Category: Uncategorized

It struck me the other day that we were collectively at the 10 year mark of ending a year/starting a new one by going, “Well, the last 12 months have been fucking rough, here’s hoping the next year is going to be better.”

By that, I don’t mean that everything has been getting progressively worse since 2016 — thankfully not; just imagine! — but that, by the time the end of the year eventually rolled around each and every year for the last decade, I found myself thinking what so many people in my social circle were saying out loud: the last year has felt like it’s been trying to grind me into paste, and I just want the next year to be a little easier.

It felt like everything was on a downhill slope from, what, 2016 through 2020, 2021, perhaps…? Perhaps that whole “global pandemic that up-ends life as we knew it” was enough of a downer to leave us in such a space that almost anything would have seemed like an improvement, but sure enough, 2022 felt a little better than what came before, and every year since then has had highlights as well as crushing disappointments and difficult moments. (Those last two have seemed to be a permanent fixture for the past decade, at least.; maybe it’s getting older, maybe it’s just that things really did seem to turn to shit at some point.)

That said, 2025 felt like one of the rougher years I’ve had for awhile, and I found myself glad to leave it when January 1 rolled around, as much as I continually tell myself that New Year doesn’t really mean anything and it’s all entirely arbitrary. The placebo effect of thinking I could package that period away in my memory as “another of the shit ones” and move on is a permanently attractive one even if I know better, and I’ll grab onto any straws in the hopes of things turning around soon.

All of which is to say: 2026, I might be asking a lot, but let’s try to not metaphorically kick me in the balls as much as 2025 did. I know that history and experience haven’t particularly demonstrated such a request will be successful, but if there’s one thing the last 10 years of new years have taught us, it’s that hope springs eternal. After all, what’s the alternative?

“Hey, man!” yelled the dude standing outside the various restaurants on Mississippi Avenue. “Hey, man!”

Look, I’m not one to randomly start conversations with strangers yelling at me on streets as I try to walk past, especially when I’m visibly listening to music on my phone. (For reference, it was “Night Vision” by Super Furry Animals.) It’s not that this guy looked like he was about to start a fight or cause trouble or anything; if anything, he looked like The Dude from The Big Lebowski if he’s started working out a little bit and was trying to take care of himself more these days, but had also gotten really into buying his entire wardrobe from the local military supply store. Still, he was yelling to get my attention and for some reason, I figured that I should probably see what’s up before things got out of hand.

I took my earphones out, and the dude happily — gleefully! — announced, “If it wasn’t for your beard, you’d look like the twin of Telly Savalas, man.”

I’ll be honest; I had no idea how to take this. On the one hand, I didn’t think I look anything like Telly Savalas, for any number of reasons, not least of which the fact that I rarely think of the man who was once Kojak because, really, who does these days? On the other, Telly Savalas was a sex symbol back in the day, so perhaps the comparison was a good thing and a sign that I should pick up a lollipop habit as quickly as possible, just in case it helps my appeal. (On a third hand, Telly Savalas was a sex symbol in the 1970s. That was a decade when plenty of not-entirely-attractive people were considered sex symbols for some inexplicable reason. Did I really want to be likened to a man beloved by a decade with questionable taste?)

I laughed, nervously, and replied, “I’ll take that as a compliment” as I hurried away, hoping that would be the end of the discussion, feeling other people watching the two of us. “Who loves ya, baby!” yelled the man as I walked away, seeming affirming that it was, in fact, meant to be a comparison that worked in my favor. A woman smiled at me in sympathy as she walked past me: “I think you look great,” she said.

It was an unusual start to the afternoon, at least.

Reading about the business of Christmas TV movies the other day, the thought occurred to me: I watch enough of these to probably be able to pitch some, right? I know the formula: a title that refers to a Christmas song everyone knows, some actors you’ve seen in other things, and a plot that won’t surprise or threaten anyone but entertain just enough to make those 90-120 minutes go down as easily as the egg nog everyone is likely drinking as they watch. So, with literally zero minutes forethought, I came up with the following:

I’m Tellin’ You Why: Opposites attract at Christmas when two leading social media content makers — what we used to call “influencers” before that term went out of fashion, which was round around when people started using the term “slop” freely — find themselves fighting to be the face of their hometown’s holiday parade! Are holiday parades a real thing? Would social media people care about them? Who cares?!? Let’s have whoever played Archie Andrews in Riverdale as the male lead, some kind of Joe Rogan with a heart, and Nancy from Stranger Things as the female lead doing some PG-13 twist on the Call Her Daddy kind of podcast thing.

