The Journal, Sunday, December 31

Hey Folks,

Well, here it is. The last day of the year. New Year’s Eve. But tonight, I’ll be sacking out at about my usual time.

Anyway, a new year (or a new any-time-period) begins again with pretty much every moment, doesn’t it?

Still, as they are with most of us, the first day of the year, the first day of each month, and the first day of the week are all well-ingrained demarcations for me. So tomorrow, we’ll all begin again, just as if the first official moment of the new calendar year is somehow magically more special than any other moment.

If I may digress for a moment, scientists say the difference between us and the other animals on this planet is that we are self-aware and they are not.

I disagree, vehemently.

The difference is that we are aware of Time and its passage and they are not. Wisely, they have chosen to ignore something upon which they can have absolutely no lasting effect. May we all come to the same conclusion sooner rather than later.

As it stands, I suspect some of them go so far as to watch us marking Time and wonder what all the fuss is about. I know my little girl cat does just that.

We humans, on the other hand, obsessively mark the passage of time down to the second. We thrum our fingertips on the counter as we wait for our Keurig to brew a cup of coffee. We watch the countdown timer on the microwave as we heat a ham and cheese sandwich for thirty seconds. We enjoy the new beginning marked by the anniversary of our birth even as we mourn the years gone by.

I first caught onto the whole time scam when I decided several years ago not to wear a watch anymore. After I took it off, almost miraculously, I suddenly stopped having to be anywhere at a certain time. Incredible, but true. It isn’t a watch watch after all, you see. It’s a slave bracelet.

I still obey the rules of Nature, just as if I had a choice — you know, aging, stuff like that — and I still mark the passage of Time, albeit not quite so frantically as I did before I tossed my watch aside. If I didn’t, this Journal wouldn’t exist.

Yet here it is.

I won’t do a year-in-review thing since I’ve kept up with that at the end of each Journal entry for anyone who wants to see it.

May each of you and all of us have a banner year with our writing and with all of those things that are vastly so much more important.

By the way, if you’d like to see my villanelle, “Roses?” set to music by classical composer Stanley Grill, please click http://harveystanbrough.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Roses-score.pdf. I don’t read music, but the arrangement is pleasing to the eye, like art.

That’s it for today, and for this year.

Back soon.

Of Interest

Nada.

Fiction Words: XXXX
Nonfiction Words: 480 (Journal)
So total words for the day: 480

Writing of “”

Day 1…… XXXX words. Total words to date…… XXXX

Total fiction words for the month……… XXXX
Total fiction words for the year………… 453762
Total nonfiction words for the month… 8180
Total nonfiction words for the year…… 183733
Total words for the year (fiction and this blog)…… 637495

Calendar Year 2017 Novels to Date………………………… 9
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)………………………………………… 27
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)……………………………………… 4
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……………………………… 182