Winter Solstice Report

It's fucking cold, unseasonably snowy and icy for Seattle, and I'm glad to say that starting tomorrow, we return to more appropriate temperatures and good old cold fucking rain.

For our annual end-of-year splurge, I requested an ounce of the finest marijuana, and some hashish. I got exactly what I asked for.

I also spoke for two and a half hours to my biological father, two whom I have not spoken for a decade, and even then I didn't know him. He left when I was four, letting my mother's new husband adopt me and abuse me. When I was 18, we had a period of a few years trying to get some kind of reconnect going, but once again, he bailed out, afraid, he said. Full of regret. Unable to choose differently in spite of that.

So I moved to Seattle in 1999 and saw him once before I left, but that was the last I had heard from him. I didn't even hear from him when his mother died. Now he's almost sixty and wants to reconnect, which I've agreed to, and look forward to with hopeful anticipation.

It occurs to me now that the only linguistic structure I've ever applied to him effectively was "biological father" and even this was only an explanation to others - it never explained anything to me. It took until this week before I began making the connections between those words and the material realities they represent. Half of me was once, a single, identifiable sperm living in one of his testicles, which traveled through the shaft of his penis and exited, with more than a few others, swimming excitedly until stumbling headlong into one truly monumental case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, for instance.

Fucking.

Crazy.

So you know, whatever. It is a revelatory light that demonstrates the heart of my belief that biological connections (frequently termed family) are worth nothing, and do not guarantee or even necessarily bear the capacity to afford a person the very things we most seem to need and desire from our Real Families. I say this because when afforded the opportunity to create my own family, I have sought out so many values and traits directly opposite those embodied by my two rather cowardly parents. I haven't got a lot of good words for them right now, and there's no need to add to the pile of whining snot on the internets, so I'll stop there for now.

Courage, honesty, ability, honesty, dependability... honesty. These are the qualities embraced by those in my Real Family. Everything demanded of me as a child before I had the opportunity to choose it, because it was completely void in those responsible for my transmogrification.

::sigh:: I've had to make up for these three for a long time. And it's funny how I feel like this one is now trying to catch up to me. I find that annoying. It makes my back hurt. It makes me want to go to sleep.

I made a most delicious beef stew yesterday. And the best polenta I've ever pulled off. Creamy and delicious. With some fresh baked rolls, it was a meal meant for a snowy day spent indoors.

I have a few projects I'm trying to gain traction with:

The Spice Rubric: Confessions of a Culinary Sinner
An in-home water feature that makes a lot of noise for zero dollars
Storycorps.net - especially with my biological father
Finish reading "120 Days of Sodom" and "Ambivalent Zen"
Make meaningful progress on "Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self"
Clean the bathroom

I am tired, and am going to take a nap with my cats.