Holidaze

Yes, I am in the daze… already a ridiculous number of parties, gatherings, events, and still lots more ahead… Good stuff appearing here and there in the blogosphere that I wanted to link to before I go to my picture gallery… Rebecca Solnit wrote a wonderful essay “The Age of Mammals” about the first quarter of the 21st century looking back from a hundred years on. Billmon returned from a few weeks off to post a telling retrospective of the Iraq War as seen through his own blog entries dating back to 2003, showing how often and correctly he and many others predicted what would happen throughout the years that supposedly no one was aware of how bad it was “becoming”. Absolutely sickening how self-referentially pigheaded and willfully blind and ignorant the punditocracy and ostensibly professional journalists (paid propagandists) have been and continue to be… W. Joseph Stroupe continues to write very interesting pieces about the new landscape of global geopolitics at Asia Times, well worth checking out. John Robb’s Global Guerrillas is an ongoing must-read too. His latest describes how the insurgency has destroyed the electrical grid serving Baghdad; it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see how easily this tactic will be adopted and spread far and wide in coming years. The precariousness of so-called modern life is increasingly staring us in the face. Efforts to go local and low-tech are not just ecologically smart, they’re probably the key to living well as the cascading failures of the Long War guerrilla attacks finally start to appear in North America…

San Francisco weather has been flitting back and forth between gray sogginess and crispy delight… here’s a couple of shots from Dec. 18, the last time I rode to the top of Twin Peaks (probably going again as soon as I finish this post)…

Last weekend CounterPULSE had its party following the final night of Frolic: The CircusDragBurlesque festival we just started… here’s a couple of memorable shots from the evening:

We had a last-minute party that grew really large this past Wednesday. Apologies to any friends reading this who didn’t get one of our frantic and erratic email invites… it wasn’t anything but bad planning and chaos… anyway, the party was great fun, a lovely mix of old and new friends, locals and folks from afar (Finland, Kazakhstan, Germany, India, Switzerland, Spain, Argentina, England, to name a few homes of our guests)… Parties like this one are the reason why throwing parties can be so satisfying. Most everyone seemed to have a blast. Here’s a few photos…

My lovely daughter, Francesca!

David and Megan and me cavorting in the hall…

The one-year anniversary of the demise of my last relationship just passed and it’s been good to see the year end. Nothing worse than the healing process from a broken heart. (Well, that’s not true, there’s lots worse than that, but you know what I mean)… Here’s to a hopeful new start in 2007, new love and continued conviviality flowing in and around my life. I’m actually a very lucky guy.