Mid-December 2023, I was chatting with petra and got an idea for the next novel I could write.

Tonight I sent them the last part of the shitty first draft of said novel, where I simply told myself the story.

Whether it'll be this fast to get through the editing remains to be seen; mostly, I'm tickled that I can pinpoint the date and time, and the exact conversation that helped kick it off.

Genuine cheering and plate-banging outside my apartment right now is proper celebration on the mayoral race. I'm still a little disappointed I couldn't work the polls today, because it'd have been wonderful to be in the room, but this will do for now.

Other good things of the day really pale in comparison to someone who wants there to be poor people in New York City, because a healthy metropolis is one where people of all stripes thrive. Bring it.

Tonight was my and my dad's last Friday night rooftop cider of the season. There's still going to be Friday night ciders - splitting a bottle, catching up, having a good time chatting - and with the nights coming earlier, it's going to happen in the apartment instead of the roof. I don't mind too much, not with how dark it was when we got there or how much darker it was when we went back down. It was honestly quite nice to look around and realize this was the last one. Nothing too special about it, no world-class cider or magnificent thoughts, just a good bottle and a nice time.

Let me amend that: nothing too special about what we did, something quite special about the night in a low-key mundane way, paying attention to the ordinary moments. It was a lovely sunset, fast-moving gray-on-slate tufts and spots of clouds, and by the time we went in, it was dark enough the moon was the brightest thing in the sky. So we stopped to look at it for a while. Just past half-full, the clouds were moving eastward. Almost there, almost there, the wind and the angle taking them just below the moon, enough to light up but not what we were hoping for, waiting more, waiting, a large piece comes by and not quite and maybe this next one - and in front of the moon it went, bright as a star, and we kept oohing and ahhing until it'd passed and the moon was shining by itself again.

As ways to end a season, it's a pretty good one.

It's my Livejournal's birthday today. I'm always a little taken aback when I get the emails about it - a bit of "really? that thing's still on?" and a bit of "it has been a while since high school." Most years it passes by with just those thoughts, a day in, a day out, and for most of today it was going that route up until I heard Cameron Crowe at Symphony Space.

Not Cameron Crowe for the innate value of Crowe himself, not Crowe for the shine of someone worth all the applause, not for someone who said Joni Mitchell could talk in third drafts and said music is a way to tattoo moments. He spoke well, he read aloud with a lot of charm, he answered questions thoughtfully, and when the interviewer asked the last question of the night - whether there was still hope for music to blow his mind the way it used to. Crowe leaned over, put his hand on his arm, and said to keep hoping. Words to that effect, at least; I lost the exact phrase in the immediate applause right after. And very much words to that effect. Keep hoping, stay open, keep listening.

It sparked the memory of my dad saying it's hard for music to hit him the way it used to, and of several memories reading different people's comments that they wish music could hit them the way it did when they were in high school, or college, or some other point in their life that's simply when they were younger and, I suspect, didn't have as much on their minds and hadn't heard nearly as much music. It goes beyond having listened to a lot more and having had the world sand down a lot of the edges. There's some of it - how much, I don't know - about not being open to having your mind blown. Of course it takes more work to blow your mind when it's already been blown so many times already. And to say it can't, it won't, is to commit to a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you're not open to it, if you don't keep looking, of course it won't happen.

I got a lot of good music in college and grad school, true. And I've heard so much since then, I'll often come across a new song and it'll strike me as a very good one, a superb variant on something I already know, a clever turn of phrase that's a pleasant arrangement of words. And I'm still willing and open to hearing new music, and it's true it doesn't happen as often that I hear a song that makes the world feel absolutely new, and it's true that it still happens.

My Livejournal's old enough to graduate college. It would've spent the last four years listening to music it never could've imagined, and in a density and intensity that's probably not going to come around again. And it's going to be listening to more music than it can believe.

To stay open and keep listening. To periodically get a reminder to keep hoping.