuff. Friday, Yule dinner at Joe's. Saturday, Hillary's Nth Annual Yule Party. Sunday, holiday party at Kyoshi Kate's. Monday, Xmas Eve, a firer and drum circle in the woods of Columbia, went to that with Jen. Tuesday, Xmas dinner with the parental units, then went over to visit with Kathy for a while.
Yesterday - tore up most of the utility/bathroom floor, four layers of old tile down to the cement slab. Went to Home Depot to scope out wall panels and floor treatment - returned today to buy the wall panels, which as it turned out I had to strap to the roof rack to get home. A bit more interesting that I planned. And I'm going to have cut them a bit to fit, and I realized I got the wrong adhesive - ah, the endless joys of home ownership.
Hmm, that's a good phrase for a writing exercise...
the endless joys of home ownership, the endless joys of home, the simple joys of having a home, warm dry place to be, to keep your stuff, to sleep and shower
the joys of home, when the whole world is one's home...the odd sensation of being on the shinkansen, coming from Nagoya to Osaka, coming into Kyoto, the Kansai area, and thinking, same as I go when I cross the Maryland border on an trip out of state - "ah. home." Can I have many homes? Polyamorous with respect to homes? "I have this relationship with Baltimore, but, you know, it's sort of an open thing.."
the endless joys of home ownership. endless joys. yeah, right. look, there is no endless joy, live continues its ups and downs, there's not some thing to get or idea to know or person to love after which life is joyful forever. Because what would you do? You'd adapt to that new baseline and no longer feel it as joy. the endless ups and downs of life, of everything.
the endless joys to the world, the lord is come, the endless christmas carols on the radio and the muzak recordings in the malls and office buildings, I need to write a couple of Solstice carols. But I had a thought the other day about the whole birth-of-christ messianic thing, something like this: that every baby is the Baby Jesus, a chance that he/she will get it right this time, figure it all out for the rest of us. It's the possibilities, the endless possibilities and hope, that are celebrated whenever a child is born, same as the Christ-child. If all newborns are the same, white-noise consciousness not yet filtering into any sort of signal, then every child born is born as the Christ-child. Endless joy to the world.