2024: A Blue Dispatch From Main Street
Social media encourages us to curate our lives, to offer up for public exhibition only the most favorable and relatable versions of ourselves. We make increasingly unsubtle adjustments to our photographs, buff our tarnished veneers, blur our frown lines to seem younger or healthier or more at ease. Rarely do we publicly report on the nagging doubts of the wee hours, the quagmires of professional or spiritual stagnation, the thousand tiny humiliations of the day that accumulate until the thankful oblivion of bedtime. When we stop and look back upon the landscape of our years, we want it all to make sense ... for our trials to acquire meaning, for our suffering to impart some moral lesson, for our labors to leave behind a treasury of dazzling talismans. Middle age speeds the passage of hours and lends to each anxiety a whistling intensity that does not lessen with time. That rising whine in one's ear is not the drone of an insistent mosquito but rather the sound of time accelerating, the ineluctable quickening towards death which we interpret as an imperative: hurry, hurry, hurry, the clock is ticking, make something of yourself, make good before it's too late. We fear that when we reach our final shore it will resemble a deadfall of squandered opportunities, regrets piled upon the berm of consciousness like so much driftwood.
To put it another way: it's late December, and I'm confessing to you that I haven't been doing so good.
I have nothing to lose here by being honest ... though I'll concede that anybody else's crisis can make for a tiresome slog if it lacks gravitas or punchy verbs, and there is little on this Earth as eyerollingly indulgent as the malaise of an aging artist. But please bear with me for a little while longer, and walk alongside me through this valley, and perhaps by the end of this letter we shall both feel a bit better about things.
I rarely post to social media these days, so the intermittent reports on my circumstances have been somewhat misleading. Judging only from my online activity, one might think that I'd finally found happiness and fulfillment in some bucolic country hamlet ... thriving far from the madding crowd, keeping musical company with woodland animals, skipping with a wicker basket towards the farmer's market, dreaming of gingham and blueberry pie. Viewers have been seeing only the sunniest snapshots of my life here: napping dogs, warm smiles shared over brunch, my irresistibly handsome boyfriend, a picturesque porch overtaken by Virginia Creeper. As a result, well-meaning commentators will blithely chirp, "So happy to see you living your best life!"
I'm sorry to report that the true picture has been much starker. All smiling photographic evidence to the contrary, 2024 was one of the bleakest and most frustrating years of my career. I've rarely been so unhappy, rudderless, or demoralized, and at many points I've been perilously close to giving up altogether. It seems I have already accepted some kind of defeat, though I cannot with any real specificity identify what battle it is that I've lost, or what I stand to regain by plunging once more into the fray.
There's been a reason for my relative invisibility of late. In the interest of sparing my loved ones any worry I've just started shelving rather than sharing my most alarming thoughts, writing then deleting vaguely ominous posts, avoiding the phone. I simply stay quiet during the quiet nights. Rather than reaching out to sympathetic girlfriends at 4:am, I'll just cry while standing at the fridge in my underwear and spoon cake frosting straight from the can. As Daniel and I often like to say, "Frosting thinks I'm pretty."
Let me back up and start again.
I rang in the New Year scooping dog poop. This is not in itself remarkable ... every single night, without fail, my partner Daniel and I walk our four handicapped dogs through the quiet streets of McEwen, Tennessee, a hilly country hamlet without stoplights or quaint storefronts or much in the way of charm. There are two kinds of rural Southern poverty ... the photogenic kind, with tilting barns and rocking chairs and an antiquey patina on its surfaces, and then the dismal kind, with dimly-lit Dollar Generals and tweakers who steal catalytic converters. We live amongst the latter. Anyway, we'd just spent the earlier part of the evening celebrating with some friends, but we went home long before the official countdown, something which would have seemed impossible to the fun-loving partiers we once were. Bailing on a New Year's Eve party was the kind of thing that Boring Old Farts did, not Cool Punk Kids like us. But, as it happened, the stroke of midnight found Edison, our deaf and elderly pit bull, copping a squat on the neighbor's yard, and thus the first meaningful action I performed this year was to clean up a steaming pile of shit with a plastic bag from Walmart.
