Before I get started, I just want to wish everyone the happiest of holidays. I want to forget about all the debilitating stress that accompanies our year-end self reviews and those shitty cerebellar scars that resulted from receiving that pink reindeer sweater from grandma right about the time her dementia set in (as it was, in fact, a sweater for a reindeer that she had spent all year knitting). So, what do you think? Can we do that? Can we all just put down the sharp utensilary implements, pin-fired ballistic weaponry, hidden incendiary roadside devices and uranium-enriched anthrax envelopes and try and move past our collective rage to engage in a hand-joining, arm-swinging, difference celebrating, lung-topping, sing-along?

Look, all I’m asking is that we do our cyber-loving best to shake the age-old, time-tested, tradition-adhering traps of pre-year/post-year personal growth comparisons that lead to excessive binge-drinking and burning of the collected failures of our past like old love letters and agency rejection notices and rejoice in the brilliant fact that we’re all still alive and hopefully still functional enough to sit up and take nourishment. Nothing crass, brash or harsh right now, okay? I want to make this about the “now”, the “moment”, the “zero-point”, and consider things holistically, embrace the gestalt, ascertain the big fucking picture. Capice?

So please, if we could, for this brief blip in our oftentimes trying existences, as a group, a unit, in toto, focus not on the entropically leaden tangible, perceivedly valuated material, or existentially hollow mundane, but rather on the esoterically beautiful nature of our interwebically fantastical union – that would be just swell. Cool?

Okay, apparently not. But that actually is cool, cause we are who we are – amidst the halcyon and the horror – and there’s no reason to make anything more of these times than, say, the middle of June when we’re celebrating pit stains and pina coladas. But I do tend to think it’s important that we do it with the people we love. Or totally dig. Or tend to tolerate. Or kind of leave us alone. Cause that’s what it’s all about: stepping outside ourselves and giving it up to our homies, then harnessing that energy, taking a deep breath and starting the madness all over again.

And speaking of, I’m planning on taking the blog in a slightly new direction come 2008, with more regular entries and more focus outside of my private little realm of horror and otherworldly mystery. Surely, I’ll still have a burning need to reveal some more story stuff and pass along a few bits of fool’s gold I think I’ve found, but I want to steer my thoughts in a more universal direction as well. I want to reach out more, I think. I want to connect. I want to make my words a little more about your worlds, too.

So, all the very best to all of you. Oh, and do try the elf. I hear the frequent exposure to the freezing cold makes them very tender.