Snow

12/26/2022

Christmas comes and goes again. It's an odd feeling to put to words, that knowledge that another one has come and gone and another 365 days until it arrives again. I think because it makes me come to terms with how old I'm getting. I've lived plenty of my life doing nothing, and even though I spend my days surrounded by projects and writing and art and music, I still feel stagnant. I hope that feeling ends soon, but I have a feeling I'll always know it's there in the back of my mind.

I'm on the mend, though. I caught RSV and now I'm recovering, though I've still got a chest cough and I wake up with coughing fits. But at the end of the day I don't have any fever and I can breathe out my nose again, so that's been nice. I've had more energy to write, draw, etc. I'm getting back to guitar, though I'm definitely rusty after ten days of not practicing, especially because I'm a beginner. It'll be fine, though. I'll figure it out.

On the bright side of things, it's snowing here. It's rare we get snow in December, as it often waits until late January or February to appear. But we're currently watching it pile up outside in sheets, and it's slowly covering the brittle grass. I'm excited about it, considering I love snow and I love watching it fall, even if it's going to make things a bit slow for a while. I live in an area without snow plows or salt for the roads, so it seems that all things are coming to a halt here.

In other news, you ever read a book so unreadable you decide to cut it up for collage work? Yeah. "The Vorrh" by B. Catling is that book for me. I attempted to read it for the first time back in high school and could barely get through the first couple of chapters, and then decided to re-read it as well as possible this past week. Well, I don't know if it's the RSV or if I really do not understand it, but just getting through the prologue was so laborous that I decided to shred the thing with a pair of tiny golden scissors. I'm slowly cutting pages and lines of text into strips that I can chop up to my needs. I bought it for a quarter, second-hand, so there's no guilt to it for me. I used some text to draw one of my characters, and put some of the lyrics to "Defenestration Song" by Have A Nice Life next to him. It worked out well, so I'm going to be using it for things like that from now on. I'm also going to rip off the cover and carve the illustration off it to glue to the cover of my new sketchbook. I want to play around with collage and more art mediums than I've done in the past, so hopefully this will motivate me. That's one thing that this book is good for.

The plot is... something special, for sure. I'm no critic, and I'm certain that a good many people have found great enjoyment in reading this book, but a plot centered around the supposed Garden of Eden in the center of a mysterious forest could be phenomenal! But I think that B. Catling flew too close to the sun on the concepts. Cyclopes, real-life historical figures, a seer's husband using a bow made of her bones, robots, all of it tends to swirl together in a messy blur. You'd think adding every color of the rainbow to something would make a bright and vivid image, but all it does is muddle every color into a dull brown. That's how this book feels to me.

Well, enough complaining about that mess. I've got better books to read, including a fantasy series my mom is getting me into, and plenty of other works that litter my room in piles and double-layers in my bookshelf. I'll occupy my time in better ways, hopefully.

If you celebrate it, I hope you had a very Merry Christmas, and if you don't, I hope that you've had a lovely and cozy winter.