In the dreariest stretch of February, I turned fifty. I can't remember doing anything of consequence on the day itself ... but right around that time I began to develop this intense melancholy, the realization that I was no longer living with the adventurous and productive pluck by which I had heretofore defined myself. Perhaps my best days were behind me, and all I had to show for my life was a landfill's worth of ignored artworks and unsold books. I had somehow maneuvered myself into an inescapable oubliette.
Nonetheless, I kept working. I finally finished my fourth novel, “THE FABULOUS MEDICINE SHOW”, a project that took over 34 years to complete. With great pride and enthusiasm, I dove headfirst into the challenge of trying to find professional representation, and I queried some 200 literary agents ... but despite a few promising nibbles, and a top-to-bottom six-week rewrite, I just couldn't get my manuscript past the gatekeepers of the industry. I sank back into the most intense despair, and nearly quit writing altogether. This defeat stung deeply, as the novel includes some of my most vivid and imaginative passages to date. For an artist, there is no pain quite like that of being unseen.
I licked my wounds and began again. I started previsualization on my fifth, sixth, and seventh novels (“THE ROAD TO VINEGAR HOUSE”, “THE GIRL WITH THE SHUTTERED LAMP”, and “TRAFARR”, respectively), and collated the first few essays of my fourth memoir, “HORSESHIT AND GLITTER”. Perhaps none of these efforts will gain any traction in an indifferent and impenetrable industry, but I will work hard to finish them anyway, on faith of their essential merit.
Overall, it was a year of too many rejections. I didn’t get into any of the residencies I applied to ... Yaddo, Bemis, Headlands. I was waitlisted for the Crosstown program in Memphis ... but that still effectively amounts to a "no", as I probably won't be able to fundraise on short notice or free up three whole months of 2025 for a "maybe".
As always, the studio has been my salvation. 2024 was exceptionally fruitful in terms of painting commissions, and my easel has never been empty. I sold out a limited edition run of prints in half a day. In a burst of activity, I executed "PARKER MEMORIAL", "IGGY I & II", "PHANTOM, "BEAR", "CHEEZ-IT', "EDISON", "AURORA", "PEACHES", "GIFT OF THE CROWS", "G IS FOR GAVIN", and began work on "NORTHWEST VIEW". I finished "INVITATION", "JEWELBOX", and "CRIMSON AND CLOVER OVER AND OVER" and started on two new canvases, "SNOOKIE OOKEMS" and "HARD CANDY". The latter is proving to be one of the most technically difficult oil paintings of my career, but it's off to a terrific start, and its luminous color is already signaling a major shift in my glazing technique.
I made a point of dedicating more time to reading, an activity which had taken a hard hit in busier years. I took in John Updike's "THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK", John Irving's "THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP", Joan Didion's "SLOUCHING TOWARD BETHLEHEM", Cormac McCarthy's "BLOOD MERIDIAN", Susanna Clarke's "JONATHAN STRANGE & MR. NORRELL", Joseph Campbell's "HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES", Andrea Stewart's "THE BONE SHARD DAUGHTER", Walter Miller's "A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ", and I re-read Henry Miller's "TROPIC OF CANCER", which blew my mind back in high school. I'm still trying to trudge my way through my dusty fourth volume of Proust, though I've admittedly lost some steam after three years.
Volunteering at a friend's farm, I planted two rows of heirloom tomatoes and helped set up a beehive. While there, I watched a pair of chickens fucking, a sight which looks as frantic and unromantic as one might imagine. I saw a partial solar eclipse while returning spoiled cheese.
