The dogs are all sleeping in their favorite spots. Peaches has lately taken up residence by the front door, away in the other room, our sentinel pooch. Last night Basho crawled into the little dogs' crate, both strange and amusing. Now he and Frankie and Harold are all curled up on the couch, their positions of choice. Peaches can't climb that high.

Hang on, I'm a get the little heater for my hands which are so cold I can barely type.

Better.

I've been thinking of writing some sort of year-end reflective thing but I'm pretty sure I changed my mind. I don't like to think of years, of blocks of time, of time all blocked up and neat. It's hard not to do it, what with the keeping track of age and days and months and work or no work and clocks and alarms and getting places on time.

One thing though, this year I finally gave up on wearing a watch. When I was a kid I wanted a watch so bad. I finally got one for Christmas when I was in fourth grade. I wanted to be able to watch time, to track it, to finally be able to comprehend what the hell was going on. I've worn one ever since, never could stand to be without one. I'm glad it's gone. I'm glad we live in a house with only an alarm clock and that doesn't have the right time on it anyway. I never owned a wall clock and I never ever will. No sir.

When I moved back down to Florida after my years in DC, I didn't have a television or a computer or a car or a job or friends. Just me in a shack with my two cats Miss Blue and Max. That's where I finally got a sense of time, of me in time or time in me. The days were so long without the ham handed time breaks built in. There was no real schedule. I had classes, but they were at different times every day. There was nothing to signal one hour from another, no urgency when I woke up in the morning, none during the afternoon, nothing had to be done before the next time deadline. It's the first time I ever felt like myself, felt myself really.

This week is going by like that. Long days. I have pretty much all I ever wanted from life, but if I could ask for one more thing it's this: to own every second. To let time unfurl naturally without the schedule of work at 8 am, three breaks during the nine hours, home again, walk from 6-7, supper, bed. I want those long days back. I want them back for good, forever.

I flaked out on all my people commitments this week (thank god). I was supposed to have supper with Adam, Blythe was supposed to come up today, we were supposed to go up to West Virginia to see Jess this weekend. Instead, I'm here, alone, watching the great swarms of birds across the street, walking all over, drinking coffee, writing, being happy. Like that Greg Brown song, I'll be happy, just by myself.

Me and Basho even went back to our old haunt, the lake in Greensboro. We hiked ten miles on Monday, which was warm and sunny and glorious. We didn't meet anybody on our path except at the very end, which was lucky because I realized then that I'd locked us out of the truck and the fellas I met were kind enough to point out that the back window was open and then the one with the longest arms reached in and unlocked the door for us. Thank ye kind strangers.

Jeff was talking about New Year's resolutions yesterday and I contemplated making a couple for myself, but I changed my mind. I never made any before on account of I don't buy the arbitrariness of January 1, of this year, which is suddenly different from last year. I want life to be the slow rolling hills, or spiky slopes, or ocean waves, or trees, or valleys. Not the same blocky blocks of 2003, 2004--as if they are the same discreet elements of time. It's all different, sometimes fast sometimes slow--I know for a fact that 2002, for instance, was much slower than 2003. Except that also I lived more in 2003 than I have in any other year, I think, so it was the slowest year of them all.

That said, we are using January 1 as the give up meat for real date. Only vegetables and fruit and nuts and beans, that's it, that's all I want.

I'm also making up no smoking strategies. The idea of quitting scares me, I admit. Like it's not just the cigarettes I'd be losing, but the whole ritual of solitude that I've built up around the cigarettes. I don't know how to be alone in the great swarms of people all over this planet without smokes, without smoking. Smoking reminds me of my insides. I go outside and I light up and I'm me, not because of the cigarettes, I know, but because I use them to get me somewhere, an instant path there, to my secret self. It's like in The Royal Tannenbaums, how Margot was all secretive about smoking, even though probably nobody would care and everybody knew anyway, as a code, as a way of being her secret self. That's it, you see. I need something else to take it's place, I guess, some other self-signal. The thing that works for me with smoking, though, is that it is something I do almost entirely alone, something separate from other people, something transgressive, something I don't want a lot of people to know about me. I don't know. I'm scared to quit and I'm pretty sure I won't succeed until I figure that part out.

I'm going to make some food today, an onion pie, I think. Be safe everybody. Have fun. Happy new year, too, happy Wednesday, happy holiday.