#the new year

[botgal]

[now-winter-comes-slowly]

[mytendermind]

hope, determination, and acceptance

[xpuigc-bloc]

Franz von Bayros

1866-1924

Bílý páv' by Quido Maria Vyskočil

1910

Franz von Bayros

The New Year

1914

[plenilune]

what a weird year it's been! this time last year I remember being so high on not wanting to die for the first time in years that I was ecstatic to greet 2023 and find out what I could do in it -- I don't feel that way this year, buffetted about by circumstance and my stupid human body and brain, but I don't feel defeated. I feel like I made a good first pass at a piece of work and now I'm going to take a hack at another draft. I made some good ground. not all the ground I was hoping to make, but a lot I wasn't expecting. I feel good about my ability to keep building a life and a self I can be more and more joyful to occupy.

I tried a lot of new things and some of them didn't work but most of them did. I said yes to a lot of weird shit. I had so many experiences this year. I'm glad I spent a night dancing and smoking on the fire escape outside a masonic lodge and being absolutely drenched in rain. I'm glad Corey and I went on a gorgeous queer group ride with a bunch of other queer cyclists through the streets of our favourite parts of northern Kentucky and then bicycled back home together. I'm glad I had a not-quite-one-night stand and bused home as the sun rose golden and alive and lovely. I'm glad I re-learned the importance of dancing at clubs until I can barely move. I'm glad I saw Oldboy in the cinema and was so adrenalised that I jumped up and down on the sidewalk and screamed waiting for my bus home. I started painting back patches and sewing things onto my clothing and making jewellery and collaging and cropping all my tshirts and sweaters.

I started writing again .god, I started writing again.

and I broke my phone, my glasses, and my computer and struggled financially and took a nightmarish disaster trip to Philadelphia for my grandmother's funeral and I lost access to meds for reasons that were completely my own fault and thus sunk into a mire of depression and fatigue for several months that could have been completely avoided. I struggled to connect to people and struggled to feed myself and been a goddamn wreck. I didn't really accomplish most of the things I thought I was going to, that I started with eagerness and energy at the beginning of the year.

but hell. I built some shit. now I can keep building on top of it. I feel like a completely different person sometimes now, with different possibilities. I fucked up and lost and careened into walls of bad luck over and over this year but I feel better for and about it than I have in a long time. okay, that's new muscles. okay okay okay. new page, new draft, we can go again.

anyway. this year I want to push forward more deliberately on some of the stuff I found out I could do this year -- obviously I am continuing to work on my goddamn space heist book, but also specifically pursue block printing, drag/burlesque, bass, and making zines in 2024 instead of just experimenting with them. bicycle more, cook more, invest in people more, Not Go Off My Meds At Any Point, play more video games, watch more films. (I watched over sixty this year! after barely watching films for so long I didn't know what my own taste was any more, and feeling the shame and confusion of having once been a kid who wanted to go to film school but didn't know what movies they liked any more.)

anyway. here's to all of you who have kept me alive and interested in the world this year. my beloved partner is making arriabbiata and playing jazz in the next room. I have to work first thing tomorrow but tonight I'm going to finish the first season of Better Call Saul and poke at my novel and the day after tomorrow I'm going to have tea and listen to music and sew patches onto my jacket and best flannel. I'm going to keep finding new things to be alive for. I'm going to create a self I want to live inside. I'm excited to know what things are going to happen to me in 2024. I'm excited to learn about new ways to feel joy.

goodnight, 2023. you were a mess and I loved you more often than I didn't.

[to2llynottoby]

I wish the world was flat like the old days Then I could travel just by folding the map No more airplanes or speed trains or freeways There'd be no distance that could hold us back

Death Cab for Cutie - The New Year

[thoselovelythings]

[salonduthe]

My new year's eve 2023 😝

[frentique]

[six-of-ravens]

update: tv did drop the wifi again, and I JUST SO HAPPENED to check the best buy site in a rage and discover the tv I had been contemplating on Wednesday was now on sale for almost 50% off, making it the cheapest one available by a long shot and actually less than I paid for my current one. so. anyway. i have a new toy to pick up sometime in the next 3 days.

should i have been allowed to make this decision when i woke up less than an hour before and slept so badly? no. could anyone have stopped me? also no. does this mean i have to tell my dad intricate lies because he wants to know every detail of this escapade but will be mad if i tell him i ordered it online bc he's a boomer who doesn't trust online shopping? YUP.