I went to a high school musical production of “GREASE”, which brought back fond memories of my theater department friends, many of whom are still with me today. I tried studying Russian again for about five minutes, but had to throw in the towel when I realized that I wouldn't get anywhere without a structured curriculum, grammatical diagrams, cultural insight, uninterrupted study time, or real-life conversational partners. On a warm winter night, I snuck over to a bro's house to share in a clandestine bit of nookie; this seemed, however, to take us into some morally grey territory, leaving me unsatisfied and my would-be paramour wrestling with a guilty conscience.
I tried to get outdoors occasionally, and made use of a great local resource: Montgomery Bell State Park, a sprawling WPA-era gem comprising 3,850 acres of hiking trails, meadows, and rustic mid-century facilities. I've enjoyed several day hikes there, including one memorable afternoon when a friend and I tripped together on mail-order mushroom gummies. Deep inside the park's woodland lies the half-buried Laurel Furnace Cemetery, almost invisible now but for a small wooden sign and a few nameless markers leaning this way and that along a slope. Once, while waiting on a hiking buddy near the park's visitor's center, I got a friendly wave and a “Yeah, man!” from the indestructible Steve-O of "JACKASS" fame, marking my only celebrity encounter of 2024.
I rode as a passenger in a truck that hit a deer, and felt it die in my hands as I dragged it off the road. My fifty-year streak of avoiding poison ivy came to an end during an ill-advised hike at dusk, and I spent two miserable weeks scratching at blisters and wondering what I ever did to make nature hate me so much.
I resumed my therapeutic use of psilocybin, microdosing to alleviate the worst symptoms of my mental illness and to gain some perspective on the big picture. I'm hoping to get on a regular psychedelic regimen next year, one which might provide an ameliorating (if temporary) latticework to support my collapsing psyche.
While out walking the dogs one night, I witnessed the most astonishing meteor. Its white-hot line of fire crossed directly overhead, blazing in the indigo night with an undeniable message ... that vast cosmic forces beyond all reckoning are at work here, that the fragile planet we occupy is subject to sudden and cataclysmic change — whether it be by asteroid bombardment, celestial storm, or some such accident of galactic mayhem — and that none of our schemes, hopes, or expectations matter one goddamned bit in the grand scheme of things.
As will be true in any year, there were many losses.
My favorite pub in Boston, which was something of an unofficial campus annex during grad school, was gutted at the hands of a crazed arsonist. Here in McEwen, a neighbor's house caught fire under suspicious circumstances, and for the past few weeks its charred roof has been slowly collapsing in on itself. The ruin groans creepily at night, like something left wounded on the side of the road.
Three of my friends died in 2024, and I watched from afar as other loved ones mourned their own bereavements. April was a funny and sweetnatured coworker of mine from my short stint in aerospace manufacturing. John was a brilliant musician, a sparkling conversationalist, and a generous mentor to thousands of artists worldwide. Dudley was a pillar of the Dickson sobriety community, a man whose bright-eyed geniality could light up a room. A quote of his is repeated often among our circle: "I was really worried about something last year, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was."
Scams proliferated. I bailed out of the flaming wreck of Twitter, joined BlueSky, and was almost immediately catfished by an account supposedly belonging to an award-winning author. A lot of hot Japanese women on Instagram seemed very eager to date me, and my voicemail was suddenly swarmed by "book industry insiders" with Filipino accents and restricted call-center numbers who wanted to promote the books I self-published over two years ago. In a single day, dozens of malevolent actors with IP addresses originating in China, Russia, Mexico, and Poland tried to hack into my email.
My car, Scout, is beginning to rattle apart, and he needs more work than I can possibly afford. He's still getting me around, but I'm scared of taking him much further away than Dickson, twenty miles to our east, or Waverly, ten miles to our west, for fear of him giving out beyond the towing radius offered by my AAA membership.
