An ending

The year, this month, feels like an ending to me. Not The End, the big ending, the final curtain, but the end of a period, an era, a focus. Both professionally and personally.

Professionally, three things mark the moment.

• I got two monkeys off my back. For years, decades, I've been sitting on personal experience screaming for expression, to be the foundation of creative work, and this year I got each off my back. In my video Deconstructing Sally I finally told my "Sally" story top to bottom and resolved it as best I can.
• I also finally dealt with my Army material. I also saw this as an epic novel, one of those 700 page paperbacks, but its final influence was on a story of novella size, Baumholder 1961. As surprising as this was, I'm very pleased with the result.
• The 25th anniversary tonight, which is both a party and a farewell, celebrating the theatrical scene here in the 1980s. It's long gone, of course, but it's great to remember that it happened, and that it was special, and I hope some of the folks involved show up tonight. Whether they do or not, in his usual intelligent and insightful way, Bob Hicks has summarized much of those times as well as anyone in a number of posts at Art Scatter, his blog, and he was here for most of it. He's been especially generous to my work, including his recent remarks about the 25th anniversary.
  

If this is an ending, what comes next? I have some notions about that but that's for later.

Personally, obviously the transition's focal point is the unresolved Big C business, which serves as a reminder -- I actually didn't need one, I've been living the gravy years for, well, years -- of one's mortality. But I do want to articulate more about "the end" in this final sense, which is one of the themes in the short novel I'm working on, and also of the new video idea. Again, more later.

It's a freezing busy day. Onward.