Year-End Restart

Well, well, well. Here we go again.

I've tried blogging a few times, and, as with most of my enterprises, I've run out of steam fairly early in the process. The blogs have lingered without updates--hell, without readership--and then I delete them.

There's no hook here, no theme. I leave the masterful political commentary to AngryBlackBitch. I leave the gentle documentary of gay male life in Tucson to Homer. And Dispatches from the Culture Wars? Well, I leave that to far greater minds than my own. So what good am I?

Today dawned pretty damn nippy for Tucson, upper 30s, I would guess. It was the first genuinely cold morning we've had so far this fall. You know, the kind of morning that you barely notice when you live in Chicago, but after 11 years out here, it caught my attention when I left the house. It finally feels like fall. My favorite season, or at least it was back home. Jeans-and-sweatshirt kind of weather, when I finally have a reason to wear the henleys and fleece vests I've defiantly bought despite being able to use them maybe a few weeks out of the year.

Thanksgiving was... it was just sort of there. It was spent with the Tucson family, which is a family of choice rather than DNA. They are splendid people who provided good food and a very pleasant afternoon. The little kid in me still desperately misses being with my grandparents, uncles, and cousins on this day. Being an adult now and privy to the full picture, the story behind the story, the stuff behind the scenes that belies the happy faces people are compelled to put on for the holidays, I understand that the Thanksgivings I remember from childhood could not have been as perfect as my memory paints them. Various adults were, more than likely, just on the verge of strangling each other, held back from doing so by the traditional niceties of the holiday table. But not in my memories, man. The house was always warm, always smelled nice, the air outside was always crisp, a fire always crackled in the hearth, and we were always happy. All of us.