01/01/2022

Awake in a daze. So much to look forward to at once, then you must deconstruct it into 365 pieces and concern yourself with just this one here. It’s usually colder than most other days. Earnestness is often overdone, the force of resolutions seem reasonable, even in the most overzealous cases.  The pages of the calendar, journal, etc., are barren and full of such wondrous possibility. Despair dissipates, a bit, exiled to the peripheries for a while. In most cases you haven’t fucked up yet, you haven’t had enough time to screw anything up. The emails taper-off a bit, momentarily, the requests for donations have all but disappeared. Soon they’ll begin again with best wishes for the upcoming struggle. Now push. The boulder you burden with seems momentarily lighter, easier to move. Now concentrate. The pitch increases quickly and you don’t wish to lose your handle.  There is danger about.

But before Maria heads north—heads home—she writes:

On the first day of the new year, as the second year of the second decade of the second millennium begins—into the third year of the plague—these are my

New Year’s Dissolutions for 2022:

January

1. Make it home from the south in one healthy piece, and stay healthy at home in the north which is also teeming with plague, into the new year and beyond.

February

2. An internal rhyme to end all couplets. (Left over business—I didn’t accomplish this last year!)

March

3. Compose my Threnody Symphony in Five Movements.

April

4. Graphic blandishments in the Charles Schulz style. (More unrealized business from last year—because it’s the cruelest month.)

May

5. A deeper exploration into the benefits of trepanation.

June

6. Polish my boulder twice a week; ask S. how he keeps his so neat and unaffected by erosion after all these millennia.

July

7. Watch Eraserhead 27 times in 30 days again.

August

8. Master the Verfremdungseffekt and speak only in dactyls at twilight. (It’s too hot for anything else.)

September

9. Be mindful 6 times a minute, or 360 times every hour, or 8640 times each day.

October

10. Reverse all the processes of eutrophication in all the world’s waterways. (I’ll need a touch of help on this one.)

November

11. Put out the wildfire in my head.

December

12. Again: The best plan is none.

“And so instead of wishing you all a happy year’s end / happy new year, I will simply express gratitude and love and faith in our imaginations, since I actually believe our imaginations are what carries us in the face of fuck. To all of you from all of us–misfits, dreamers, mammalian kin; let all of our imaginations move us toward our next becomings. You are the rest of us. You literally keep us alive, noisy, unflinching.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch / “Corporeal New Year” email