Happy New Year (and Decade)

My first dream of the new year happened as I was being woken up by fireworks at midnight. I remember that in the dream we were playing a card game with several combined decks, including various kinds of non-playing card cards. Each player was dealt out 20 cards and had to present 7 as his final hand. It had come down to me and my brother Mike. I was quickly arranging my hand in what I hoped were winning combinations, try to find the highest runs and sets. I remember I considered adding a card called “Wonder” that had a sort of mandala design on it but wasn’t sure what it would count. I shuffle the cards apprehensively. Time is short.

2019 Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to all who may still look in now and then! What with the holidays and various distractions weighing me down, I have not been posting very regularly, and what I have been posting has all been groups of pictures just plucked from my favorite sites. I used to at least try to put down my thoughts about various aspects of life and popular culture. I think that if I have a New Year's resolution involving this blog, it is to include one essay on something each week; or if not an essay, an observation. I'm feeling old, and weary, and my health is not the best, but I think I can at least do that.

In the meantime, I find New Year's (arbitrary as it might seem) to be a sort of rallying cry, a point of the year to look around and gather your spirits. You really do need it. You come out of the highs and lows of Christmas and look around at the bleakest part of the season, raising your head out of the trenches you have unwittingly set your path into, and have to think (you really should) about how you got in this rut and if there might not be a better path to take. Arbitrary? Perhaps, but better an arbitrary reminder to begin than no beginning at all.

Notes on the Old Year

Well, the year started out a little rocky with my TIA (or mini-stroke), my loss of a job, and the amputation of my toe. And I have limped along (both literally and metaphorically) through the months. But I have accomplished a few things I wanted to do for a long time, in my spare time.

I turned all of my writing (short stories, verses, journals, the beginnings of novels, and dreams) into active documents. I organized our family archives into a rough order. I thinned my books, movies, and CDs, some by selling and others by gift, learning to let go of things. These acts were, in fact, fulfilling a few old New Year's resolutions.

So, new resolutions? I hope to do new writing, more for this blog. I need to get a job my reduced capabilities can handle. Other than that, the future is wide open. Good-bye till next year.

All Is Quiet On New Year's Day

The New Year is a very odd holiday. It is secular, almost arbitrary, and yet a set of traditions and rituals have come to cluster around it like every other celebration; but then you could almost define human beings as animals that make rituals, despite any beliefs or lack of them. It is a holiday that could be said to be only properly observed for one instant, at the stroke that changes December to January, and I know some people stay up to midnight to see it in and then promptly go to bed.

I spent New Year's Eve with family, eating pizza and chips and dip and drinking soda. We played party games (Catchphrase, Apples to Apples, Taboo) until midnight. This pretty much echoes New Year's when I was a child, except the adults ate black-eyed peas and pickled herring and drank coffee and played cards and dominoes, while the kids ran around and played and lived that parallel life just below the parents' radar, exactly like my nieces and nephews do now. Now as then at the stroke of twelve (marked in the old days by the radio, last night on cable TV) we all shouted "Happy New Year," couples kissed, and everybody shook hands. Someone in the neighborhood is sure to be letting off fireworks, no matter how dry the conditions are. The revels go on for an hour or so more, then everyone hits the road with cautions to watch out for drunks.

I am up now after about six hours of sleep (which is all I get these days anyway) and waiting for the majority of the family to wake up so I can make our special Holiday Breakfast: pancakes and bacon and fried eggs. Meanwhile I do some of my own little rituals. I've changed over my old calendar (a The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey from last year) and put up a new one (a temporary placeholder from a local real estate agent until I get a Desolation of Smaug edition). I have a bit of a quirk about calendars: I feel if you don't change the month right away that it's...well, not exactly bad luck, but a kind of stalling, backward influence on your life. I've made out a payment on an old bill from my book club (the SFBC) that's been nagging me for the past six months and that I've always put off, so I can start the year fresh and clear.

New Year's Day, no matter when it has been celebrated, has since ancient days been seen as a time to make oaths and vows, to examine one's deeds and resolve to make amends. New Year's resolutions are in this tradition, though for most of us the only promises we make are to ourselves, and we are the only ones we usually disappoint. But then, if you don't aim at the moon, you won't even reach the rooftop. New Year seems like a rather arbitrary time to resolve anything, since obviously you could make resolutions and be better for them at any point in the calendar, but something you can do anytime is all too often you won't ever do (like pay my SFBC bill!) unless you have some specific impetus to do so.

So as I await my summons to cook, I mull over a few projects I hope to work on this year. One is organizing the perpetual disarray of my image files, and keeping them in order. Another is getting the Family Archives winnowed down and put into some kind of shape. Another is to finally write up the backlog of subjects I have lined up for this blog (I seem never to like for matter, just time and energy!). I wish everyone good luck with any resolutions they might make this year. I know I shall need it.

Happy New Year!

Ring Out Wild Bells

Ring out wild bells to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty night:
The Year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells across the snow:
The Year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out the slowly-dying cause,
And ancient forms of petty strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

--Alfred, Lord Tennyson.