I’ll Be Home for Christmas: There almost certainly has to be multiple movies with this title already, right? Well, this can be another one, but it’s just a rip-off of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles that works in some gags about self-driving cars and Ubers because the gig economy is a cheap punchline, am I right? Nicola Coughlan can take on the Steve Martin role and she’s paired with Aidy Bryant in place of John Candy, and the whole thing can be a slow motion version of America Ferrera’s monologue at the end of Barbie about how difficult it is to live up to multiple warring expectations at once, but with all the edges softened and a finale that lets everyone have a happy ending, because let’s not upset people too much at the holidays, everyone. Let’s get these viewing figures up.

With Your Nose So Bright, Won’t You Guide My Slay Tonight?: A drag-themed retelling of the Rudolph story that’s also a cautionary tale about cocaine addiction, and — okay, maybe this one is a bit of a stretch. I’m sorry. (I will rethink this if someone offers an option, however.)

Netflix, call me.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t really use my Apple Notes app for anything other than random thoughts that aren’t particularly important but feel like passing fancies in the moment that I might want to remember. I’ve got multiple notes for everything from my room number when I check into hotels — I’m always worried I’ll forget, but I never have; I also rarely remember to delete said notes until months after whatever trip I was one — to contact details for work people that I’ve never actually used. (I still have people’s numbers on there from when I went to the UK two years ago, in case I couldn’t check into my hotel or get my show pass afterwards.) It’s not the home for anything that would be considered especially necessary.

Amongst those unnecessary things: random sentences that are either observations, or prompts for things that I might one day want to write about here. I started doing it on a trip earlier this year, because something was looping around in my head and I thought, I’ll just put it here and it can get out and I can get on with work and then moved on with my life. (I did, in fact, write it up for here later that night.) The thing is, in many (most) cases, I end up writing things that I don’t remember the context for later, or that aren’t as interesting as I first think when I return to them. For example, currently in notes and pulled at random:

“Everyone wears black”

“The archaeology of my digestive system”

“Sense memory: eating donuts with a fork in the Bee’s Knees”

“Technology changing the shape of the minds eye, landscape of feature films becoming vertical of phones”

The one about the changing shape of the mind’s eye, there’s still something in that, to be unpicked and considered, I feel… But for now, let’s pretend we all know what these meant at the time, and that I wrote about them appropriately. The notes can stand as some nod to unfinished thoughts, like a Beatles Anthology for something far less important.

“It’s normally around this time of year you get sick. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened yet already.”

As much as I wanted to disagree with the observation, I had to agree that I was actually feeling a little bit under the weather. It was a realization I had probably subconsciously made a couple of days earlier, but searched for multiple get out clauses from. I’d been feeling not-quite-right for a few days, but tried to explain it away with any number of potential explanations that didn’t really hold any water: I’d slept poorly the night before or I’d been paying too much attention to one particular thing at work and couldn’t quite concentrate on anything else as a result or whatever. I knew the truth, but I simply didn’t want to actually admit that’s what was actually happening.

I was denying it in part because, bluntly, I do always tend to get sick at this time of the year and I’m bored with that tradition. It’s not that I get sick sick as much as I get very run down because work always gets crazy in December — it’s the most wonderful time of the year to try and get everything off your plate before the holidays, after all — and the weather here in Portland likes to yo-yo in terms of temperature and wetness, which creates the perfect conditions for a headcold, at least in my case. It’s something that I can try to avoid, but it catches up with me nonetheless. Take this year, for example.

