2025-12-24: maps

idly listening to a youtube playlist and in between the stuff i want to listen to and the stuff youtube thinks i want to listen to, one particular song comes on. maps, by the yeah yeah yeahs. and i don't know much about the band other than they were one of those new york bands of the early 2000s, and that i'd played maps on guitar hero, or maybe it was rock band?, almost twenty years ago. and i'd never once seen the music video, so partway in, i flipped tabs, and was face to face with karen o (whose name i knew, but who i couldn't pick out in a crowd), close up, bangs slick, crying as she performed the song.

and she looked all the world like someone i knew a couple years before that, as the old millennium was coming to a close, who i fell for, and who fell for me, and who looked so much like karen o in the video, the same dark hair, the same bangs, the same expression looking towards me. amazing how decades later things can still hit hard, how a chance encounter with a music video for a song you've only ever been peripherally aware of can take you back to midsummer. a night walk in the rain, a long look; what came after.

i'm in the midst of a few days off, enjoying that small joy of not working for a week, having a beer with lunch, walking the dogs through new trails in the sun-bright snow. spectral reader, i hope 2025 was good to you. i know for me it was a year of getting back into a lot of things, learning that a lot of things don't leave us, they're just latent. i hope 2026 is good to you. i'm going to try to be more bold in a lot of things. i don't know if it'll work. but i'm going to try.

i got a new guestbook; leave me a msg?

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