Well, we’re all good for another holiday season, we’ve celebrated surviving 2025 (definitely considered “survival” of a year that will not be remembered well in the annals of history, actual history – hopefully we’ve been charitable and compassionate and thoughtful and truthful and dare I say, human, to counteract that … so far) we’ve added a few things to our stash of things while adding some things to other people’s stash of things, some things probably already forgotten until months from now when we will discover them as surprise brand new things and we are getting ready to return to our regulars where we will surely miss the anticipation of short weeks and probably REALLY quickly … like Monday at around 9:02am, or maybe 9:15am after you’ve toasted your bagel and hopefully haven’t had to curse at forgetting to bring in the cream cheese you bought on Friday on the way home (leave a note now dude!).
But on this Sunday morning at the end of the season I thought to just sit for a little, read a few bits of mine and also check my WordPress Stats just to see what posts have been viewed or even “liked” recently as I have mentioned and done in the past. Now, obviously, there are recent ones that will have gotten some attention but I will also often find, when I do this, at least a couple of older pieces that someone or someone’s have somehow found to view.
I don’t really know how people come about some of these older posts other than maybe randomly searching the Attic, which is great if so, though certainly not through tags as I am no good at remembering to keyword hashtag anything, for the most part, but I am also not really going to question as, well, it’s just cool and I’ll leave it at that, plus it reminds me of where my head and I were at depending on the time or place of the post.
So, that’s what I have today, a revisit of a post from around this time of year in 2020. A pretty good post too, as I re-read it this morning, and one that has some moments still pertinent to today as well.
Plus, I also didn’t really have anything new so …
Oh, and Happy Happies all.
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The Snow Was 17 Feet
December 12, 2020
The snow was tall, just tall as enough tall it needed to be against the front door to keep it from opening as I remember now, though 17 feet at least it seemed in my kid head then, though bear in mind that my tall was small (but with hope of a big someday). I was only six or seven or so and I was mad. My parents had just bought their first house, a something numbered address on Archer road in Mahopac NY with me in tow. But I was mad, not the mad that some might attribute to me and my now of cats, a crazy cat lady guy and a need for solitude away from a mad, mad, mad, mad world, that kind of mad, but with a just being mad … why the fuck can’t I open the front door to the glories of snow?
I hate snow, or at least I hate it now, the cold that it is and the down of that cold, the darkness of a light’s short days that come with it. But, again, I was six or seven or so. Snow was a wonder then, something just waiting for the play.
It certainly, the snow, wasn’t 17 feet tall but, it feeling taller than me, it could have been 30 feet, or a hundred feet, or a however many feet that were necessary to dwarf me. It was as far away as just a glass door, that extra door that you doored along with an already perfectly good door, one that could become a screen though, in the summer months, for a bit of air and I pushed, pushed against not 17 feet of snow, but enough, against the door, a silly angry kid pushing against a door. And I even had my snow boots on. Ready. Go. Snow.
Man, that shit could bleed, knuckles, after the mad and its push to open a door that didn’t want to be opened, a door that just said “leave me be son”, “I’ve been holding this off all night”, “have ya seen the snow? It’s almost 17 feet.”
That was my first scar, a one atop my right hand. A fist knuckle and a hard push. The only thing missing was the “motherfucker” exclamations that would come years later for all of the times snow or anything of the sort would be 17 feet tall.
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Jonna and Keryl give me a pass, I think, as to our guests. It’s a show, “Happy Hour”, that we’ve been doing since dinosaurs searched out self help gurus to ask of what to do for their inadequacies, “I’m too big with short arms”, “Mom wasn’t around for the long names that would come based on my bones”, “I was a vegetarian though three stories tall and a bit ungainly”. They know I’ll never read the books from these guests, I can’t, I don’t read anything that isn’t filled with the wonder of places imagined, some of swords and kings, some of spaceships and distant planets, all of a simply not here, instead of just “self help” vagaries that tell you of who you could be if only you could be someone else just like you, but different (especially after buying a book). But surprisingly, some things, even in my cynicism seep through, our guests, all, have their moments for me. I Just patch them together, grab bits and pieces that may mean something and move forward. A lot of them are the same, some just a more well known, more established name “same” than others but, really, the same. But I grab that patchwork, a workable patchwork mind you, and roll. No need more.
Recently in one of our shows Jonna talked of finally wanting to write her own book. A something she has in her, like Keryl who has two now, Jonna’s Facebook posts evidence of the writer.
Jonna, if you’re going to write a book please don’t think of it as the topic of a future interview for a podcast with a couple of cool ladies and some dude interviewing for advice within a small world of such. Just write your book and a just you book. Write too much, exaggerate often with sly smirk, but just be a book that books as a Jonna book would book.
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Bella has one PC chair while I sit in the other. I have two. I know, Mr. Fancy pants huh? One is the “Shoes” chair the spot he owned from the moment I took it out of the box years ago and laid my thin Steelers blanket on it after trying not to have any pieces left over in my assembly. Then there’s the one slowly becoming the “Bella” chair as I sit on all nights and she sits with me after a dinner shared with Cricket the Blind on her foot recognized paper towel for the small fork cuts of extra dinner to come and an attempt at the same with Mimi the Quirky (successful if it’s chicken).
Bella is the most patient of cats, there’s not a of one of us who couldn’t be better off with the kind of patience she shows, not being terribly fond of Cricket the Blind and only minding Mimi the Quirky, she exhibits her patience just for me, holds back any anger she may have at these “others” who have invaded our space taking attention away from her belly rubs on her dot of a small bit of circle carpet in the living room I never use in this two room place or another rubbed belly on her chair or even on her crunchy paper (my Sister sends powdered vitamins once a month worrying of my poor diet and possible vitamin deficiencies in a box that doesn’t really need any packing but she still does with that hard edged brown paper stuffed to the left or right of that packing box, depending on how you opened it – I think she’s fully aware it’s not needed but packs it just the same – she knows cats). It’s Christmas day every month for Bella when I get my vitamins and she gets a new lay on fresh crunchy paper splayed out next to last month’s flattened such.
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I know this is a little disjointed, but it’s one of the ways I think, in short blurbs of thoughts but strung together in pieces and with many run-ons of current things or memories that may not be connected or just might be (usually are). This one is the latter but it’s where my thoughts were this weekend, as some of you might be able to relate to disjointed thoughts, the brain being a bit of jumble during the upside down we live in. But it is a weekend where I’ve taken Monday off to give me 3 days, to at least breathe a bit (though apparently not to get my thoughts into any coherent form). I get 3 weeks a year of vacation time, or PTO for those technical. 15 days to do with as I will. I do this once a month and this month is a bonus with the holidays to come giving me a couple of others. I almost feel guilty knowing that the holidays will afford me my once a month two extra times without paperwork but I’m not going to let that deter. A once a month Monday is a once a month Monday, the holidays are just gravy. Could I take a week at some point, call it a vacation, sure. But I’m a single dude always strapped for $$ and I have my charges. Plus, where am I going to go, especially now?
Some of you might be alright with believing a normal exists but I’m not a one and it doesn’t.
There’s so much that is 17 feet tall, hell, most of our lives are spent trying to deal with stuff that is 17 feet tall, a seemingly insurmountable task of too tall walls, placed there daring us to scale maybe even bloodied knuckles to come from the attempts.
But I’m in no mood to scale today. This is simply my acknowledgement of such. 17 feet? I gotcha. Tall you are. But I’m just gonna take an extra day and sit and surveil a tall wall for no reason other than no reason, and hunker a bit away, just me and the girls.
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