flipping for my matchbook.

well, it sure has been a while. consider tomorrow the spark to starting over. since this is no longer a requirement. blogging, for me, has never been an assignment. i speak when i have something to say. and in these final months before i'm launched into the much vaunted "real world" again, i suppose it's time i focused my voice.

we'll see how brave i am.

______

shades of life are ringing through my open ears.
december.24.2007

according to the news reports, a giant fat man in a red suit is making a perilous trek across the nighttime skies as i write this. delivering smiles and magic to people who, most likely, need them. deserve them. i'm sitting here at the kitchen table, flooded by two decades of memories. i'm eagerly awake, but not for the impending arrival of santa and my deepest desire: a shiny g.i. joe box. yeah, talk about weapons of mass destructions.

it's funny to be in this house tonight. to witness, maybe more so than last year, how we grow up. how it's eerily quiet as i count down the minutes to a midnight episode of family guy. how i'm not bursting with curiosity at what i might get. about how i'm more entertained and excited for spencer to get here tomorrow and pull apart the blue plastic bag hiding his new batman bed. god, that thing is fucking cool. in many past eves, i've spent these last minutes before my eyes fell to dreams hoping the cookies tasted well enough. that i had been a good enough boy. that, maybe, miracles come to those who wait. that the stars held this strange kind of magical power to crisscross the universe and unite people. no matter how far the distance separated them. by space. or by hearts.

i think, most of the time, i forget the call of magic. or faith. or whatever it is you want to call it. maybe it's just blind hope. especially when i'm surrounded by point-of-sale displays and pop star versions of classic holiday tunes. but maybe it's the allure of the three movies i saw in the past three days, weaving three very different stories about love. about power. and, ultimately, about hope. three stories that restore, in some little luster, a glimmer in my heart when you wish upon a star.

my wish for you is that you believe who you are is exactly what my heart has always searched for. my wish for you is for you to be fully happy. my wish for you is for your demons to go away. my wish for you is for your doubts to subside. my wish for you is for someone to unlock your heart. my wish for you is for your ambitions to shine. my wish for you is for you to know the best is yet to come. my wish for you is for the strength to deal with what's ahead. my wish for you is to find the love you've always been seeking. and my wish for you is that the smoke finally clears.

wishes, after all, are just a spectacle of magic. a cannonball shot with a hectic direction. so i'll just sit here in my childhood home on the eve of another christmas. oddly eating cookies. take that, jolly fat man. and hoping that magic touches those i love the most as they scatter across the universe.

merry christmas.