Christmas Letter and other terrors of the night

Good morning.  Thought it would be a good time to write the year-end or Christmas letter.  My sister's birthday is Oct. 24 and so after school the other day (and in the pouring rain) I went to Hallmark to find a hoops and yoyo crazy card for her.  Love those cards.  Turns out Hallmark was having a "buy one get one free" on Christmas stuff.  YES it's way way way too early for anybody to have Christmas stuff out!  TICKS ME OFF, yes it does.  I don't even have my wig for Halloween yet, which is on my list of things to do today actually.  Anyway, I bought gorgeous Christmas wrapping paper and two boxes of fabulous cards and that has now put me in the mood to write the letter that needs to go in the cards to people I haven't talked to in years and ... I don't even remember the last time I sent cards or a year end letter.  So here I sit in the dark stillness and I'm sneezing because the season is changing and the air is just a degree cooler and it's dark and I love being on my patio in the early early morning but I'm finding this time of year it isn't silent on Saturday or Sunday early predawn mornings---the traffic on the turnpike wooshes like some giant clothes dryer and it is persistent so where are all those people going on October the twentieth?

Anyway, I'm sitting here with a denim shirt on over the tank top but the sleeves are now pushed to the elbows, of course i have on my writing gloves with the little bean palms that keep the laptop from searing my flesh and yes I have on my wool socks for the first time this "winter."  The official weather on the net?  Seventy-one degrees which "feels like" 75.  I know, but I get chilly easily.  But I also digress.  It's 6:41 and I've been sitting out here since 6:00.  I've looked at Christmas present possibilities on amazon which I can't order because I just got the new card and still need to call it in and it's on the other side of the house and I should be working on the novel.  I've looked for the location and times of the new bank that swallowed my bank officially and I have no cash and need to go to the grocery store today.  I've checked another blog which reminded me of this blog and I also looked at the authorbytes web stuff but don't yet have the guts to contact them because I just know it's going to be so expensive my eye teeth will fall out and I just paid off the websitepalace which isn't a good fit for me because I don't know what I'm doing and I really need to talk to them and get an education.  And all this because I decided this would be a good day to write the Christmas letter and I ended up with a lame beginning that stalled several times because I think I'm just too frightfully wordy at the moment (as you can see) and I don't know what to say really and I'm talking to people that are far away geographically and some who are far away chronologically meaning I haven't spoken with them in a year or more but I still have heartstrings attached and don't want to lose them and wonder if I shouldn't write an individual letter to each one...or ... maybe that's the key...write to one of them and then shape it into the universal...that might work...

I usually have trouble blogging but I am convinced no one is reading and so while there is still the terror (overly stated) of being read by enemies everywhere who could use my words as weapons against me, I am trying to write anyway.  And I am writing on a blog that is off the hook actually because I don't know how to plug it into the universe and so that gives me the false confidence to write and write quite blitheringly and aimlessly and yet I do have this sense that it might be read by the wrong people.  Weird, I know, but fear and terror are never ... or rarely rational.

Wow the first shade of night just peeled out behind the trees and I can barely make out the contrast.  It's a sad thing because soon this will give way to glorious sunrise and the day will sweep me off this gloriously intimate nocturnal womb of me, the laptop and lamp, and my savory tea and the far distant sounds of people in transit...

All this to say I have no idea what to write in a Christmas letter as I sit in 75 degrees in south Florida way before Halloween but it would be such a good thing to get a jump on it and get it all ready and actually connect with my friends again this year!  I am in my 50th year which sounds old and yet I feel timeless.  except for the weight of my butt in this chair and the face that levitates me when i glance at a wall mirror.  Speaking of terror.

So I guess I will set out to write the longest "lost" friend and shape a letter.  After breakfast.

Message in a Bottle

Blogging.  The problem isn't so much writing...but in the conviction that all this is swirling in some tiny bottle in the middle of the vast ocean.  No one is there.  

Somewhere there must be a place (so to speak) to activate even notifying friends at least that I'm rambling online.  Especially after so many friends comment that I should write a blog.  But what I write in a personal email may seem universal and insightful...but I also have a specific audience at that point.  This...this is madness.  

I'll write to no one and everyone...if only I knew where the button is that opens the portal to at least the choice for everybody to read or reject.  What is that "+ share" button in the upper right hand corner?  What is a permalink.  etc etc.

Hell, it takes me half an hour just to get to THIS page after all the hoo ha with Jim's old "automatic" blogger link popping up...oy.

I want to post my flash fiction at least---with the fear and trepidation of having it stolen...which sounds awfully fully of hubris, doesn't it?  Especially since the original problem is NOBODY IS READING...because I don't know how to connect with the outside world!