Denying it, however, doesn’t do any good; I just end up feeling worse, because I don’t do anything to feel better and so I just exhaust myself further. That’s what happened this year, until I had to finally ‘fess up to myself and admit that, all things considered, I needed to just lie on the couch for awhile and watch some shitty television and try to switch my brain off. Which, in my defense, is what I try to do with my time off anyway. It’s just that, this time, I can pretend that I’m doing it for medicinal purposes. Perhaps there’s one good thing about getting sick, after all.

I was talking to someone the other day about suicidal ideation, as you do. Well, not suicidal ideation, per se; we were actually talking about the impulse to throw yourself off a very tall building or some other impressive height and the way it just seemingly happens, at random, without warning. I made some half-joke along the lines of, I don’t really get that because I don’t want to kill myself, and was told in a two-part statement that was at once entirely correct and impressively incorrect that (a) the urge to throw yourself into the air from a great height isn’t really an attempt to kill yourself, actually, and also (b) everyone wants to throw themselves off a tall building, anyway.

The first part of that is very true; it’s called — somewhat darkly — “the call of the void,” and it’s apparently a very common variation on the fight-or-flight response to the inherent danger of being in a position where you might fall to your doom: why not just take matters into your own hands, instead? (The “call of the void” name apparently derives from the original French term, which of course sounds much better: “L’appel du vide.” Who doesn’t want to have some l’appel du vide, when you put it like that?)

It’s the second part that I had the problem with, because I’m someone who still feels nervous walking the (impressively fenced) bridge over the highway on the walk home from one of our local movie theaters, despite the fact that I do it multiple times a year for, essentially, the entire decade-plus that I’ve lived in the city. I certainly have no desire to throw myself off a tall building, and everything being equal, I don’t even feel comfortable being in any location where that could conceivably be an option, anyway.

I’m explaining all of the above when my brain suddenly remembers, no, that’s not entirely true: there was that one time earlier this year. I was standing on the top floor of the Seattle Convention Center, right at the edge of the floor in front of a floor-to-ceiling window and watching the traffic move past five or so stories below and I did actually feel that unavoidable but what if I jumped moment. At the time, I was deeply uncomfortable and moved away from the window immediately, making a joke in my head about I know the year has been shitty so far, but come on now or the like, but it stayed with me for a couple of days afterwards, that sense of “why did I feel that?” before I looked into it and found out about the call of the void.

That said, part of me almost wishes I had tried it, mostly because what would have happened wouldn’t have been me falling to my death, but instead me faceplanting against some very thick glass before coming to my senses and moving on far faster, all things considered.

It’s taken me a few weeks — in my defense, I’ve had both the death of a pet and being consistently overwhelmed by work, to the point where it felt as if I was only able to stay at my desk for roughly 90% of the time I was awake for days on end — but I am finally at that point of the year when I’ve remembered that fall and winter are my favorite times of the year. I’m hedging my bets by naming two seasons, but what I really mean is, the stretch between October and December.

What underscored the realization for me was walking home from the movie theater the other night. It’s a point now where it’s dark pretty much from 4pm onwards, making the night feel at once omnipresent and endless, and also oddly magical and unknowable. That felt especially true that night, which was one of those weird Portland nights that are both warmer than you’d expect and oddly misty, so that everything feels hazy and somehow welcoming as you wander past everyone going about their business.

It was late enough that people were flocking to the many bars I walked past (and I could hear the various types of music flooding out from the doors as they opened when I walked past: shitty techno, muddy guitars and twang, echoing jazz-pop), but also early enough that I was walking past families and couples as they left all the various restaurants after their meals, huddling together and laughing, talking, conspiratorially. Maybe it was the darkness or the supposed-cold-of-it-all but it all felt like end-of-the-year behavior, as opposed to people walking through the streets in summer where they take up more space and interact with everything around them more. This time of year is for people to hunker down and lean in, appearing and disappearing from the fog and suddenly illuminated by passing cars as they walk before vanishing.

All of this was soundtracked by the crunching of leaves underfoot, and surrounded by the orange glow of living rooms in houses as I walked past. I was reminded of how much I love to walk around neighborhoods during the holidays and see the colors of Christmas Lights everywhere. How the lives of everyone in those houses feels like it bleeds outside during this time of year, and what should be this dark, lonely, cold thing becomes so much warmer than it should.