[classongoing]

It's the second week of our rerun series! To give enough time to read through each episode, we won't be releasing the 2nd edition of Episode Two: Call of the Void today. Instead, however, we have a trio of tie-in stories, two old, one new for you to read.

First it's our first ever story, The New Year, a collaborative work between Class Ongoing writers @bazwillendinflames, @intuitive-revelations, and @tinybookgirl, with cover art by @liria10.

Set between Brave-ish Heart and Detained, we get to catch a small glimpse at how everyone spends their New Year’s Eve. Available here.

Next, it's our second tie-in, President Woods, written by @intuitive-revelations and with cover art again by @liria10.

With Courtney Woods being supposedly in the same year as the gang, we found it a little odd that she never shows up in Class. In this story, we take small detour into the future, to find out why. Available here.

Finally, we have the first installment of our new multipart side story, The Lost Diary Entries of a Rhodian Prince, the full length of which is written as another collaborative work, this time between @intuitive-revelations, who also illustrated it, @avariciousambitions, and @bazwillendinflames.

In this series, we expand on the entries seen in the latest Big Finish audio, Secret Diary of a Rhodian Prince, with new entries by Charlie reflecting on the latest events in Coal Hill. In this long installment, he fills in on the events since The Lost, as well as those of Fallen Soul.

The Lost Diary Entries of a Rhodian Prince is meant to double as a spoiler-filled recap of each episode, in this case Episode One, from Charlie's perspective, so do not read if you're in the middle of reading that story, or planning to do so.

If you're unable to read from the images, whether due to tech difficulties, visual impairment, or just can't discern my Charlie's handwriting, a text version is available here.

[now-winter-comes-slowly]

January

The wonderful air is over me,

The wonderful wind is shaking the tree,

It walks on the water, and whirls the mills,

And talks to itself on the tops of the hills.

Illustration: Margaret Tarrant

Find other Januaries of old at @now-winter-comes-slowly...

[notajoinerofthings]

so this is the new year

and i don't feel any different

the clanking of crystal

explosions off in the distance

[plenilune]

saying goodbye to a really fucking weird year with -- honestly -- the most fondness and eagerness to get where I'm going next I've felt in, god fucking knows how long. since the cusp of 2015, maybe? and even then that was the giddiness of being newly in love and that redeeming the rest of the hurt and uncertainty. typically at the end of the year I'm so goddamn defeated I just want it to be over. I want some ritual of starting over so I can imagine I'll be able to make it go better this time. and this year started bad! I basically spent the winter in a disorienting fog of inescapable ptsd flashbacks that more or less ate my ability to function other than at work as an automaton with a lot of scripted sentences. I would come home from desired social interactions that had gone well sobbing because even though everything had gone well the act of interacting with other people hurt in an almost physical way, so that a positive social interaction was no better than a negative one, and I could not turn off the firehose of thoughts in my head no matter what I did. my imagination was a dried out nub of fuck-all that couldn't take root in anything. anything I enjoyed doing somehow made me feel worse, as if the wires had got reversed in my brain and whenever I had a good feeling my brain input the code for bad feeling instead. I was isolated, miserable, and EXHAUSTINGLY insane. I was constantly frightened with surging waves of obsessive terror and absolutely no corroborating evidence other than my own self-loathing and assumption that everyone found me as repulsive and exhausting as I did that my partner of nearly eight years loathed me and wanted me out of their life and were just too nice to tell me. half the time my thoughts were un-parseable to me. it felt like I was having thoughts radioed in untranslated from a language I didn't speak, garbled with static and warp. I was passively, if not dangerously, suicidal.

and then somehow I did two things, and I think they saved me, though I don't quite know how. first, I made good on my New Year's resolution, which was to pursue listening to music again in the old greedy, interested, wide-ranging exploratory way I did in my teens and early twenties before my life became a parade of having to survive disasters, because I'd already started by accident discovering new things again and being excited and transformed by them in a way I'd almost forgotten (this is also partly thanks to @hamartiamart and @picturesinhismind in particular, but some of it was just -- it happened, by accident, for some reason, and thank fuck). and listening to music made me interested in some things again. honestly I think my newfound ability to read and watch films again in this last chilly quarter of the year and the big messy Something I am labouring to shape into enough of a shape of use for Creation are all largely thanks to music and the new neural pathways and sense of wonder and eagerness it river'd through my brain. I started listening to music, really listening to music, again, and it made me able to pursue the books and films and histories and practises and interests that the music was trying to describe or tap into -- got really into hauntology this year, lads, among other things -- and thus I got my whole life back.

