yet another special dinner at Simmi and Hildur’s. this time their traditional New Years Eve meal of wild (gray) goose, two of them with an incredible sage stuffing. fabulous! driving home, through the city, past the harbor, huge fishing trawlers, port windows reveal green house-plants inside. strung with Christmas Lights (Light tubes are the most popular item this year, aside from the traditional candelabras in windows). fireworks still going off regularly, although nothing like the madness of midnight when the entire area erupts in a madness of explosions and Lights. emergency signal flares (expended often before expiration, just for the hell of it) slowly drift seaward in the Light breeze, creating drifting constellations that are punctuated by thousands of greater or lesser explosions.
Loki finally retreats into the house, and when I go back in some minutes later, after the boys have spent their collections of pyrotechnics, I find him crouched in the living room by the couch, sobbing. ever since his first New Years, he has been terrified by the noise. later that same day, I find myself looking at this website again, wondering just what to do with it. I find the older sections like the portrait works, and other documentation work to be just too dry. yet I don’t have an idea of what to do — either just scrap them or somehow integrate them with other areas of the site. it is just that the writing is too glib and amateurish to have much soul. something akin to how it is when Loki asks me to tell him stories each night (or during the day when there is a chance) — I make long ones up (sometimes based on stories that I have read, like the C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books) that span several days and feature some of his best friends as partners in adventure. but in the end, I don’t think I am much of a storyteller. although it is something that he connects with in me — I think mostly because the combination of my absence in his life, and the long series of audio tapes I have made for him of either reading stories or occasionally telling ones. he listens to the tapes, and apparently gets a bit obsessed by them at certain points, listening over and over to a particular one until he has it memorized. so when I read him something when I am visiting, he can mouth the words and now is beginning to pick out the written words on the page. I try to peer into him, to understand what the conditions of our relationship have imposed on his spirit, but I cannot see clearly. he is an Other. and the only way I can cope with the whole thing is to show him what little I have come to understand is something called love.