2011-12-14 - 1:29 p.m.

Perhaps this is a silly thing to say, but one way you know you're getting older is that the seasons seem to get shorter. When you're a kid, winter lasts forever. Summers still fly by, but a single soccer season, in the memory, lasts years. That one goal I scored against Hyndman looms large, and long, and is fat. Sixth grade is the size of a boat.

Which is all by way of saying that we're slipping into the deep darkness now, still eight or nine more nights until the darkness is at its longest. It's bright when I wake, but dreary after lunch, and deeply dark for the drive home. Just a few weeks ago, the leaves changed, and then they were brown for a long while and I thought: they'll never all fall down. But, just now, I took a walk around and I noticed that the leaves are, for sure, all gone.

It's mid-December now, and it's dark, but I like the strings of tiny lights on the balconies and around those quiet little windows, and I like my little words, and I like the feeling of warmth when it's:

- under a blanket
- in the cold car, in those first few seconds after the heater's just begun to work, when your fingers go from pain to gentle pinpricks
- a mug of something late at night, when everything's still except the intersection of my head and the newest chapter
- beers, with friends
- the memory of sixth-grade dances in the Washington Middle School gym

No news on my book. Seven or eight agents have it, are looking at it. A handful have rejected it, but their rejections didn't sting so bad since I already knew what their main complaint would be. I hope somebody likes it enough to publish it. I don't know. But I'm done with it, I think. My insides can do other things now.

It's getting dark out already. I don't mean this to sound so melancholy.

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