Dick Cheney removes his human mask and squats naked inside a pentagram made from the blood of drowned orphans amidst flickering shadows and flames and smoke from brimstone and burning tires. An aide brings him the bad news: tobacco consumption down, booze down, sugar down, trans-fat down, Krispy-Kreme stock down 15%, whatever.

Dick Cheney just chuckles, a deep chortle with lots of reverb. “Buy,” is all he says. “Buy. They’ll bounce back up in a week or so when people forget about their resolutions.” And he shakes his “head” over folly and human weakness.

It’s important, see, that it be clear I have made no resolutions for the New Year. I couldn’t be arsed, basically. Suddenly, the New Year was upon me, just like that, and there I stood, no resolutions ready.
The things I have ended up doing differently, stopping doing, doing more of, doing for the first time, they have nothing to do with no steenkin’ resolutions.
They are, instead, a response to the pain and turmoil inside me. Nothing special, just the usual stuff you run into, I suppose, on this lap of the bumper car ride.

The weather has been freezing cold for weeks now. Everything is frozen solid. White. When it is foggy, the fog freezes.

There is a hydrangea out in front of my house. If I could paint flowers, I would paint it every day for a year and at the end of the year would know something I currently don’t. I would paint it in all weathers and lights and stages of growth from jello-green sprout in the spring (to arbitrarily choose a starting point) to its current brown, whithered and majestic state.

But I can’t paint flowers so I think about hydrangeas on my frozen drive into work. You have never seen one die, have you. They live forever, hydrangeas. The ones of my childhood are still alive, still thickening against the walls of my childhood house (except for the one my dad actually parked the pickup on), or they would be, if the house hadn’t been burned down, then razed for a mall parking lot.

Hydrangeas are my favorite flower; unfortunately my wife doesn’t like them so we get into fistfights over flowers a lot. We drive out into the hills with a bottle of whiskey and she puts a roll of quarters into her fist and slugs me in the head when I’m not looking. When I wake up on my back with the taste of iron in my mouth she’s standing over me drinking my whiskey and saying something about no hydrangeas this year.

In fact, we have three of them out in front of the house.

So one of the things I’ve started doing is meditating in the mornings. I get up at like 4.30 am, 4.45, for that peaceful hour at the start of the day, right, when everyone is sleeping. Feed cats, eat breakfast, boil tea water, make coffee, pack lunches, write in journal. Now add meditating to that. The hour is getting pretty fucking full. It’s turning into an hour of stress; I’m beginning to stress myself in my quest for inner peace. I’m sitting there meditating, counting my breaths or something, checking my watch every 5 minutes.

I’ve also begun making lists. Five to ten items on a postit each morning, which I carry around with me throughout the day, crossing shit off. Or not. I’ve got a success rate around 70%, which I consider good. A few easy things, a few hard things, a few easy or hard things that have been niggling and bugging me and I’ve been putting them off for months or years. Works, so far.

One of the things on the list, recently, was go have a cup of coffee by myself. Because you can’t just sit in a coffeehouse and do nothing, and I wasn’t in the mood to read magazines, I bought a book first. Some book, any book. Some book on Buddhist meditation, cheap skinny little book. I had my coffee and read the book. Mindfulness. Attentiveness. Beginner’s mind. Blah blah blah. BzzBzzBzz. Paying attention to the moment. BzzBzzBzz. What was that? You know how you’ll be reading, and it occurs to you you sort of slept through the last two pages? I must have read the first three pages of the Mindfulness chapter five times.

How is this ever going to work, I wondered.

So there’s the meditation. And the journal writing. And I’m re-reading The Artist’s Way. I had, originally, thought I hadn’t made a lot of progress when I read it the first time, but here I am trying not to write, but rather trying to edit these manuscripts I have, re-writing is harder than writing, and with ten or a dozen paintings hanging around. So I suppose it did set something in motion.

And I’m trying to give my wife more time to herself and more space, same with Beta, and Gamma I suppose. Step by step, whatever. No resolutions, just this step. And every morning, on my way out to the car, a glance at the hydrangea, frozen in the snow.

Whiskey River had a quote a while back, some one remarking how Westerners want to witness their own enlightenment. I suppose I want not only to witness mine, I also want to blog about it. Although, who knows. Maybe enlightenment will strike, and then I’ll just