Before I found this place I was feeling so blue...

I know a place downtown, 

if you wanna go?

I'm going to show you how this amor,

is gonna love you harder than ever before.

We're gonna get sky-high,

and create a new world,

where somebody might die, 

but nobody gets hurt.

And I need some relief...

My peak? Did I even have one? Sometimes it feels like I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But that's it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I'd loved and been loved, but that is something quiet, personal. Nothing you can really show. I look around and I see a singularly plain, featureless landscape. Almost feels like the video games I play. A surrogate avatar crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death.

The old Karr, the boy of the big laugh and the easy ways, literally shed himself, a pile of skin and soul on the floor, and stepped this new, brittle, sharp, a razor-wire knot daring to be unlooped. He wonders who would be up to the job of unravelling him. Even if with thick, numb, nervous fingers. Country fingers. Flyover fingers untrained in the intricate, dangerous work of solving Karr. When he'd hold up the bloody stumps, you'd sigh and turn to your secret mental notebooks on which you tallied all his deficiencies, forever noting disappointments, frailties, shortcomings. And it was quite a hefty book indeed. 

You're never going to see me again...

This year my only goal is to listen more deeply. So the space around me fills me up, and when I will want to write, it will pour out of me. And I don't want to only listen to the person speaking to me across the table, but simultaneously listen to the air, the chair, and the door. And go beyond the door. Take in the sound of the season, the sound of the color coming in through the windows. I'll listen to the past, future, and present. I'll listen with my whole body, not only with my ears, but with my hands, my face, and the back of my neck.