Your propensity for self destruction is worthy of study

How we ever gonna get up if that's how we get down?

The house looked pretty, perched above the sea. Well built, artfully crafted - beautiful, some said. The living was easy, the laughter was genuine. The light was always on and the door was always open. Storms, infrequent and impetuous, met their match and moved on, leaving little but scratches to mark their wear.

It would've been easy to think that this would last forever. But to do so would be to ignore the shaky ground on which the home was founded, and the tell-tale heart buried deep below. Bleeding, bleating, steadily beating - rending rifts into the sifting sand upon which the house made its stubborn stand. The cracks were patched and the structure steadied, but the wounded heart was never freed.

In time the sand began to swallow the home. Its occupants were quick to abandon ship but the owner stayed behind, determined to forever patch this sickened shell. As I look at it now, only a single original shingle remains. We're all wondering when it will fall and, if so, can a home be built again?

I'd give you the news but nothing's changed.

Why do we armor plate our memories? Dress them up in disguises, fanciful affairs? What better way to understand life than to strip it naked and lay it bare? I don't want you to paint a picture of the past. I want you to take me there.

"Am I helping, once again, to kill the things that I love?" - Anthony Bourdain

 We're all just star seeking starlets and this is our murmuration. We forage as far as we dare, rank and file, hither and higher, a swirling dancing cloud too proud to be close, too scared to be stray, making and breaking affiliations on a wing and a whim like some disaffected social network. In the dawn of our days we return to the roost, back to the comfortable, the dependable, the familiar. Leave the outliers to the predators. To those who feed on the flesh of the unfamiliar. The creeps. The weirdos.

Tipped the black spot - that ever elusive, blurry dot. It blots the mind, a blind despot, clouding vision in a tyrannical flurry of split decisions. She longs to crush it under foot, or at least to hold it there. It's bean a long, hard year. She's good at this, she tells herself. Bartender, another beer!  I'm waiting...

Ibid, your honor.

The ship was a present - built on eastern seas to be set adrift in Venice presently. See-worthy, worthy of great seas (the currents of our memories more so than those it sailed toward currently). For just a moment it was momentous - setting sail toward unknown shores with great expectations tucked securely in its patterned sail. An ark of sorts, lion and tree and her and me, arcing out into a steadier stream - fanned by much fanfare and the rising glint of a lavender diamond. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised when the craft capsized - or that you'd be in so readily to right the vessel crafted at your hands. A guardian of life, you never struck me as one to live life guarded. Because of you that ship will sail time and again, til the ocean of the mind meets its end.

Why does it take this calendar flip to stop and think of the steps that led us here? Why does our past, when called, stand forth so reluctantly? What does it take to make a lasting memory? So little. So much. Much thanks to those who go the extra fathom, who weigh the anchors of the mind. For 2012 - a focus on the little things.