I am typing this sitting in the sunshine on a white crushed gravel patio outside the winery downtown. I am sitting literally on the gravel because I didn't want to bother the staff by making them haul out a chair or table. The last time I was here, the owner told me that sometimes I sit outside in weather that she wouldn't consider sitting outside weather. She said it in a nice way like I was quirky, but I've noticed a lot of people who think they're quirky are actually just annoying. The gravel is cool where it touches my butt and the outside of my crossed ankles. (I am sitting criss-cross style with my long legs bent up under me.) I don't mind it. 

I spent the day (wasted the day) writing. I'm alarmed how quickly I was able to use up this week. I brought two books to read here but then I thought I might write to this first instead. I brought a book on Civil War death and that one I mentioned previously about Appalachian folk witchcraft. The witchcraft one is not very good (a little corny and so many spells for warts! Who gets so many warts that they need multiple spells?!) but the death book is excellent. I get along so well with the Gilded Years generation except when they are acting all racist and not letting their women do anything. (Which is usually.) I would have made a good shitty cavalry man in a past life and died on my back with my mouth open to the sky. Maybe someone would have come along and taken one of those early black and white Civil War battlefield photographs of me.

I dreamed I was writing a porn fic thing about a whale man with a giant penis. (I'm still a freak, after all.) Then I had one of my significant ones full of the past and conversations that I revise and revise in my dreaming mind until they feel real, and the sense of them and the presences in them last for days. It's funny how much reality I give to these dreams, like they are true psychic nighttime meetings with my past, whereas the one I had immediately afterward about attending a bilingual picnic with my most annoying coworkers will be disregarded. (Although, hey, at least I am kind of sorta dreaming in Spanish, even if most of the dream was me not really knowing Spanish.)

There are a truly stunning amount of mediocre white couples downtown right now, pointing at things, peering in windows, crossing the street and then crossing back. Very judgemental of me, huh? Mediocre. I'm the very essence of the word. I'm down here too, drinking my second glass of very dark red wine and eating a chocolate bar for lunch.

The year rubs down to the last little nub, doesn't it? So many people are probably just the same as me, wandering through this blank winter sun afternoon stupor with their puff jackets, using up the last days of the year, wondering where they will be this time next year and what they will have lost, thinking oh, wherever you are I hope you are well.