Some kind of bottle is almost essential in any form of civilized life.

The subject line for this post comes from an old Encyclopedia Americana article about--can you guess it?--bottles. I don't really think about bottles very often, which is a shame since they certainly are handy things, things you can use to carry water or iced tea or even V-8 juice if you're a freak like me. And now that I think about them, bottles really are hugely important to civilization. Civilized society always wants the convenience of having a container for something that would rather flow, like water, or wine, or time. And now that some few of you have Jim Croce's song "Time in a Bottle" running through your heads, my work here is done.

Two thousand six CE (or AD) was an odd year. It wasn't an especially bad year for me, though it did certainly have its difficult spots. There was enough weirdness going on at times that I created a special e-mail folder called "Whatthe," which I never did come up with a better name for because I could never decide if I should use "Whattheheck" or something stronger. Lots of health-related stress was involved as well, along with bureaucratic stress and the financial stress that goes along with the other stressors. Found a new amazing possible treatment for my health problems which made things significantly worse, which was a disappointment but also a learning experience. Found out that the neurologist who said "I think there's something wrong with your braaaaain!" was probably right, although, thanks to the bureaucrap involved, nothing has been done to follow up on that. I end the year with more than a little frustration. But I feel like the good has outweighed the bad, since I've had plenty of opportunities to get out and get to know some people better. I'm hoping for 2007 to bring enough energy and opportunity to see some of my older friends along with the newer ones, and get reacquainted with some of the good folks from my past, people I never got to know as well as I wanted but whose names have resurfaced in the last few months. You never can tell what the future will bring, though, no matter how many hopes or fears or really deep thoughts you have about it. You just have to open that bottle and let it flow--or some wacky metaphor like that. I'm not sure the stream of consciousness is going anywhere significant this time.