January 2003 Archives

Pale. Joe Henry, Fuse. Snow crystals in suspension; earth gone ghostly. A sky the skim of ice over milk. Inside: clear light and music, pianos and trumpets. Brushed drums.

Guitars and bass. The smell of laundry.

Folding. Time.

A pale week of washed-thin hours jump-cut together. Single degree moments. Glitter in the air. Ambient light in white, snow blue and spectral lavender. Minutes that fade in and out like ghosts -- or frosted breath in Winter air.

It is 5:13, now. It doesn't feel like it.

And now it is not.

Henry sings the phrase, "incubating diamonds". The visual is vivid. The moment is still pale. Twenty-four into January and the mercury is deep in its well. Friday, and I'm folding slowly into the weekend.

Stay warm.

Sipping Russian Tea and typing; the Christmas tree, undecorated. It is crystal-cold outside. The kind of temperature that thins your skin down to a paper-thin shivery layer and wreaths your head in a smokey halo of your own breath.

Nice to be inside, the tea warming me from the center outwards.

Haven't done my exercises -- though I have been running around. But it's night now, and things are slowing. I have been tinkering a little with Tangerine. Do you like the new background? The spirals remind me, a bit, of tangerines themselves...also of clock faces and concentric ripples. All appropriate for a journal of this type. I think. I've also doublespaced the text, for better readability.

Other than that, today has been mostly about taking down the Christmas tree, writing, and website coding. Oh yeah, and drooling over the new Powerbooks from Apple. I'd "switch" in a second if I had the cash...

I watched Minority Report and The Nightmare Before Christmas last night. Kind of an odd combination, but I enjoyed both movies a lot. The "What's This?" song from The Nightmare Before Christmas is still playing in my mind as I type...

Ah, down to my last sip of tea.

Mmm...

Everything is frosted, powdered in white. The contours and curves of the ground are softened, altered. When the wind blows it puffs clumps of tumbling snow from tree branches and powerlines. Steady snowflake specks swirl from the featureless, ice-colored sky.

The roads are wet black lines.

January's first Monday is one step away from monochrome. What colors there are are pale and filtered thin by snow light.

It is quiet.

If you could capture the color of blue-white Winter moonlight and pour it over the world in daytime, it might look like this.

Such soft cold beauty.

And I suspect that things will be going even more luminous as the light sinks down behind the hills.

This, I think, would be a good night for reading...with a glass of deep red wine. Maybe the tick of a clock the only sound in the background. Stopping now and then to think about lacy flakes swimming slowly down, unseen, from a pitch-black sky.

2003, in her early hours, is a soft pale princess with a gown of frost and snowflakes, sweeping low...