It’s not just the night itself, when we had to decide to put Piggles to sleep. That was hard enough, even thought we knew it was both the kindest option considering the circumstance and what felt like the inevitability of it all. She was, after all, 18 years old — officially very old for a cat — and we’d been noticing that she’d been breathing heavier in recent weeks, but not to the point where it felt like it was a pressing issue until it so very, very much was.

(We’d made the decision and felt the paralyzing mix of regret and grief and sadness and uncertainty over have we done the right thing, is this the right thing to do? and then, soon after, were told that she couldn’t even be brought out of the oxygen tent to be intubated easily; knowing that felt like a strangely horrifying gift: if she was suddenly having such trouble breathing, we were definitely being kinder, saying goodbye that night.)

Nonetheless, we’d been — or I’d been, at least, all I can say for certain — unrealistically optimistic that she had longer left, that she was breathing heavier because of the weather or maybe it was arthritis because she was so old or any number of things that would allow us to pretend that, sure, she wasn’t a spring chicken anymore but she still had a lot of time left with us. She was Piggles, after all; she was, until the end, this tiny little cat with an oversized presence who was at once affectionate and demanding and ever-present. Life without her seemed unthinkable.

And that’s what I mean, when I say it’s not just the night of saying goodbye to her, and hoping that somehow she could tell through our head-scratches and cuddles that we loved her so fucking much. It’s been the afterwards of it all: her not being there when I expect her to be, the absence of her on the couch, or yelling at me when I’m in the kitchen, or running towards me when I get up in the morning because she wants to say hello and get breakfast. (Feeding her was the first thing I did when I got up every day, and the last thing I did before bed each night.) It’s her not being around when she was always around.

Even now, it feels like she’s around. Just not in all the ways I wish she was.

November is the start of the year breaking down, in the best ways possible. Sure, there are drawbacks to this time of year — think about how cold it is at all times seemingly, how sluggish it can feel to get up when everything is so dark first thing in the morning, or that nagging feeling in the back of your head that there’s only so much time left before the holidays and/or the end of the year and you’ve got shit you need to do — but at its best, November is when things start to slip and fall apart and the structure of the year begins to unravel just enough to let us breathe a little easier.

Occasionally, I admit, I get exhausted by the fact everything just keeps going: the work week is what it is, and then the weekend happens and that’s just enough time to catch up on everything and prepare for… the work week again. More than once, I’ve told people on Sunday night that I’m lowkey mad that I’ve finally got my head straight after the last week only to have to face up to doing it all over again the very next day; there’s a Sisyphian feel to the whole thing for 10 months out of the year… and then November arrives.

Part of it is because the holidays are around the corner, and that means that we get some time off for Thanksgiving here in the US, and then the Christmas and New Year breaks (or, if you’re me, one long extended break between the two) come along and it’s a glorious chance to step off the roundabout for a period. It’s a chance to decompress a little before the whole thing starts again in the New Year.

For the past couple years, however, I’ve had an additional boost to the system collapsing just a little bit: I’ve been so bad at taking PTO at work that, somewhere around the middle of October, someone has to take me to one side and politely remind me that I need to take a lot of time off in the next two months or else I’ll lose the hours I’ve accrued… and so, this year like last year, I get two solid months of three-day-weekends at the shortest. It feels decadent and indulgent and something I feel no small amount of guilt over, but I can’t deny that it also helps me relax and feel human in a way that I truly appreciate.

Sure, I could always use my PTO during the rest of the year so that I don’t feel so stressed and oppressed in the first place, but if I did that, I wouldn’t have any ability to take so much time off as the year ends and everything gently, wonderfully, unravels and gets slower and easier.

Here’s to watching movies on planes, which is where no less than five of my October watches come from — and Sorry, Baby, at least, was the kind of thing that makes me thrilled to have been trapped in a flying metal tube, given that I wouldn’t have likely watched it for any other reason but I utterly loved it. Elsewhere, let’s enjoy the abandonment of the traditional horror focus for the month and the return of two camp favorites to finish October off: Phantom of the Paradise and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Sometimes, you can’t beat the classics.