old night, old year

alright, we'll do it your way

Nochevieja, slightly more than half awake on the last morning of a year so convoluted it would have been canceled if any of us had the means. I spent the first part of the year re-learning to walk. I don’t think I was expected to regain all of my motion, reading between the lines of how my doctor commented on progress. It was a quirk of fate and a poor reading of the vertical planes of horizontal maps that against medical advice I ditched my cane on my way to Italy and spent a month climbing stairs I didn’t know were there when I picked what turned out to be a hilltop apartment. I spent a lot of this year helping other people out and some of that I’m proud of. Hauling my laptop down the mountain to put out fires and eat frozen coffee. Walking along the beach like the saddest Magellan marking the supermarkets of the new world. Boiling eggs in a teapot and feeding the endless tide of cats rolling eastward past my front door. Guided by sunlight through Calabria, trying to whittle down scenes in my head but then tripping over new scenes buried in the sawdust.

The best and worst part of the year was finding a depth of creativity I had searched for my whole life, arriving unsolicited just as I reached what I thought was the finish to the task at hand. Here I am with more ideas than I can carry, more tumbling into a narrowing path, trying to move forward with whole universes jammed in my pockets. This, in the last year of my forties, the year I finally got far enough under the hood of the comics business to see how little light there is for anything to grow. How much of the road behind me was spent risking the one life I have on a dangerous journey toward the wrong kind of safety, an imagined city always further in the distance.

I went to Japan alone for the first time and tried to focus on the people and all the things they make by hand and how much pride goes into things that will never make anyone rich. The ramen shops that can never expand because the same person fills every bowl. An ambition to feed people. The choice of slow systems to make better rather than more. That craft is a closed circuit that is only complete when it connects you to someone else.

It took me decades to figure out what I want to be when I grow up, and it’s both less and more depending on who’s looking.

Nochevieja means “old night”, the oldest night of the year, about to disappear into the harsh light of the oncoming train of the future. In English we focus on the new but in Spanish we memorialize the present moment ending. It’s a made up discontinuity, but on it we place the whole potential of existence. We agree collectively to choose an imaginary point in the distance and place all of our ambition on the other side and then cross it together. One of the few places left where we all see hope.

A portal that doesn’t exist but nonetheless leads everywhere.

Happy Nochevieja.