One of the nice things about having kept an online journal back in ye old golden days of the internet, when we were still making fun of the word “blog,” (she says in a wavering ye old golden girls RIP Betty White voice), is that I had a record, of sorts, of my life. Fully curated, obviously, for all that we were promising each other naked emotional honesty and completely obscured personal information (sorry, “completely obscured”) because our greatest threat was a stranger from the internet appearing at our doorstep, utterly disarming us by their knowledge that our name wasn’t CandyKane56 BUT IN FACT Belinda (this is just an example, you understand) and in that moment of pure unbridled terror because our true faces had been revealed, sweeping us away to their Dungeon of Ultimate Terror where there was no wifi or even ethernet cables.

Right, anyway, if I wanted to look back and see what the actual fuck I had been doing all year, I could flip through the entries and smile fondly at the shenanigans of Past CandyKane56, and chuckle indulgently. And now it’s new year’s eve eve and I am sitting here trying to remember what happened. I don’t even remember what the hell memes were coming at us fast and furious early this year.

I stopped writing; my book came out to kind reviews. I took up embroidery after Failures of Counting thwarted all my cross stitch attempts. I confronted my mortality after a couple of seizures? I think that was this year. I tried to come to terms with the fact that my eyes were almost too bad to even embroider and bought a head-mounted magnifying glass that I have not managed to bring myself to try, because it looks too ridiculous.

I lost an important tooth; I lost an important tooth appliance. I grappled with the fact that teeth are considered “optional bones,” when it comes right down to it, medically speaking, and are prohibitively expensive. I wished I could afford teeth.

Along with my writing moratorium, I stopped reading anything but romances and YA and realized that my field of fucks was sown with only middle fingers, and the corpse of a former English major who still makes shitty comments about the punctuation and grammar was buried head-first in the loamy soil, nourishing the land.

Crom remained the most expensive healthy senior dog fucking EVER, when after having his enter limb reassembled from scratch and he had to have an eye taken out, THEN a lump of cancer needed to be excised for the cost of all the dollars in the world, most of them our grocery budget, and then lots more really fucking expensive lumps to check for cancerousness. (None found to our great relief, despite the absolute flood of money out the door).

I reconnected with some of my oldest friends, and lost touch with some new friends as I sunk into pandemic depression. I got depressed. I didn’t understand why living was still a thing that had to be done. I renewed my promise to Crom to stay alive at least as long as he did. I promised my wife, too, and kind of against my will.

I struggled with my drinking. I quit for a whole year; and then, because for whatever reason I truly believed that not drinking meant Missing Out, I tried to be a Regular Normal Person Who Only Occasionally Drinks but that didn’t really work out for me.

I raged, again and again and again and again, so often and so unhinged, at the unfairness of losing my best friend. I did laugh when I realized he would have laughed at the irony, he really would have — the last-minute transplant just in the nick of time, just when everything seemed lost. The transplant a failure. I didn’t really laugh. I wondered when it would stop hurting.

I felt so disconnected and so plugged in to the terrors of This Modern World, of Late-Stage Capitalism, of Not Knowing How to Explain to You That You Have to Care about Other People, fascism and breathtaking selfishness and how we keep blowing through threshold after threshold, turning point after turning point, point of no return after point of no return and the Here Be Dragons sign just up ahead, or have we screamed past that one too?

I’ve struggled with a way to make any of this meaningful, to turn any of this into hopefulness, to go back to being the person who genuinely fucking believed that the moral arc of the universe really did bend toward justice because how could it not? How could it not? No, tell me why it can’t. Help me out here.

And I’ve sat here typing and backspacing for more time than I want to admit, trying to come up with something pithy and wise, smart and strong and meaningful but not twee, not a total and unremitting collapse into the bottomless drama mines, not something empty and useless. But it occurs to me that I also am tired of the idea that it is an empty, useless thing to hope and to care and to wish for better things. I have been trying to be a better person for most of my life, and always secretly convinced that I’ve been a failure at it. I am going to keep trying to be a better person, and keep trying to feel like I’ve earned my particular carbon footprint, keep trying to Art and keep trying to make sure people know how important and lovely and special they are, in the micro, and keep trying to figure out justice and how to help make it happen, as a battering ram or an encircling shield or a field full of nourishing fucks in the macro, and see where that takes us. Who knows? There’s no certainty anymore, that much I’m certain of, but I guess we do what we can.

Happy merry, everyone. Stay safe. Stay warm. Take care of yourself, please. Be good and be happy and enjoy how hot you are (you are SO hot, and you should realize that now, not when you look at old photos and wonder how you could have been so foolish. SO HOT.)

With love,

me