I drove the roads at 2:00 a.m. . I didn’t have to worry about lanes because there was no other traffic to impede me. I swept my stairs again and salted them because, well, no one else was going to do it. Wearing knee-high boot covers, I didn’t have to worry about wet or cold feet. It was a balmy negative two so I didn’t have to worry about overheating as I swept some of the areas around work. I love the abandoned world that snow brings. But I did take time to stamp ribald messages in a few places with undisturbed snow. To imagine the consternation of anyone who reads them this morning. At one point, my laughter was uncontainable. My voice carried and echoed strangely across the snow and in the undisturbed world. It was beautiful, but also a bit lonely.
In the earlier hours this morning, it was one degree. With winds of about ten mph, it was breathtaking. I once worked in a -40 work environment. If you’re lucky enough to have trees with leaves still on them, you know that the melody the wind creates sounds like falling rain or heavy snow when it’s this cold. Unlike most post-midnight Saturday nights and Sunday mornings, traffic was non-existent. Everyone was huddled inside somewhere, undoubtedly with blankets piled and tucked. I walked to the road and watched and listened as the dead leaves above me rustled. It was a beautiful, abandoned world with just me in it to observe it. The crosswalk and street lights shone vividly in the air. Color in this cold takes on a new life. I stood there until the bottom of my legs began to ache from the cold. A cup of bitter coffee and another cup of hot cider waited for me back at the apartment. But still, I stood there, waiting for some unidentified moment to propel me back inside. Nothing happened. Sometimes that’s the most beautiful thing.
Someone asked me, “X, why haven’t you been making solar bottle lights lately?”
I was certain that the grin I gave shouted the obvious answer: “I haven’t stopped.”
In the last few months, I’ve left several in front of people’s houses with a note attached. The Johnny Appleseed of decorative solar light bottles. A few more, I’ve left in odd places where I knew they would be discovered and taken by someone interested.
I didn’t want all the bottles that had been saved and given to me to be wasted. So for anybody like Jay or Burke or others who shared their bottles, just because I haven’t mentioned it doesn’t mean I haven’t given new life to the bottles given to me. To strangers. It’s a pleasure to give one to someone personally, something I’ve made. But it turns out that it is equally fascinating to put them out in the world without having any idea about the lives of those who receive them.
This afternoon, I walked behind a building and looked over the fence. The bottle I had left on their front porch weeks ago sat facing the sun, charging as much as possible in the low winter light so that it can later add color however the new owner sees fit.
What makes going to the movie so special? It could be the excessive butter that leads to gas-propelled walking and making you regret every decision you’ve made in your adult life by eating too much of it. The kernels that plague your teeth and make you reaffirm the decision that, yes this year, you need to go to the dentist. It could be the occasional narcissist who thinks that we need their phone lit up in order to see that they are checking their Tinder for people who are really into selfishness. Rarely do you see a brain surgeon at the theater. I really doubt that Chad or Karen needs to check their phone every 16 seconds.
And that leads me to one of the most joyous things about theaters. It is one of the last remaining places that we are supposed to pretend that our life doesn’t require our personal and immediate attention. We get to focus on a fantasy world, feel our heart race, and even feel a tear sometimes form in the corner of our eyes. Without the distraction of devices. We’re just sitting and absorbing a collective story that brings us happiness.
I’m old school. I want to see and hear the nuance on the screen and to dive in to an alternate reality for a couple of hours. To feel the spark of creativity and originality fire in my brain as I watch and listen. And that requires focus. No matter how people defend their restlessness, entertainment without focus is a diluted shadow of the experience when you aren’t aying attention.
I know people roll their eyes at me when I tell them I don’t get bored. There’s no secret to it. Even if you’re sitting alone on a quiet porch, there’s an entire world within your view. And another one inside of your head to match it.
It’s being in the moment and giving each moment your attention. I can’t help but think that so many people are sitting in the passenger seat of their car ignoring the world as it passes by. At the fulcrum of most people’s lives are their phones. They are the best communication and entertainment devices ever invented. But you have to remind yourself that for every second you are distracted by your phone, you are missing the world and the people standing right next to you. If if first come first serve is truly important to us, then surely it follows that the people already with us deserve our undivided attention.
And that’s one of the reasons I love movie theaters. We haven’t quite lost the expectation of being in the moment and focused.
Like all experiences, a great movie that is shared takes on new life. Much in the same way that doing something together has the same result. All of us can list seminal movies that changed us in small ways. None of it could happen without allowing the magic of imagination and focus to envelope us.
Yes, we also get to eat a bushel of popcorn and drink so much soda that we are afraid we might not make it to the bathroom before the movie is over.
