Tag: new years

Coffee Log, Year 2, Day 290

garethlivesayLeave a comment

Hi.

Coffee: Maxwell House Master Blend, Office Coffee

A couple kids around a campfire as the sun goes down, speaking Russian; the last day of a long decade.

Happy New Year’s Eve.

2020 confounds me. The strange thing about the future is that it makes you look back and so 2010 is where my head’s at tonight. I was younger, a virgin, had never tried whiskey, or smoking, my vices were less dramatic but more severe. I was an introvert. I was in college but couldn’t stomach it. Classes were fine, but the people – they all seemed to have somewhere better to be.

It was around a decade ago that things changed. They’re always changing, but 2010 was different. We started drinking up each other through the long straw internet. Smartphones. The first iphone was in 2007 but by the 10’s they’d taken off. You’ve got everything in your pocket, all your money, all your friends, too much and too little time. Life got demarcated in ways it hadn’t been, so that the big pictures were clearer than ever while the details got so subdivided into clickbait attention-takers – we all became farsighted. Even while I’m writing this, I’ve checked the time and answered two texts.

I went to Greece that summer in 2010. June, my first trip abroad, first trip alone. It was to study but I didn’t really study. We had classes but we traveled. And the country was in uproar. They were reeling from the same financial crisis that had hit America and there were riots, marches, austerity. I ate a lot of 2 Euro gyro’s on desolate pigeon’ed streetcorners and most were good but one, in Thessaloniki, came without tzatziki and was full of mustard, so that was kind of bad. Otherwise, I remember the beaches, the Aegean, and the sound of rough talking in back bars about things I couldn’t understand.

I’m in love with this year, 2019. Not for anything special about it, but because I look at who I am, at all my surroundings, and things have changed, I’m bolder colors, I’m unrecognizable from who I was before.

Again, happy New Year’s Eve.

Currently Reading: Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin

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Kindness, kindness, kindness.
I want to make a New year’s prayer, not a resolution. I’m praying for courage.

Susan Sontag

Coffee Log, Day 314

garethlivesayLeave a comment

Hi.

Coffee: Cafe Pajaro Extra Dark, Trader Joe’s Brand

There was this woman I dated a while ago who I used to go to malls with. This was back when malls were still a foundational part of American culture, though even then you could see the signs that they were moving on.

But that didn’t matter to us. For me and her, malls were a personal thing. They were spaces we could be comfortable around each other. There were lots of spaces – including the apartment we shared – where that wasn’t true. Some people click with you when you’re alone and some people click with you when you’re in public. Me and her were public people. And for those few hours walking around, talking about this or that, living in a world of window-shopping and picked-up objects, I think we had a special love.

I went to Southpoint Mall in Durham, NC for the first time in forever. I’d been writing in the morning but my laptop cut itself off to update so I needed a place to be. It was a strange day, a patchy sky, sometimes cloudy and sometimes bursting with a New Year’s sun. There was ample parking. I found a space across from a couple church buses.

Inside, the place was reasonably busy. It still smelled like Christmas – pine trees and peppermint. I walked in and out of stores not really looking at anything, paying more attention to the people, and I saw a lot of store-workers looking drained at the end of a long season. But even that was lovely – fake, hard, unfair, but perfectly predictable, a call-out to a time when walking along a covered boulevard overspending all your credit cards was the pinnacle of living. In the end, I left without buying anything. I’d gotten what I came for.

I remember this one particular time at Southpoint towards the end of that relationship. It was night, we’d gone to dinner, we were walking about an hour before the stores were closing. I think it was summer. There’s a big ceiling light that spans the whole inside of the place. It’s covered in floodlights that change for the season. That night, the lights were undulating shades of blue. It looked like the ocean. Staring up at those lights, I felt like we were a part of something old, fluid, indecipherable. I held her hand and imagined we were on a beach somewhere. A far away place you couldn’t pinpoint. We stayed until close.

Today’s her birthday. Wherever you are, shopping or at home, I hope you have a full heart and restless, excited dreams.

Novel Count: 9,255

Currently Reading: Killing Commendatore, Haruki Murakami

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The breach between the mind and body can’t be healed by more knowledge.

Barry Webster, The Lava in my Bones