Back Around
ISSUE #135
I wasn't going to do an issue this early in the year. This is work for me, after all, not only because nonfiction feels often like drawing blood, but also in the maneuvering it takes to untie my emotions from the clicks and open rates (this is no one's fault but the internet's).
So I wasn't too eager to end my vacation—until I took a drive around 3:30 last night just to feel the mist of a January rain. I was listening to a brilliant album I've discovered by Brenda Lee, a bright bubble of 60s pop from the Atlanta native most famous today for "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" (she was 13 when she recorded that; she's only 17 on this issue's track). That, along with the ultra-drama of Wet's "11 Hours" remix, and "That's Alright," a beautiful kiss off from Stevie Nicks, combined to form a New Year's trio that birthed a New Me, the three fates that tempted me back to the keys. Let's open up the resolutions box:
Don't do bad things.
Alright, that's enough for me. I'll carry over the rest from last year.
It's Brenda's album that I think of when trying to write my resolutions. I'm in love with an album that barely seems to exist, having vanished in the mists of time. She was the fourth highest-charting artist in all of the 1960s—back when Billboard truly reigned—bested only by the likes of Elvis, The Beatles, and Ray Charles. It feels silly to be trumpeting the virtues of an artist so wildly popular in her time, yet she's largely disappeared from lists and retrospectives. Nothing beside remains. The lone and level sands stretch far away.
There's no such thing as a year—this fact is self-evident. Right? No one can force you to cut off the limbs of life and tie them up in boxes with eager strings. We carry only the clocks in our ticking cells. Who made Gregory the master of time? By all rational accounts, my New Year started on the first of November. Before then, I experienced a New Year on the last weekend of September. There was one in June as well. Then there was the global New Year we had last March. And before that, it was December of 2019. That's five years I've felt in the course of the one draped over me. No one can deny the personal nature of time.
Nobody likes the "It's going to be okay," guy, but I hope we all remember the difference between what is there and what is here. Remember the love you pump to your fingertips. Remember the faces we've resurrected through pixels, timezone travelers who rearrange their bodily hours just to glimpse your familiar face. Remember the ones who used to make you soup, even if you haven't seen them in weeks and weeks. They will be there when we return.