Professionally and financially, this was my worst year on record, marking an even more precipitous decline than what I went through the prior year. I've never earned so little in my entire working life, and it's frankly embarrassing to look at the figures. The slump of 2024 was fundamentally tied to two major losses of 2023. First, my longest-term client relationship, with the Bank of America, came to a mysterious and deeply disappointing end. There was no explanation, no formal dismissal, no finality or closure, not even a termination email ... just a bewildering and sustained silence from the producer who I had faithfully served for fifteen years. Even after a few politely worded nudges, I never got any answers from her. Later that year, I lost another client, this time a friend who had brought me into the energy sector under the wing of his agency. As both breakups happened in 2023, it seems that this should all be considered stale news, with no bearing on the present ... but truth be told, the foundering of these two partnerships sapped what little professional confidence I had, so much so that I felt pretty much unhirable throughout all of 2024. I had somehow steered my ship into the horse latitudes, and its sails hung slack for lack of wind. This may seem to some like an extreme emotional overreaction, and on the surface my underemployment might appear to be nothing more than the most egregious kind of sloth ... but I assure you, this was most decidedly NOT the case.
Depression is an insidious thief, you see, and it will quietly rob you of the will to reach for anything. You can't just haul yourself up by the bootstraps if you've lost all sense of self-worth. You won't apply for a job if you believe deep down that you really don't deserve it.
Despite these setbacks, I did land a new client based in Brazil, and at their request I did some ghostwriting about the use of AI in business automation and workflow optimization. This presented an opportunity to learn a great deal about a growth area I'd known very little about, but it also illuminated some sobering realities about the changing corporate landscape. Unfortunately, this assignment turned out to be yet another brief tango ... the entire marketing department (including my awesome boss) got laid off with no warning two months after I came on board, and I got thrown out with the bathwater. It wasn't such a big deal ... I sensed that my role would soon be made redundant by AI anyway, as more and more boardrooms are prioritizing "content creation" over "writing" in the traditional sense, and the work itself was grossly regurgitative.
I got tasked with writing a few more legal essays for the plaintiffs of a personal injury lawyer. At present, this work occurs only infrequently ... but the experience of crafting each of these essays is highly rewarding, as it allows me to use my skills to help people in their time of need, and I'm hoping to turn this side-hustle into a real business sometime next year.
I moved furniture for a friend's home staging company, got hired to perform a major edit on young adult fantasy novel, and animated a Christmas-themed music video for a Massachusetts-based musician. One of the most unexpectedly taxing gigs came during a rainy weekend in Franklin, when I worked at a soggy taco stand for the Pilgrimage Festival, standing in ankle-deep mud and slinging overpriced nachos until my entire lumbar region throbbed. One entitled twenty-something princess refused to accept the "NO SPECIAL ORDERS" mandate from our line cooks, and she continued to snippily escalate the situation until I had to be restrained from leaping over the counter with a ladleful of piping hot pork hash.
The undisputed highlight of my year was a short trip back to Washington State, my homeland, to attend my brother's wedding and our father's 74th birthday. My brother and his bride put on a perfect wedding: simple, sincere, uncluttered by ostentation but featuring all the best components. They had recently purchased a vacation home on Hat Island, a small and insular community blessed by a commanding view of Possession Sound, and it was in this setting that our family experienced one of its finest moments.
While there, I didn't get to see nearly as many people as I wanted to, and I had to miss out on some visits farther afield, but the few reunions that did happen were truly restorative. I hiked past old haunts and childhood homes, watched salmon leap up the rapids of Granite Falls, and drank a cup of delicious clam nectar from Ivar's on the waterfront. I visited the famous mummies ("Sylvester" and "Sylvia") of Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe, two macabre but fascinating fixtures of my childhood. My father and stepmother took me up to the Big Four ice caves, an amazing (and dangerously fragile) natural feature of the Cascades. I took a deep dive into debauchery at my very favorite sex club, the sacred red lights of which did much to bolster my flagging self-esteem.
