Today was the first day we have felt any real cold this year, and it was….wonderful!!! Although Anna, my other blog fan, when she can figure out what I’m writing about, would absolutely oppose my standing outside in the cold with wet hair and a cough, I couldn’t help it. It’s just so beautiful, especially with the wind!

Cold is so beautiful because the air holds more oxygen, making us alert, and less moisture and particulate matter than warm air; giving clarity, and rendering all perceptions exceptionally vivid in its incisive sunlight. I love it! God I miss winter!

Did you know that every increase in cranial capacity in the evolution of the hominid line occurred during ice ages, including the most recent, the one that only left about ten thousand years ago? That one began when only Neanderthals existed; when the glaciers retreated only we, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, remained. Human consciousness is forged upon an anvil of ice! I’m only telling you this because Frost is my middle name!

And today was exceptionally vivid because of the clouds and the wind!

How many sounds are there within this cold wind, and what color are they: the rusty clatter of a parade of leaves splattering through the street, the rhythmic clanking of the gate latch, a gate touched by nothing but the wind, the endless, effervescent sigh of the branches kissed by a velvet sky?

How many? Maybe they are infinite, even in this little winter wind? The wind flickered the blades in my front yard under the undulating sunlight.

Wow! I wonder at what one can witness from this view point, this portal, positioned upon a singular node within this strata of the Universe!

And what is this strata? No one knows. It just happens to be a place where the evolution of the matter within led to a biological organ, a human brain, capable of recognizing not only the evolutionary process that generates its existence, but also that process itself as a building block in the saga of the ever unfolding Universe!

Our minds themselves behave as quantum particles, simultaneously acting as matter and energy, nodes and waves at the same time. Ideas such as these the winter wind gives to me!

I also, in this same little epiphany brought about by the marvelous alchemy of wind, sunlight, sound and winter, saw a link between the music and the paintings, a beautiful lysergic link, which may just be that beautiful lysergic link within everything…..but more on the lysergic countenance anon……

So, end of story, for now. Someone else with wet hair and a cough probably would not have waited outside for his wife, but I’m obviously too intelligent to go in. As all two readers of my blog know, genius truly is pain, all the time!

I actually have a reader! And it happens to be Mo, of all people! And now that Mo reads my blog, all I need now is more readers. I stated more on Mo anon perhaps, and now happens to be anon. (More anon, quite possibly.)

Anna thinks “And so it goes, with Christmas Cheer” is funny, which it is. So, thank you, Anna, now I have TWO readers, so I must be catching on!

Derwyn’s never read me, because he can’t open my writings in his browser, and Davey’s never read me because he doesn’t know I exist in this form.

For that matter, almost no one knows I exist.

But that’s OK. That may change, someday. The Chestnut Hill Local presented an article about me this week. I felt its portrayal fair, accurate, and a succinct snapshot of myself. This portrayal warrants credit: since I hardly know what to make of myself, how do I explain myself to another in a manner in which he may explain it to more?

Wow: genius is pain, no matter how you look at it. It is!

Whenever I paint the flowing water, or even gaze mindlessly upon the endless flow, I feel the water throb, endlessly downstream, and in so doing I touch the forever.

Sometimes good thoughts happen. One happened to me today, partially induced by Davey Cope.

As all readers of my posts know, I’m a tortured genius, in part because no one reads my posts, but also in part because I feel myself living within a fractured consciousness; wherein my paintings don’t directly speak to my music, and I’ve yet to understand the sophistication inherent in my profoundly independent philosophy. But I sure as hell love to whoop’ an’ holler, yell and make a fool of myself in front of a room full of strangers!

I guess I’m gifted.

Today, beautifully, I saw a glimpse of the unity within.

Davey’s CD, “Handmade Songs”, played within my car. I slid toward work and into a parking space facing west, as the sky slid into evening. Davey channels the Music of the Spheres, at times, realizing trances, and this channeling induced an immediate reverie in me as I witnessed the sunset. The entire world was silent, except the music, and the music brought the world into focus.

The immediacy of the perceptions I connect with music, and the immediate demand to clock in. My thoughts shaped themselves in a flash. I myself, do not channel trances through my music: I’m a wild ride; a shape-shifting, shamanistic metaphysical rock and roll medicine man; but it’s all the same stuff. It all exudes from the same strata of the Universe, the strata that lies within and gives birth to everything, the core of which is the body of Love, love love, and nothing else.

It’s true. Cheer the New Year with Love.

Isn’t it strange, don’t you think, the abstract clatter- clatter of random individuals placed together, unwillingly, for the holidays? Within my family, this placement indicates a dry and so sardonic sense of humor as to be almost slapstick, on the part of the gods of destiny.

My father-in-law seems comparatively wealthy. Were I a playwright I could not design such a character, because he would seem such an absurd parody of himself as to be unbelievable: the arch-conservative, neo-bourgeois, repressed waspy laywer who looks down on people who have no money, like me, and sees himself in power. He seems even out of Dickens in his cast!

From his mouth I have heard words such as “Henry needs to get a real job, and turn art into a hobby.” This statement is directed towards a man who is almost fifty, and has spent twenty years of his life cultivating a career.

I have also heard: “Don’t bring your guitar to our holiday meal.” No Christmas carols. This is to a man who has a voice so angelic that it only comes along once in a generation. Oh well…

And also, to me in front of my daughter: “No Rock and Roll, no junk…..” (It’s actually true!)

And, in speaking of New Orleans: “That city is the home of every vice known to man.”

And of course, no bourbon is served. Remember, I am from the south. Wait!! Is THAT the way ‘yall Yankees celebrate the holidays? No WONDER all the music of our country eminates from below the Mason-Dixon line!

The environment bespeaks of the antithesis of civilization, an environment in which a Henry certainly can’t be himself!

At the family gathering I attempted a joke: Wherein a Poet, a Priest, the Pope, a Midget, Monkey, Rabbi, Lawyer, Donkey and a Duck, all walk into a bar together; yet no one got it.

Except the bartender, who simply asked: “What. Is this some kind of a joke?”

Wife: “Keep the lawyer jokes nice.”

Husband: “The joke’s about a friggin’ DUCK!”

Step Mother in Law: “Priests, Rabbis, and Popes will never walk together into bars.”

Yet nary a ripple of laughter percolated from the lips of all present.

The step-mother continued, however, after I forced her: “Monkeys, Penguins, and Ducks, however, will.”

I therefore ask: what, then, is funnier, the punchline, or the dysfunction of the dynamic?

Ahh….the life of the artist. Someone’s gotta’ get a laugh out of all this, might as well be me.