How is it December already?

Good day, and welcome to Month 12.

As I type this, it is December 1st, 2025, which kind of weirds me out. I mean, we all know that as we get older the passage of time seems to speed up merely because of the law of scale—a year/month/day/pick your unit of time continually shrinks in proportion to the total time you've lived, hence a year when you're 13 feels a lot longer than a year when you're 53—but this year seems to have flown by with particular alacrity.

In some ways, I guess that's not so bad—big-picture-wise, 2025 has been a shit year, why not get it over with—but that's nonsensical. Arbitrary numbers on our cultural timekeeping platforms are great for organization, but really they don't mean anything on a day-to-day human level. (And yes, I know days and years aren't arbitrary, they're facts of astronomical physics, but how we think of them culturally is; with a little different push from history we might still be using a variation of the Sumerian calendar.)

Or, maybe the year hasn't really flown by in my perception. Maybe my wow-is-it-already-December nonplussedness stems from something a little more localized, or more to do with my fucked-up brain chemistry and how for a while it seemed November was the month of doom. There was a stretch of years around the turn of the century wherein bad stuff tended to fall in November; that hasn't really been the case in more recent years, but anniversaries still turn up every time around and perhaps have contributed to my most recent Black Hole episode, still ongoing.

In which case, yay, November over, bring on December.

Eh, whatever. The why of it doesn't matter, I guess, it just is: I'm in a mood, and time passing by, whether "quickly" or "normally," isn't helping said mood.

Analyzing the whys is what I do, though. I overthink things, I overprocess things, I drill down to the studs on things. I might be better off if I just moved the fuck on. Instead I'm posting this rambly word salad stream of consciousness. Which, I suppose, is a potential way to move on? Better putting it out there than just letting it stew unarticulated in my head.

Regardless, it is now December. We've gotten past the first portion of the holiday season, bracing for the next, and looking forward to putting them all in the rear-view. Which kind of sucks. I mean, as a younger person I looked forward to holidays; now I look forward to them being over. Because they aren't fun anymore. Holidays are not made for single folk, they're not made for poorly-coupled folk, they're not made for third wheels or groups of orphans (literal or metaphorical). In fact, I can't remember the last holiday season I actually enjoyed as an adult. There must have been one or two somewhere along the way, but really I just remember suffering through them or just making the best of them in a sort of relaxed coasting detachment.

Anyway, herein lies my immediate challenge: Climb out of the Black Hole during the holiday season without immediately falling back down again. Don't disappear completely into my head for another month. That's my mission, if my brain chooses to accept it.

Ghosts appear and fade away.