I want to have a New Year’s resolution but I can’t think of one. I already don’t smoke or drink, and a minor and extremely tedious recent health issue cost me five pounds last month that I didn’t want to lose and have been trying to get back. Read more books and fewer social-media feeds, I guess? Good luck, me! As for writing, past experience suggests that the tightening of thumbscrews fails to increase my productivity, or maybe I just don’t want to believe or admit that it could, holding on as I do to the notion that life should be worth living.
I don’t seem to have as much faith in my raw will-power as I used to. And yet, and yet. On some days, raw will power seems to be all I have. According to the “wrapped” function in the app that tracks my Cross Fit workouts, I lifted 868,994 pounds in 2025, which is 129,685 pounds more than I lifted the year before, which suggests a certain amount of single-mindedness, or bloody-mindedness.
One idea is that I should write more of these little essays for my blog / newsletter, and then also turn on the “enable payments” spigot, and dive headfirst into the resulting piles of cash, like Scrooge McDuck. I have hesitated to turn this spigot because I have a conflictual relationship to the idea that there should be any relationship at all between writing and money. Also because one reason I mistrust my reserves of will-power is that I really ought to be devoting them to the writing of novel #3—my New Year’s resolutions for the past half dozen years were pre-inscribed long ago, if I’m being honest. I continue to write these essays at all only because every so often I work myself into a knot that I can’t figure out how to unravel any other way. If I were to write them more often and more incidentally, they would probably have a different flavor, less urgent, more meandering.
For example, I could write about a feeling that I’ve had lately, which I think is a symptom of late middle age, where I’ll be doing something like goofing with the new puppy, whom we adopted on Christmas Eve, and when I rise from the floor, a little light-headed, from the sudden shift in blood pressure, I experience something that isn’t as well formed as a recollection but does seem to have the coloring of one, the fragment of an episode that I’ve mostly forgotten, maybe a residual sense-memory of wrestling with our last dog when he was a puppy, twenty years ago, or of a joke my husband and I used to make back then, or of what it was like proprioceptively to be on the floor in the apartment where we then lived, at the age I then was, or maybe all these trace sense-memories overlaid together, transposed onto the current moment without the right tags, so that what comes into my mind is nonsensical the way a dream is. Vague, cryptic. I get moments like this a lot lately, and they remind me of—and this is such a historical thing to be reminded of that it’s a little embarrassing—a product called Silly Putty, a plasticky, rubbery ball that they sold at the grocery store when I was a child, which came in an egg, I seem to recall, and which you could stretch, and snap in two, and bounce, and another of its odd properties was that you could flatten it and press it on top of the Sunday newspaper’s comic strips, which in those days were printed in color, and the dry flexible tablet that the Silly Putty had become would lift a reversed impression off of the comic strips, which you could marvel at the exactness of for a minute or two, and then smush up, and marvel again as the bright reds and blues and oranges of the comics were diluted by your folding and massage back into the light pink substrate that had briefly held them. What I experience, in other words, in my moment of lightheadedness, is like one of those short-lived Silly Putty copies, the text in them an illegible mirror image of something I probably didn’t pay that much attention to at the time, restored for a moment with colors that are strangely sharp but at the same time recognizably secondhand, restored however without any possibility of lasting preservation, restored only for the ephemeral pleasure of a chance to notice how the plastic of memory is emptied as the tissues on which your memory is imprinted are recycled.
While I was lost in the composition of these sidewinding sentences, the current puppy, today’s puppy, sitting on my lap, chewed a corner off the case for my reading glasses.