52 Resolutions for 2012:

1. Do at least one form (one time through) every single day for the next 365 days.  (Any extra is a bonus – if I do one form a day for a year I will have done more forms than I did all of last year combined.)
2. Be showered and dressed by 10am every work day of the week.  (My job makes it easy to stay in pyjamas half the day – I believe this has added greatly to my over all depression)
3. Get a morning walk in with the dog 5 days a week.  Can be short, can be long.  Just do it shortly after getting dressed.  If it’s raining really hard do forms first and do the walk later during a let up of rain.
4. No second helpings of meals.  Period.
5. Don’t eat any geoducks.
6. Finish basting the damn quilt you started five years ago.
7. Take better care of feet (apply moisturizer after every single shower and do a soaking and pumice once a month – ’cause dude, that cracking is painful!)
8. Make two new duvet covers using flat sheets for one side and pretty fabric on the other.
9. Get on a once a week cleaning schedule (Saturdays always worked best for me: bathroom, vacuum, laundry, clean sheets.  Just doing the minimum on a regular basis will be better than the way it is now.)
10. Make some cool shirts and wear them even if you think you look like a hog in a suit.  Hating my clothes keeps me depressed which keeps me fat which keeps me hating my clothes.  It’s a stupid vicious cycle.  Clothes used to be fun.
11. Play the accordion just once this year.  Pick a moment when no one is home and have fun.
12. Send 5 queries out a week until you run out of agents to query.
13. Sprinkle all the carpets with diatomaceous earth.
14. Wear makeup 5 days out of 7.  Seriously dude, if you don’t make an effort to pretty-up more often you will never crawl out of this sewer of a mood.
15. Spend at least one hour a week in the garden.  That’s nothing much and yet would be about 40 more hours than I spent in it last year.
16. Prune all the roses.
17. Replace skanky old face powder sponge thing.
18. Be in the present more often.  Don’t miss what’s perfect right now in the pursuit of what you hope will be perfect tomorrow.
19. Make garam masala and curry mixes from scratch.
20. Pickle everything using brine this summer (the traditional way) rather than canning in vinegar.
21. Find the mighty huckleberry in its natural habitat and bring some home to play with.
22. Grow wings made of fog.
23. Lose 40 fucking pounds.  (Swearing is non-gratuitous)
24. Forget the score.  Forget you think you know what it is.  Pretend you have no idea.  Pretend you can’t see your own death.  Pretend the world is one big mystery egg.  Do it because others need you to do this.
25. Dismiss autonomy long enough to understand the collective self.
26. Step in less mud.
27. Get your bare feet back into the Pacific ocean.
28. Finish the second draft of The Winter Room.
29. Grow more food.
30. When you hear people say ignorant negative shit about psyche drugs and mental illness – instead of feeling like the primordial sludge sucking at the edge of a goddamn swamp – be the light that illuminates their ignorance with kindness and patience.  Also pray that no one in their lives is suffering from mental illness and kills themselves because they don’t believe mental illness is not only real but comes with a very real suicide rate.  Be a light in their dark ignorance.  Send them love.
31. Play chess more often with Max.
32. Drink coffee through as many dawns as you possibly can.  That’s your best hour.
33. Stop calling yourself a bitch, bitch.
34. Take yourself up into the woods on your Vespa and get lost.  But not during hunting season.  And take a knife.  And wear boots.
35. Save up and buy work boots.  I’m a boot girl.  Always have been.  Always will be.  How is it I’ve gone several years with no work boots?
36. Get some rain gear.  Seriously.  I know you’re a die-hard rain loving bitch, but if you don’t get a slicker and rain-proof shoes comfortable enough to walk in you will miss out on about 300 walks a year that you know you want because the smell and the air and the sky are so divine when it pours.  Squelchy shoes are NOT divine.
37. Every time someone thumps their bible at y0u, go ahead and thump your dictionary.  Same diff.
38. Visit your old hens at their new home.  God, I miss those girls.
39. Meditate on how much you like brown rice once a week.  (This will make it seem true)
40. Learn to make a lotion you like in your own kitchen.
41. Make curtains for Max’s one tiny window.
42. Be 50% less of an asshole this year.
43. Mind other assholes 50% less this year.
44. Perfect your jam making skills.
45. Stop silently cursing the sonofabitch lying produce man who wears the toxic smelling cologne.  Curse him out loud from now on.
46. Practice double sticks so you never forget what it feels like to wield a weapon of minimal (but painful) destruction – so you never forget your warrior side.
47. Wear diamonds in the field.  Lord knows you don’t have many and you’ll never have anywhere fancy to wear them and they’re just minerals carved to catch light – nothing more than mined ghosts reflecting the fires from the center of the earth where logic vomits babies into petrified forests.  Wear them.  Aint nothin’ in your life gonna ask diamonds of you.
48. Run more errands on your bicycle.
49. Write five new poems.  For god’s sake, you’re a poet before you’re any other goddamn thing.  Doesn’t matter if you’re good or not.  You know it’s how you think, how you dream, and everything in your life must be translated from the shorthand of poetry into regular language.
50. Buy more tape.
51. Celebrate the ridiculous.
52. Never let a day go by without telling Max how much your life is enriched having him in it, smothering him in ridiculous kisses, and showing him your confidence in his innate light.  Keep it lit.