Back in Tennessee, the nearby town of Dickson held its second annual LGBTQ+ Pride festival, a surprisingly colorful and bustling affair that put an especially timely emphasis on trans visibility. Equally well-attended were the Mystic Maker's Market (a hotspot for witches, fortune-tellers, and the crystal pendant crowd) and Art In The Alley (a street fair for local artists and crafters). Seeing these things happen came as a heartening reminder that progress does eventually make its way to Smalltown USA ... even if it arrives in the form of rainbow swag, ren faire corsets, and palm-readers sporting shawls in the style of Stevie Nicks.
I attended two different campfires with two different sets of friends and ate rabbit stew in a house that my boyfriend had remodeled and sold long ago. We helped a trans neighbor file a police report after she had been harassed in a grocery store. I reconnected with a close pal whom I had insulted very badly; after a long and sad estrangement, she showed the courage and grace to extend an olive branch, and we gleefully resumed our conversation.
Along with half of America, I watched with horror as our nation once again showed its true face: gullible, mean-spirited, greedy, racist, undereducated, misogynistic, xenophobic, fearful, and foolish. While I have been very hesitant to "unfriend" people due to their differing political views, I've come to realize that I can no longer respect the opinion or judgment of those Americans who've demonstrated such a glaring lack of discernment with their vote. I've been having a hard time looking certain people in the eye. I even had to jettison a former patron after he posted a homophobic political meme that made me want to punch a hole in my studio wall.
Meanwhile, the picture in the bathroom mirror isn't so pretty. I no longer bother to suck in my gut or keep my clothes in good repair. I do manage to bathe, floss, and do my laundry ... but other than an occasional evening walk to the cemetery I don't get any real exercise, and as a result I look terrible. I've abandoned the local gym altogether, though it is open twenty-four hours a day and stands only two blocks from our house. I've come to feel that there is no joy to be found among its dumbbells and sweat-slicked pleather benches, and I discovered that even with adjustable speeds the treadmill still goes nowhere. My friends and family have noticed the resulting weight gain, and I cannot help but recognize in their eyes a strange alarm, something bordering on dismay or perhaps even disgust. People show surprisingly little tact when one has gained or lost a great deal of weight, though they may couch their judgments in terms like "concern" or "care".
It's strange how one can be fat and feel like they're starving to death at the same time.
To disguise the evidence of my physical deterioration, I've perfected the art of the flattering self-portrait ... a cheeky closed-mouth smile that delivers good dimples, a 3/4 view that is taken from slightly above the eyeline so as to hide my sinking jowls and double chin, a jaunty cap to cover my thinning hair, some judicious use of Photoshop to restore a little vibrance to my skin. Sometimes I affect a defiant insouciance about my lost beauty. "Fuck it," I sneer to the shampoo bottle, "I'm fifty years old and I've got nothing left to prove. Besides, I've gotten laid more often than any of you could possibly imagine. Who cares if I stopped being hot?"
I am now a quarter million dollars in debt, with no clear path to solvency. Because of the federal taxes that I owe, and the complicated tangle of my finances, I cannot receive any assistive credit from the Healthcare Marketplace. Thus, I will have no health insurance whatsoever for 2025. This lack of a safety net came into sharp focus one late night, when I suffered a devastatingly painful asthma attack and couldn't go to the emergency room.
I celebrated my twelfth year of sobriety without much fanfare. I am deeply grateful to be free from my dependencies on alcohol, tobacco, and other recreational drugs, but lately I've distanced myself from the recovery scene. For the most part, I've stopped going to AA meetings. AA has never been a real necessity for me, as maintaining my sobriety has become a fairly effortless thing, so I went mostly to support my partner, and to spend quality time with some of our favorite mutual friends. I realized, though, that these meetings were providing my ONLY source of real-world social interaction, and that I was pretty much going just to alleviate my loneliness and boredom. These don't seem like valid reasons to hang around the periphery of a twelve-step community, no matter how much I love the attendees.
