Kindle fire with snow

I'm watching it snow like the dickens. It is an unexpected thing, this glossing of white now all along the streets and coating the tips of trees in pots on balconies just across the way. First the white streaks glance one way, the wind  pushing the flakes sideways, to the north. Then the wind relaxes, and the flakes spiral down, straight down. Then the wind inhales a bit, sucking the white bits back to the south, until an exhale blows them back again to the north.

Seems to me this unexpected snowstorm is a lot like 2009 was for me. Sucking, for one. Unexpected, for another, and also because of the omnidirectional flow -- first one way, then another, then back again, with big lulls in betwixt. At times I felt quite the marionette, dancing at the whim of those who have neither my best interests at heart nor even a clear perspective on themselves and the the effects their behaviour had on others.

Optimists will counsel me that I should "not throw out the baby with the bathwater;" I should reflect upon the good that came with the bad, the lessons that were hard-won. Fuck and alas -- no. ALL of life is hard-won. I will not celebrate and pretend nostalgia about a year that was more bad than good, more transitional than stable, more down than up, more dark than light. When something is overwhelmingly negative, I will call that spade a negative spade and wait for something more auspicious to arrive and label "decent" or "reasonable" or "pleasant." That is realism. That is me.

So. I am glad to see 2009 sweep out of my life, forever. Along the torn hem of her long skirts, which she trails in the increasingly precarious streets below me, is the muck and the rabble and the detritus of misbegotten plans, untrustworthy assassins, and a general sense of "get out, and get out now." Goodbye, 2009. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.