Soundtrack to Mairi

Today I went for a hike. Urban hiking, as it were. I went up and over hills, through pretty neighborhoods, skirted a race’s finish line and found myself at the Wave Organ. It’s one of my favorite places to take guests. It’s out of the way. It’s a gorgeous walk. And, well, it’s cool. If you’re a nerd. It’s one of the Exploratorium’s outdoor exhibits, an “acoustic sculpture” at the end of a jetty on the San Francisco Bay. I’ve only been there at high tide once or twice (and today wasn’t on of those times) but it’s neat regardless. Right now there are flowers blanketing and draping the installation in ways I’ve never seen before. I sat there on a day so much warmer than any other time I’ve been there and drank my tea, looking at the water to one side and the city to another.

I started this project with me at the Ocean. I’m ending it with me at the Bay.

To be honest, I’m a little glad it’s over. Not because I didn’t want to do it anymore but because the nice, clean end is giving me a chance to reflect on the last year as a whole instead of as a continuing thing. I’m considering more of what I want out of the next year. 

I also have ideas another 52 project but I won’t be sure which project I’m going forward with until I start it. We’ll see.

My room hasn’t been a place that I spent time in for a long time. It’s been a place that I slept in, a place that I shambled out of in the morning and didn’t stumble back into until I was ready to go to bed in the evening. I wanted to change that but I just kept not. There were other things that were more important.

Then, last weekend, I moved my bed. Once that was done, I reorganized my closet. Everything changed. I moved another bookcase into my room. Then a desk. With those gone, that meant the living room was unbalanced and everything in there was rearranged. I have a liquor cabinet now. The coffee table and couch were moved just inches but they align with the sliding glass door and the bookshelf in front of it and that line carries all the way through the living room. We took all the art down to give the walls and our eyes a chance to reset before we put it back up. It’s still stacked against each other, leaning against a wall.

It’s changed the whole apartment, that one small action of moving my bed, ninety degrees clock-wise.

My room isn’t quite the refuge I’d like it to be. I’d still like an arm chair, something to flop into and throw my legs over the side, something to read in for hours with a whiskey or a water, but that may be a little while. Still, there’s a desk in my room and somewhere to sit that isn’t the bed. I haven’t had either of those since I lived in a studio and, it turns out, I missed that.

I’ve seen this mural… 500 times? More? Then this week I get off the bus and I see it as if it were the first time. The whole mural is beautiful but this part, framed just like this, with that little swoop of graffiti along the jaw-line, stopped me in my tracks that day. It’s my phone background now.

I was flipping between full auto in the sun (because: lazy) and manual indoors and in the shade and ended up forgetting and doing a whole series of shots outdoor with the aperture wide and the shutter long. Woops. I almost trashed the whole, blown-out lot of them in post (I do very little but sizing in post) but then this gem showed up. I sort of love it.

This year the Asian Art Museum brought in a bell.  Short version: ring the bell to rid yourself of last year’s awfulness. Longer version: On December 31, they let 108 (groups of) people ring that bell to shed the year’s badness, to let things go. I had a good year. I had a really good year. I mean, just look at the last eight months of this blog. But I am not the only person in my life and a lot of my friends, a lot of my loved ones, have had really sincerely fucked up years. So I went.

I didn’t ring it because I didn’t need to but I went to stand witness. It was beautiful and it was glorious and I am not using any sort of artistic license  or hyperbole when I tell you that it nearly brought me both to my knees and to tears.

…

There’s this superstition that the way you spend New Years, that three seconds spanning from 11:59:59 to 00:00:01, is somehow indicative of how you will spend the following year. Begin as you mean to end it. I like that. I’ve given that some amount of credence, even if I know it’s self-fulfilling.

For the last umpty years, I’ve spent New Year’s on my own, on the couch, in comfy clothes, with a carefully-chosen book. I was with someone for a number of those years but we were usually in different time zones come the fireworks. Go on ahead and talk to me about the importance of NYE kisses. I’ll wait. I can’t remember the last one I had and I designed it that way. It was how I chose to be. It was how I wanted to be. It was how I wanted to be for the next year and I made it happen, plus or minus.

This year, I didn’t manage to finish the book before the book I had carefully chosen as my New Years read before the Big Day.

And so it begins.

I went out for a dinner. That’s unusual. I usually cook for myself. I had some superficial interactions that were aaaaalmost not… and then were. I had some deeper interactions. And after everyone who didn’t work there and who wasn’t a regular left, we kept talking and—drinking or no—my guard was already down whether they realized it or not and it would’ve been so easy to stay. But at 11:45, I pardoned myself.

"Y’all are great and I love you but I have a date with a couch, some sweats and East of Eden.”

So I left. To… to what? To preserve my tradition? To “predict” 2014? To solidify the theme for 2014 in my head? And I rushed. I rushed. There were no cabs. There were no busses. I was maybe twenty minutes out by foot and I had fifteen minutes until midnight so I rushed.

And fuck

that

rushing.

I was in a park near my home when the fireworks went off and people started yelling. There were horns. There was a small amount of good-natured screaming. I stopped on purpose in that liminal space between nurturing friends and manufactured privacy. I stood and looked across this beautiful goddamned city I live in and I breathed the fresh air and I let the moment happen and it was the most chaotic and peaceful I’ve ever been, all at once.

It was nearly 2am before I read another paragraph of East of Eden.

There is probably a lot more to say about that and what all this means (because I’ve decided it means… it?) but right now all I can see is that one transcendent moment between the chaos and the acceptance and if that is what 2014 has to offer me then I accept that moment as predictive.

I accept the roller coaster.

Please excuse the inevitable shrieking.

…

This is 39/52. 38 will need to wait a little while. It’ll make sense when I actually post 38.