So without the minimal interaction provided by those meetings, I've become completely isolated, and now rarely have much reason to leave the house. For the most part, I no longer go out to do things, other than making an occasional shopping run to Walmart, drying my laundry at the laundromat (our home's dryer crapped out), or maybe taking Daniel to a lunch date at the local greasy spoon. This, above all else, is why I've felt like I've been slowly dying since I moved here. The stormchasing derring-do of earlier years has been replaced by a life of startlingly small proportions and almost no variation from day to day. I wake up at noon, feed the dogs their breakfast, shower, make Daniel lunch, shepherd an increasingly incontinent pit bull outside every twenty minutes, try to do something productive with the non-contiguous scraps of the day, feed the dogs their dinner, struggle to move the needle forward on various studio projects, walk the dogs around midnight, eat supper and watch TV with Daniel at 1:am, then go to bed at 3:am. Rinse and repeat.
To be fair, though, things aren't all terrible on Main Street. Our home, which was built sometime before 1899, has a bird nest that sits atop a drainspout below the eaves, and this seems to function as something of an avian flophouse; we've seen both robins and house sparrows setting up shop on the same spot for the past three years. On foggy spring mornings I'd hover by the fake French door with its broken plastic mullions and sip coffee as the hatchlings strained towards their mother. Spring also brings the threat of severe weather; I still thrill to green skies and the sound of tornado sirens, though this crooked old shitbox would probably provide about as much protection from the wind as a chicken coop.
Daniel and I like to sit on our front porch and wave as the Homecoming and Christmas parades go by. These annual events are rather modest affairs ... little more than a handful of decorated jalopies and pickups, the high school marching band, a few floats covered in flapping crêpe and handwritten signs, smiling kids throwing fistfuls of candy, all of this pomp sandwiched between slow-rolling police cruisers ... but they bring to our life a warm measure of Americana, a feeling of neighborliness and tradition.
Weather permitting, I'll take a late afternoon walk to either of McEwen's two historic cemeteries. Along the way, I'll look to everyday details that appeal to my eye, accidental compositions that I've taken to calling "my little treasures": a pile of forgotten scaffolding rusting against a carport; an antique dinner bell hanging unrung on a garden post; hooded signal lamps on a crossbuck; a fallen Spanish oak, the limbs of which spear the soil like a sculpture by Calder; a grain elevator rusting at the edge of a field; a reflective pond nestled in a copse; a tool shed with two empty windows, through which one can glimpse a framed picture of lawn and sky. From far away, the train whistle sounds mournful and romantic. Deer forage between the graves of 19th Century Irish immigrants, turkey vultures flap from carrion on the tracks. The town's water tower stands gleaming and bold against the cumulonimbi, and it looks especially heroic when backlit by the setting sun. Encounters like these provide a few lifesaving morsels of beauty, just enough glory to survive on.
The one constant in my life over the past year, the one thing that has kept me going despite all my swiftly piling grievances, has been the love of a good man. Daniel is the best partner I could ever ask for ... smart, funny, talented, generous, loyal, easy on the eyes. He's a brilliant artist, a spectacularly gifted and soulful musician, a great cook. All day long we laugh and hug and hang off each other's shoulders. We understand one another so thoroughly, so intuitively, that we can speak in a shorthand of campy movie quotes, references to sitcom stars of yesteryear, faggoty bon mots, nonsensical non sequiturs. We use alphabetic fridge magnets to spell out love letters in the form of dialogue from "ALL ABOUT EVE" or "MOMMIE DEAREST" or "CARRIE". There is something about our shared sense of humor that seems to belong to a much earlier generation of homosexuals, the one that existed before the unfashionable version of AIDS wiped out so much of our tribe. We seem oddly anachronistic, he and I, a bit removed from the era in which we live. Our easy camaraderie brings us much comfort in troubling times. I can tell that the harsh daily reality of living with a suicidal boyfriend has been grinding against his optimism, but he tries his best to keep a cheerful demeanor. I'm so grateful for his companionship and patience, and am impressed every day by his wisdom, his work ethic, his strength. He's still my favorite human being.
