This New Year....

I finished out the new year with a bang.

I nearly bounced a check. I broke my bed. And I thought this too shall pass. And it did.

I felt like my best defense toward ringing in 2012 was a good offense. I went to bed at 9 pm. I never heard all the fireworks let loose on the river. I never heard the horns honking, the shouts, and the coyotes and wolves howling in response. I never heard ten thousand dogs barking to protest the interruption of all that silence.

So yep it's now 2012.

It doth feel a bit different even if it feels the same.

I've already spent the new year with porn stars and escorts, preachers and artists, cowboys and Indians. I've prayed with a decedent of Hawaiian Royalty and I've prayed for a friend who is hiking 2600 miles in 26 wedding gowns over 26 weeks (http://www.hiking26.com/ ). I'm winning some. Losing some. I'm good with all that--as long as I continue to know that this view remains.

I wish everyone a belated Happy New Year!

I hope yours is a beautiful, brakeless, nearly careening-out-of-control, hot mess of a new year. Because those years tend to produce the best stories.  Because there is beauty, stunning, breathtaking beauty, found on the last eve of the year,in  being able to go to bed and feel crisp, welcoming sheets, and a fluffed pillow, and hopefully laying down on a bed frame that isn't about to crash to the floor--and yet knowing, even despite all that comfort--that on December 31, 2012 as you drift to sleep at 9 pm, you're thinking to yourself, as you close your eyes, my God! What a ride!

That 2012 so was--thee ride. Of a lifetime.

That's what I'm wishing. Your way.