Thursday, January 30, 2014

Misery Loves Company



Slap. Slap. Squish.  Slap. Slap. Squish.  It's 4:00 am and the Gulf is blowing in through my upstairs bedroom window.  There's at least an inch of water covering the whole damn floor.  And in the other bedroom too.

And I am so damn grateful.

Slap. Slap. Squish.  Slap. Slap. Squish.

It's 8:00 am and I'm scrubbing the stubborn cooked on scrambled eggs from the bottom of the skillet.  My eyes are bleary and I can feel myself getting bitchy from a lack of sleep.

And it's still raining.

And I'm still so damn grateful.

Because I used to look at days like this and think how beautiful they must be, untainted by booze.
How wondrous it must be to move through the small hardships without the added weight of misery.

I never thought they'd be mine.

Thank you.

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Word!

Resolve: firmness of purpose or intent; determination.
 to convert or transform by any process

Music. to progress from a dissonance to a consonance.
 I've had my word for 2014, resolve, picked out since way before New Year's.  I guess you can see how much resolve I've had for writing about it, I still struggle with whether I have enough left to say on this blog.  But then today I was visiting the mmabsers message board and a friend of mine there had copied and pasted an old post of mine from early 2011, All Out War when I was still struggling and I didn't think I was strong enough, or smart enough or anything enough to win the war.  She said, and other members chimed in, that it was an inspiration to them to see where I'd been and where I am now.  
Well, golly, I guess I better keep writing.
  
I've had this post planned out for weeks, I was going to explain how having resolve or employing resolve was different than just making a  resolution, how I wasn't going to get bogged down in goals and accomplishments.  I just wanted to have more resolve, dammnit!
Then I went to look up the definition of  resolve, yep, those first two are exactly what I wanted, then I got hung up on the third one, the one that defines  resolve as a musical term that means the transition of dissonance to consonance.  Wouldn't it be great if I could find a song that sounded exactly like what I wanted my whole year to look like?  Something with just a little dissonance and long periods of consonance, or something that started out with a short prelude of dissonance and then segued into a long ballad of consonance.
I have spent, I'm not kidding you, six freaking hours looking for that song.  I started out with the Stones and the Beatles and ended up with Sebelius Symphony #7.  I don't know why I didn't think of it right off the bat. 
Not!
I'll admit it, I googled the "best example of resolution of dissonance."
  
Is it what I was looking for? No.
It's perfect.
It is a symphony of life.  It has dissonance through out the whole freakin' twenty-five minutes.  But with the flick of a wrist, a single breath,  a slide of bow across string, the harshness transforms to deep beauty,  strife builds to glorious triumph, and the deepest sorrows give way to frivolity and carefree joy.
I'm still listening and I don't know how it will end, but it doesn't matter.  A baby will cry, a leaf will turn,  a star will fall and it will all start over again.
Such is life.
Such is life.
Happy Belated New Year, Amigos!