The other day I was trying to explain to a new friend the mania that many of my friends and I have for documenting our lives. I told him that life was better when documented, re-articulated, and well-lit. This is how to create present nostalgia.

I stayed in for most of the weekend and wrote, which really means writing a few sentences, taking some notes, and then checking my email obsessively every ten minutes or so. But all that aside, it went well. I'm on the same track tonight and I'm happy to be inside. Something Ali said the other day haunted the crude portion of my brain that can't help but glom onto superstitions...he said something along the lines of, "Some people say that what you are doing on New Years is what you'll be doing the rest of the year." What a thought...while I spend every New Years with some of the best people in this universe (not sure about the other universes), I'm usually holding on to a grain of discontent, some regret for the slowness of my personal achievements. Sometimes, even though I am logistically in the best possible place with the best possible people, I still feel like a shrimp plate at a Bar Mitzvah. So-and-so's girlfriend thinks I'm obnoxious. Why does everybody hate me? I might have brain damage. Did I leave the stove on? But I guess that's just part of the chemical make-up (Prozac and Ativan only dull the edges into what someone once told me was a "quirky personality type", as though that could be found in the DSM IV). I can't exactly obliterate that from my consciousness and arise a different person. I wouldn't want to. But I do know what I want and (as the Sex Pistols once said) I know how to get it. It has a lot to do with staying home and writing, appreciating my friends, and to be doing something on New Years that I would want to do for the rest of the year. I'll be with some of the best people in the universe and I'll know where I am.
So really, here's the challenge...I want to be present.