It is New Year's Eve. A time for reflection and also understanding. Understanding gained through trial and error, through revelation, and also through living. I am sitting at Mario's Place in Downtown Riverside, Byron, a Mario's Veteran of 16 years, pours as I reflect. Holiday lights still hang outside and the air is crisp. It is winter and I love what hangs below the clouds. We say good bye to 2009, a year fraught with worry, peril, and dismay and yet we cling to hope. Hope, potential and desire for something better.

Mario's Place is filled with party-goers and laughter, just what we need in 2010. Happiness was as rare as a gainful employment and an up-to-date mortgage in 2009. Karla Porter reminded us on Wednesday's Animal Show that happiness is more important than any salary offered. Really? Tell that to the unemployed. Being available to relocate and do a job well, says a lot about that IT guru or Manager of Oncology.

We wait anxiously, searching for signs of improvement and hope that the economy is "really" on an uspwing, a steady climb. We face a treacherous time, some are lost in the past, hoping for a return to the gravy eighties as precocious Gen Y'ers drive the dream on, Thank God. Yet mouths still need to be fed. Is there a heartbeat or has the economy flat-lined? I'd love to be assured.

Life is a costume party. Are you one that dons a mask that hides who you really are? or who we want to be? I grasp the future by the fangs, fangs that incite and insight. And so I live and move forward, and maybe someday I'll quit taking myself so seriously, but don't count on it.

For once that quits, drive dies and perception truly is reality. At least, that is what we are told, often. Reality is not what we perceive, but what we make. And I'd like it to be a lifelong meal.



© by rayannethorn