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Well it’s here now, or behind us, depending on which way you keep your head turned.  Myself, I’ve done quite a bit of looking back the last couple of years.  Too much looking back, that’s for sure.  Time to swivel this big head of mine back around straight and figure out where the hell I’ve wandered off to while I wasn’t looking.

It’s hard to see where you’re going when you’re looking back over your shoulder.  Did you know that?  You lose the trail and get off course.  Did you know that?  Yes, I suppose you did.  Of course you did.  What am I thinking?  Everyone knows that.

Here’s something you might not know.  One time a friend and I were put in charge of burying his dead father.  Seriously.  His father had been cremated and one way or another, it had somehow come down to just the two of us, and the father in his canister, to find a shovel and go down to the cemetery and bury him.  My friend knew the spot.  A stone was already in place, waiting for us all to show up.

I can’t say I actually remember helping my friend carry his father’s ashes, but I do remember helping to dig the hole.  That much I remember for sure.  We wondered a little about things as we dug, some of it out loud - like whether or not his father’s replacement hip was in the canister with the ashes, or if someone fished things like that out - and some things we wondered about to ourselves - like what it meant to die, or to be left behind, or to be twenty-some years old, burying another person.

The thing I do remember most of all, the one thing that sticks in my head clearer than anything else from that day, was the thing that my friend said when the job was finally finished, and we were patting the earth back down onto the hole.

“Well, that takes away the pressure.”

My friend’s father had not been an easy man to grow up with.  Loving, but demanding and controlling.  Friendly, but a temper quick to show itself.  A drinking problem that I’d never witnessed, but was all too fresh in my friend’s memory.  My friend’s words seemed harsh, but were some of the most honest I’d ever heard, even till this day.  Burying his father, as hard a thing as it might have been, had also lifted away some heaviness.  The cost had been steep, but finally there would be room to breathe; room to be himself. 

And without another word, the two of us turned and left, leaving behind something that seemed best left in the past.  Buried, but not forgotten.

So yes, this morning the new year is here.  Another year.  Another chance to find some of my own breathing room.  I won’t forgot 2005, but part of me knows that the best thing to do, maybe the only thing, is to dig a hole for it and just walk away.  Walk away without looking back.  Focus on where I’m going for once.  Live a day or two without the past hanging over my every decision, without all the pressure.

It took me all day to clear off my desk.  All day.  One man, one desk, and at least two months worth of mail.

It’s safe to say I have lost touch with modern-day reality.  I have become economically unglued, falling apart at the seams, dust of dreams no longer recognizable.  If I am to see myself somehow, I must refocus.  The caricature of my life redrawn.

Tonight I am going to try and imagine the new year, close enough now that even someone as out of touch as me sees it there, pushing up against the present.

What can it possibly mean?

For Christmas I wished for more time and a good pair of shoes, so that I could walk all around the world, stopping at each and every one of your homes to knock on the door and give you all a big Christmas hug when you answered.

It sounds like a lot of work, maybe because of all the walking involved, but I think it’d be worth it.  And because I’m not magical or anything, I couldn’t get around to everyone on just one day, so while technically I’d be calling it a Christmas gift, some might want to think of it as more of a gesture, to avoid growing anxious while they waited for me to show up.

And I could start walking right away, or maybe later today, after lunch.  It’s just a rough guess, but I’m thinking I could be delivering Christmas hugs in Boston as early as the 4th of July, if I leave today.

So until I get to your house, Merry Christmas, my invisible friends.  May all your friends and family within reasonable walking distance wrap their arms around you today and every day, and hug you with all their might.

But not so hard that it hurts.  No one wants that for Christmas.

Once enough things have happened to you in your life, recovering from that sense of paranoia that has slowly begun to take root at your core is easier said then done.  If you’re young, you don’t have a clue what I’m talking about here.  The twenty-somethings.  Yea, you.  You know who you are.  Bold, sexy, still full of yourselves, thinking that life boils down to connecting the dots between sexual encounters and love encounters.  That time when life feels like nothing more then that feeling of bouncing back and forth between the simple and the complex.  Simple, complex, simple, complex - my god, the drama!  That time in life where love moves in and out like the two ends of an accordion, and come to think of it, ends up sounding just about as good.  I can’t imagine there is any force on earth quite like the sense of drama that courses through the veins of the twenty-something, except, maybe, that sense of supremacy that marks the time known as the thirties.

Stupid twenty year olds, what do they know?  The thirties, now that’s where it’s at.

Or is it?  Or as my particular case demands, was it?  Was I actually ever thirty?  Could something like that have already come and gone, ripping through me like some Oklahoma twister on it’s way through another trailer park?  If it did happen, you’re going to have to break out the photo album to prove it to me, because God almighty as my witness, or maybe just use the plain stupid look on my face, I don’t remember a bit of it.  Not one bit.  Could those ten years of riding the tip of that twister already have come and gone, that my time of infallibility is over, and the forties are already here, my life scattered around me like all those poor trailer houses I just finished ripping through?  What?  You mean, the ride’s over?  Huh?  Gather all this stuff together?  This junk?  What the hell?  You mean this is my life!

Well, I’ll tell you, I’m no fortune teller, so I’m not even going to try and imagine what the fifties are going to be about.  But I can tell you one thing for sure, one thing about the forties.  The forties are all about gathering yourself back up, getting ready, I suppose you might say, to take another poke at the thing.  Whatever that is, anyway.  The thing.  I guess it’s life, I suppose, but I can’t say for certain, because so far the forties haven’t been one bit about knowing anything for sure.  That much I know.  Oh, and that I must have been one hell of a twister back in my thirties.

Pardon my language, but fuck!  Look at the mess!