the other thing I did was that one day I couldn't stand it any more and I got on a bus and I told myself I'd get off the bus when it looked interesting. I remember this inexplicable feeling of claustrophobic terror, leaving my apartment, as if I was doing something wrong and dangerous and punishable, something that was going to hurt me. this at least had the benefit of signalling to me that no matter what, I had to keep going, before I started to really believe that feeling. and I did! I kept going all the way across the river, actually, and ended up in Covington, Kentucky, in a part of the city I'd always loved but had never actually explored on my own, in the leisurely way I like to take things in. I ended up at a cat cafe, of all places! they had delicious scones and a window through which I could watch the cats play if I didn't want to pay the enter-the-cat-room fee, and also an old favourite brown ale on tap I thought had been discontinued years ago because I could never find it any more. I sat there in this little warm corner of magic with stupid tears leaking all down my face for hours. then I started walking. it was not-quite-spring and cold and rainy but the grimy weird old city was beautiful. I was alive again. I went back nearly the next day I had off. just to walk around the city streets and discover new little Places and listen to albums on the bus. and then I started exploring more neighbourhoods. and I discovered the whole city I live in, which had never really been mine before.

also we bicycled, Corey and I, and I found more of the city to love, on long fond jaunts of wooded and wild and lovely places. during some of the worst of the summer cycling was the only time I was able to feel genuine pleasure and wonder. I have a list of coffeeshops that I love now, and restaurants where I've eaten, and three newly beloved used bookstores, and a vintage clothing shop where they recognise me, bus routes that feel homey to me, a queer bar I semi-regularly attend drag and burlesque shows at, a bike shop where the proprietor had me stand in place to listen to jazz on his meticulously crafted stereo system. I got my library card back, and -- well let me not get ahead of myself. it took me most of the year and a couple of false starts, but I got healthcare and access to medication again for the first time in many a fucking year, and I think it was because of the music, and the city. I found reasons to want to savour the world again and I became increasingly desperate to be able to do so. found a little queer clinic on one of my bus routes and got all my shots and things and started one medication that did fuck-all and missed several appointments and got worse for a while and then I started ssris again and it's like I'm a new fucking man. especially after the two-month adjustment period passed, like -- I'm not cured, I'm not well, I have so much more work to do, but I feel joy again. I feel interest. I am rewarded with the good brain chemicals when I do the things that I like. I can talk to other people sometimes, even if I still worry they couldn't possibly want to talk to me. I've made new friends this year, a couple of burgeoning new friendships I am so giddy and excited about, which has not happened in so long, and deepened some really cherished old ones, and even have sort of made work friends. my little sister and my favourite aunt got married (uh. not to each other.) and I danced my ass off at their weddings. Rowan and Dylan came to visit and we ran around the city and cooked them food, and of course the week Avery blew in with the summer rain, and Corey and I started a new tabletop game this autumn at the greatest place to play games of imagination in the world (our old friends' apartment above their magic and occult shop, or as their tagline has it, 'bespoke arcana') which, I am absolutely losing my shit about how much I'm enjoying it and my character, and my ability to respond to our DM and his partner's overtures of friendship now that I can be around other people for longer than twenty minutes without starting to scream internally and fall apart.

and, yeah, I got my library card back (I had like $200 worth of library fines from books that had been in my house since 2019, do NOT ask me to elaborate, it was a huge source of shame. anyway the Cincinnati library recently did away with fines altogether so all I had to do was return all the books and they would wipe away the debt, so to speak), so I've been reading properly again, and pursuing and discovering. and in 2023 I will do more of that, and perhaps I can finally, sometimes, be happy. something I had sort of forgotten was possible for me. I feel like I'm in a really insufferable stage of coming back from the dead, where everything in the world is so fucking DELIGHTFUL to me, and so much of it is mundane shit everyone else already knows or doesn't think is really all that worth putting up a fuss about -- buses and rain and small birds and pastries and the way certain sounds, sound, and memorex tapes and old film stock and ideas about detective fiction and gas stations and light and light and light -- but I like LIKING things again, not wanting to become dead most days I wake up because nothing can make the festering hurt rotting away at me stop, no taste is sweet, no sound is good, no touch is kind, no task brings me contentment or accomplishment, there is no point in taking care of myself or trying to become better when I only experience the same feelings of dread and screeching nerve pain and paranoid misery no matter what things I do or try to love.

god there's so much more I could say. I'm not used to this. it's got to even out sometime. but I am so excited to try to have a good year, this one time. I am excited to Become.

happy 2023, and may you also be eager for the mundane wonders in it.

[thoselovelythings]