104th Post - December 2022

Hello 'In the Know' readers, I hope you had fun in November and enjoyed my recommendations. However, Christmas has arrived and this means its time for me to write about more things to do this month to keep everyone 'in the know' and most importantly getting ready for Christmas and making sure you are ready for the party season.

It's true, Christmas can feel like a lot of work. But when you look back on all the Christmases in your life, you'll find you've created family traditions and lasting memories. Those memories, good and bad, are really what help to keep a family together over the long haul. Christmas is not a time nor season, but a state of mind. To cherish peace and goodwill, to be plenteous in mercy, I to have the real spirit of Christmas. The spirit of Christmas is the spirit of love and of generosity and of goodness. It illuminates the picture window of the soul, and we look out upon the world's busy life and become more interested in people than in things. Christmas waves a magic wand over this world and behold, everything is softer and more beautiful....

Putting aside Christmas, this year for me has seen many sleepless nights. What keeps you up at night?

It's a momentary glimmer of distraction. The tiniest notion of reminescent thought that wanders off into wondering, the spark that lights a tinderbox of fixation. And now is irreversible. The flame has caught. You're wide awake.

Maybe it's that one urgent question you mean to ask someone years ago but didn't. Someone that slipped through the cracks in your history, and they're are too far gone now away. All the ghost ships that have sailed and sailed away, but at this hour, they've anchored in your harbor. They sit with flags waving, bright and beautiful. And it's almost like it's real.

Sometimes sleep is as evasive as happiness, isn't it mystifying how quickly we vacillate between self love and loathing at this hour? One moment, your life looks like a night sky of gleaming stars. The next, the fog has descended. Suddenly you're in the rope indentations of your old tire swing still on the branch. All the phone numbers you still know by heart but never call anymore. The boy's devastated face as he peeled out of your driveway. The family man he is now.

What must they all think of you?

Why can't you sleep? Maybe you lie awake in the aftershock of falling headlong into a connection that feels like some surreal cataclysmic event. Like spontaneous combustion, or seeing snow falling on a tropical beach. A lavender haze crush that feels like the crash of wave.

Or was tonight the night you realized how solitary, how alone you really are, no matter how high you climb. The elevation just makes it colder.

Some midnights, you're out and you're buzzing with electric current — an adventurer in pursuit of rapturous thrill. Music blaring from speakers and the reckless intimacy of dancing with strangers. Something in this shadowy room to make you feel shiny again. On these nights, you know that there are facets of you that only glow in the dark.

Why are you still up at this hour? Because you're cosplaying vengeance fantasies, where the bad bad man is hauled away in handcuffs and you get to watch it happen. You laugh into the mirror with a red wine snarl. You look positively deranged.

Maybe you were trying to mastermind matters of the heart again. You've gotten lost in the labyrinth of your head, where the fear wraps its claws around the fragile throat of true love. Will you be able to save it in time? Save it from who? Well, it obvious. From you.

We lie awake in love and in fear and in turmoll and in tears. We stare at walls and drink until they speak back. We twist in our self-made cages and pray that we aren't — right this minute — about to make some fateful life-altering mistake.

This is a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams. The floors we pace and the demons we . For all of us who have tossed and turned and decided to keep the lanterns lit and go for searching. Hoping that just maybe, when the clock strikes twelve... we'll meet ourselves.