* 2013 *

January 1, 2013


It will be dark for hours yet, and I think I can write a little and still greet the sunrise. Symbolic or not, I do feel fresh and moderately reborn.

Waiting for an invitation to a New Year’s party didn’t work so well (any more than did trying to have my own last year; still have provisions left over from that).The party I intended to go to was canceled (I suppose K is ill). Instead, J called. It was a surprise, as I’ve seen him fairly recently and I assumed my ration was exhausted. He wanted to come here and I wanted him to, so we had an intimate New Year. He said he was only going to stay a few minutes, but he stayed the night and left moments ago. I told him I rose ungodly early and he needn’t, but I guess an alarm went off inside him. He walked down the dark stairs and out into the dark street, and it was all very cinematic and dramatic until I began wondering “Where the hell did he park?”

For many years my resolutions have been to keep on doing what I’m doing, if possible with greater intensity, until something comes of it. I suppose it’s the same now. What I do propose is to aim a Kantian concentration on each succeeding moment, to judge whether the next action, the next gesture is really in harmony with my spirit. Some things I do, some relationships I have, are, after all, pointless and exhausting. It would be easier to address them moment by moment rather than to try to purge hugely all at once.

I go into the new year with several continuing bewilderments. One is that my determination to be loyal and faithful does not seem to inspire loyalty and good faith in others. This has been an oddly one way street for me, and much puzzling hasn’t clarified the reasons. I could assume I’m missing some glitch in my own character that others see and respond to negatively, or that I read the signs badly, or that my friends are unusually flawed, or that I take too many of my character touchstones from heroic literature. The other choice is just to stop pondering and actively reconcile to it, as one does to a limp or weak eyesight. Some things are just the way they are, and the way to make them worse is to linger over it.  It’s an existential victory, I suppose, to hold to a principle which is not reciprocated by the world.

Affection is another thing entirely. No sane person expects affection to be returned precisely as it is given.


*

Just returned from a brisk walk east and north, which I often do on the first of the year without its (sadly) turning into a habit. But today it was fine. The streets were dark, a few houses with their Christmas lights on, party hats strewn on the sidewalk outside Avenue M. The air was cool but without bitterness. I went quite fast, and my lungs rejoiced. Edna’s was open, and I stopped for coffee. The rain was considerable when I left the café, but, again, without bitterness. Only then, as I left the café, did a little silver show in the East.