Daniel is deeply beloved in his community. Because of his many tattoos and gregarious nature, everyone here knows who he is ... but in a good way. The ladies at the bank and post office adore him, especially because he bakes holiday fudge for them every year. The police officers all wave to us, and the sheriff cheekily calls our block "Rainbow Hill". The neighbors bring over extra produce and bags of snacks.
Our dogs remain at the center of our lives. It's their safety and comfort we worry about, not our own. They're constantly being showered with attention and praise, and they want for nothing. Edison, the deaf pit bull whose Number Two Special unceremoniously inaugurated 2024, is in the twilight of his life, and so I spend nearly every minute of the day with him by my side. Phantom, the blind and deaf Australian Shepherd, continually bashes butt-first into the furniture and is an utterly graceless goof ... but his happiness is infectious. My habit of sneaking him bits of lunch meat throughout the day results in the most eyewateringly abhorrent dog farts, but I don't care ... a dog this cheerful deserves to be spoiled. Cheez-It, the border collie born without eyeballs, is the most brazen of the bunch, and she fearlessly leads our pack on our nightly walks. Bear, the neurotic hound, is the caretaker and peacekeeper among us all. He won't finish eating until he knows that everybody else has been gotten their fill.
If I've achieved nothing else in my year, I know that I've helped to give these dogs a good life. They won't ever know the hardships of the street, the sadness and stresses of a shelter, the boredom of a crate. Somehow the devotion I've showed them has made me feel a bit better about myself. My reward comes in the form of their unconditional and uncomplicated affection, their constant proximity, their nuzzles, their tongue baths, their wagging tails, their spazzy and perfect loveliness. Their presence reminds me that any time spent in the selfless service of others is never wasted. They remind me that life doesn't cease being miraculous just because it is inconvenient, stressful, unmanageable, expensive, boring, or disappointing.
I worried all year long about how I wasn't going anywhere, feeling guilty about all this immobility. But even if I were to be sitting perfectly still — which in truth I haven't been — the planet I've planted my ass upon would still be racing around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour. On a more macrocosmic scale, our solar system has been hurtling along the galactic plane at 448,000 miles per hour, and the entire Milky Way itself has been screaming through the Virgo Supercluster at roughly 1.3 million miles per hour. Everything is in motion, and that motion is made relative by the scale of observation. In five billion years, our sun will burn through its stock of hydrogen, leaving its main sequence phase and bloating into a red giant, and after it blasts away Earth's crust there will be no more mention of tax liens or hemorrhoids or Cool Ranch Doritos.
For all of its disappointments, 2024 was only a short chapter in a very long story, and plenty of miracles have occurred in those 365 days. Many more epiphanies await us in the days ahead, as long as we don't allow ourselves to give up. For a little while longer, at least, we get to live in a world with pickled okra and Prokofiev and penicillin. There's so much left to live for, so much left to see: auroras in Norway, Atlas moths in Borneo, the great white sharks of Gansbaai, restored '57 Chevys prowling the streets of Havana. As for myself, I want to get lost in the souks of Marrakesh, I want to get lost in Prague. I want to photograph the vine-choked temples of Angkor Wat and stand at the gates of Auschwitz and ride a camel to Erg Chigaga. Everybody has places they want to go, and many of us feel that we're running out of time ... but we're always exactly where we're supposed to be, and the time we've got left is the time we've got left. Fate is only the simultaneity of past and future. One may just as easily achieve enlightenment in Dunkin' Donuts as in Dharamshala.
Sometimes there's nowhere to go but inwards, and that's okay.
As I write this, Daniel and I are facing each other in a pair of ratty old armchairs, tapping on our laptops and drinking coffee as rain pummels the tin roof. We just had the fireplace fixed, and now two of our dogs lay in peaceful repose before it, the very picture of domestic tranquility. Nag Champa smoke rises from the mantel. And for a moment, just one quietly shimmering moment, all is well. I'm fine. Daniel and the dogs and I are fine. Existence is unutterably beautiful. Main Street sends its regards.