blogger blue balls

today the rest of us return to step with our realities, back to life with what we can only hope is rightly renewed chi, perspective, perhaps point. cliched as it may, the ringing in of a year anew can’t help but inspire recalibration toward (at least in the direction of) bigger desires, intention for a greater good, however much of it we can muster. inspired after weeks of (mostly) fond memories with family, family of friends, it’s almost impossible not to want more for the next, to lament at the last: the things we should have (ok shouldn’t have) said, the things we didn’t do, all those fucking emails we forgot to remember. the truths we ate, the ideas we abandoned. half-hearted. half-there.

it’s been hard for us to express our shit lately; get it out in any medium. by the end of the year we were tumbling in some sad creative shambles, the pace of work and its procrastination enough to leave us just fumes when time came to create for fun. we were completely blocked when we tried to write, scraps of sentence making their way across the wall of this sterile medium. they just lay there, square on a page, absent of thread theory theatrics. florid words forming nothing really, overdramatic leaves clinging to a spindly, silly vine. so we tried turning pen to paintbrush, keen to unleash in confident color, perhaps fearing this shy serif just no longer fit our fancy. but what didn’t come out of our unrestrained (even bc-enhanced) brush tips but motherfucking blocks. bright, square things, textured terrorized frustration. frantic expression of an intolerable inertia.

in many ways the year we just survived can be represented by this shape, burly blockades in the way of that ever-abstract -fleeting happiness. we spent the months resisting our deposit into such definitive, determined surroundings: the return to work (still a cubicle, if a cube of concrete) confines of domesticity (confusions with love), our own designed doubts (mind’s own self-mutilation). forces to resist (yet curiously fit) the mold, whether at work en blog or at play. a lot of time spent worrying, mostly about what we weren’t doing. inaction. stuck. rut. block. blocked. blah.

it was in a fit of the flu, fuzzy cone of a fever, messages in dreams maybe sent to process (a visitor’s pass to the realm of hungry ghosts) that we broke through, owned it, got on top and rode that bad boy. we realized: perspective. blocks or breadcrumbs. were they standing tall our way or were they stones to step on, just shit to do.

if you believe in resolutions, yours should probably be just this: do what you want. think of what you want, and get it done. while brasandranties has always been quite good at declaring what it is that we desire, we’ve only recently remembered that it’s all for naught unless we up and fucking do something about it. so here’s to 11. turn up the lights.