Shaved Meats, Piled High: Two-Faced edition
Goodbye to 2021. To paraphrase a favorite columnist, my dad: This is the time of year when Janus, the two-faced God, looks forward and back, sees his shadow, and goes back into his hole, leaving us to six more years of Covid.
I may have gotten that slightly mangled.
I'm not exactly an inspirational type, although my default setting is Misanthropic Pollyanna. (It's a possible mindset. Not easy, but possible.) I like individuals. I'm less bullish on people. As Kay says in Men in Black: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it." And even individuals suck at risk assessment. Trust me. You do, I do.
So here we are, trying to figure out the risk of practically everything we do, every day. I don't worry so much for myself. I am old, I've lived a life -- two-thirds of one if I enjoy my mother's robust good health, closer to three-quarters if I skew toward U.S. life expectancy rates. (By the way, do you know how far down the U.S. is on the country-by-country list of life expectancy? So depressing.)
My daughter -- my daughter is another story. I figure we'll get past Covid. I don't know how we're going to handle climate change and the current political climate.
Y'all, I have had . . . some stuff over the past few months. I can't tell you about it because it involves another person, a person whose privacy I will always protect even though this person finally said to me: "You can write about this" and that was when I knew . . . I can never write about this. We are talking about a person in my life whose oft-stated desire was to avoid being written about, a very not on-line person, who will not, in fact, even know if I write about him/her/them.
I will never write about him/her/them. I don't think.
Don't get me wrong: as a writer, I'm a magpie, I will steal all the shiny things from your life. I stole a story about a Stuckey's peanut log flushed down a motel toilet from one of my oldest friends. I appropriate good lines. I have used real-life crimes to inspire my fiction.
Sometimes, I even use my own life, although oh so sparingly. And now I am even less inclined to use it. Personal essays, which became an important new creative outlet to me in the year leading up to the pandemic, now feel impossible. Ironic because I'm about to teach a workshop on them, but I don't have to be writing something in order to teach it. Instead, I'm trying to learn to write poetry. Don't worry, I'm not going to share it.
I'm also not going to make any resolutions for 2022, not even my traditional one-word one. Despite being an atheist, I have finally absorbed the Yiddish adage: Man plans, God laughs. Oh, I have a few goals. Finish novel. Write poems. Keep walking. Keep passing the open windows. Try to make sure every meal includes a vegetable. It would be nice to get to the end of 2022 and find I had done as well by a goal as I did by my decision to average 5 miles a day walking. Nice, but not essential.
Anyway, here's my holiday card, alongside the one I received from my "neighbor," who greets me almost every morning. Who wore it better?
See you on the other side.