My New Year's Blue Ablution

There’s nothing like a seagull in a snowstorm. Maybe it’s the white on white, or maybe it’s the sense of disorientation that comes when looking up through falling snowflakes and your vertigo is saved on the wings of a white bird. Whatever, I find myself coasting over that dark thread of river again, not quite frozen. It steals me away from home and towards some other occupation, towards that ocean of interstate and my half-hour commute to another continent of consciousness called work. It’s been a long strange trip I’ve taken for way too many years now. And so this year I will whistle another tune: sometimes I toil for a living, sometimes I dream that I’m free, sometimes I get a great notion to jump in the river and flee.