The Melody Lingers On

The liberal political whirlwind. And at the end, fittingly, there was snow. Heaps of it. The first fall of the year delaying the flight, and then welcoming me at home the next morning. Imagine my delight as the change distressed the citizen neighbours, wrapping up traffic, halting expected routines. It always amazes - how ill-prepared folks are in December for what will surely prove routine in the months ahead. Count on it. Yet in every year there lies the same chaos at that first real flurry. How little we learn. And how funny it is.

On a much more sour note, work also welcomed me back, with a vengeance. Ignorable work at that, the kind I most abhor and usually can avoid, replete with organizational monotony: Checklists and resolutions. Every detail just so. Pah. I expect many days at this desk to frustrate, but I hope those moments of deafeningly internal Honduran screams while watching the tediousness about remain fewer in number.

And so that glorious weekend already seems so distant. A weekend of pink forests. Of immaculate and unprecedentedly dyed comb-overs. Aborted theft of vodka and thrown, shattered glass at the infamous and hilariously too-posh "W". Chance discoveries at the Intercontinentale. Woody Allen-esq moments of longing for that expert who could trounce your friend in debate - only to enlist him from across the bar since it was where all main national journalists had come to gather. Posing as a feature writer from Harper's with the incorrectly given media pass and Deaniac t-shirt. Drinking bottles of absurd Saturday night red wines named "Sexy Lizard" and "Hot Bikini".

Plus the unbearable lightness of the selection of our leaders and immature nature of the pettiness, even as one really wouldn't care to change it. Nostalgia in the present. The spectacle. The depth of coincidence. Peeling back the everyday to illustrate the possibilities and endless divergencies of the mercifully too-short life. Like seeing the everday suddenly papered over, like this soft layer of whiteness now temporarily on the rooftops out my window.

That ever-present but under-exposed surrealness all around. Just reach out and try to grasp it. Never what it seems, so often a reminder of what's past and prologue. Beauty and poetry, sweetness and light. Easy to taste, impossible to capture.