I took a great picture of… Nothing. I was wandering around, thankfully with shoes firmly on, oblivious. Something behind me crashed through the brush. It wasn’t instinct. I decided not to turn around because whatever it was would have already been on me by the time I turned. The unseen thing went up over the rise before I let myself pivot. It’s more fun imagining what it might have been. Perhaps a creature from Where The Wild Things Are. Even dangerous magic is sometimes worth it. X .
What is the word for looking at the same thing you’ve looked at for 19 years and seeing it differently? Even at 3:00 a.m. Colors on display, amplified by a cold December morning. The early morning quiet before everything and everyone arrives. Whatever the word is, I’m feeling it in my bones this morning.
Because I was in bed by 8, wakefulness pounced on me by 1 a.m. I found a cold, still morning waiting when I went outside. Frost-covered surfaces sparkled, and even the furnace’s steam floated sideways instead of drifting upward. While standing out on the landing with a cup of coffee steaming a little later, a young man drove up and came up the steps to let my neighbor’s dog out. (At least I now know who let the dogs out.) As he descended the steps, the unseen ice and frost on the last few steps from the deteriorating and dripping gutters caught him by surprise. He fell, his body accordioning down the last few steps, even as he held onto the dog’s leash. I stepped inside quickly without thinking. I hoped to spare him any potential embarrassment of being seen. Not that either ice or gravity was his fault. And certainly not the lack of accumulated maintenance for my apartment building. I returned outside a few minutes later as he ascended the steps. He quickly confessed that he’d fallen down the stairs, not that his awkward gait or hands clutching at his lower back didn’t signal what might have happened. I quickly learned to respect the invisible ice here the first winter. And if I momentarily forget? My cameras will record me doing impromptu gymnastics as my hands wildly flail ineffectively as gravity drags me to the concrete below.
Later, I watched the small fox that traverses the main parking lot entrance make his way south across the pavement. As it did, a neighborhood cat who prowls our building late at night spotted him and froze in place, its eyes carefully appraising it. There is always an ever-changing litany of visiting cats in our neighborhoods.
At 4:36, I heard a man’s voice screaming as I sat at my computer making Xmas surprises and pictures. The cold, still air outside must have amplified it artificially. I stepped outside and listened as he continued to scream in angry bursts. The words were incomprehensible, as was the man’s motive for such anger on an early Sunday morning. It continued for about two minutes and finally fell silent. No sirens ensued, so I assumed that whoever was on the receiving end of the tirade was safe and that any listening neighbors groggily turned over in their beds and decided it didn’t warrant a call.
Though immersed in a world of creativity, the outburst flared an intense bout of loneliness in me. It triggered memories of so many nights and holidays ruined by the calamitous rise of both ire and shouting.
That kind of anger signals both helplessness and hopelessness. The people engaging in it have lost control or sight of the fact that the very act of being able to shout belies an opportunity to be thankful. True despair elicits silence.
I let AI render a picture I made, hoping it would capture the silence of the morning, pierced by strangers’ lives briefly intersecting with mine.
Last year, I devised a new word, “angstmorgen.”
I’d like to add another, “wakksol.” Both for the root meanings of the anticipation of the sunrise and the fifth note on certain scales.
Between errands, I went down in the holler of the creek. Attempting to take a picture of a bird, I instead took one at 3 times magnification without realizing my camera lens were all smudged. Definitely a happy accident. If you are wondering whether the creek water was cold, It shocked my feet and legs. It’s been much too long since I’ve listened to the roar of the creek with my feet in the water. It’s hard to believe it’s 62° in the middle of December.
Someone pulled a me on me today. To say that work has been a feat of athletics in the last few days is an understatement, right up there with mentioning that lightning wakes you up. I was hurrying back into the building and someone stopped me to talk.
It wasn’t one of those polite conversations or one filled with superficial exchanges.
To say that it was probably exactly what I needed is another understatement. He offered his personal insight about one aspect of me and my life. Where it told with any more authenticity, the air might have been permeated with static.
Though I was past due back in the mayhem of my job, I stood outside in the chill weather and listened to him. We exchanged more words today than we had in the sum total of our being acquaintances.
I learned an awful lot about him, both through words spoken, and words not uttered.
Whatever idea I had of him shifted from a casual one to a complex astonishment that someone with so much story had been right in front of me for a long time.
Though I was tardy in my return, I would welcome such a conversation each day to remind me that people are much more than they seem and that most of the time we don’t make the effort to get beyond the surface of our interactions.
That he approached me changed the tenor of the day for me. The hell of work was still upon me. But I got a reminder of what life and conversation can and should be like if someone reaches out and creates the opportunity.
PS I took a picture of my view, using one of my beautiful hanging prisms on the landing. Considerate it a beleaguered metaphorical attempt to reveal the filter that each of us carries inside our head as we walk around the world.
P.S. Parenthetically Speaking 