I hadn't really planned any sort of end of the year post until I noticed the date I was typing in for today's photo, so this post might be a little jumbled.

What happened to me this year? Well, pretty early on I doubled the number of foreign countries I've been to by visiting Iceland and Holland. That was pretty damn cool. On that trip I got to swim outside in a snowstorm, wreck an SUV, and legally partake in a variety of lovely drugs. Oh, and in the fall I jumped out of an airplane, which was a terrific experience, and something I definitely want to do again.

I did my annual film festival. I planted seeds in egg cartons that grew up into great big sunflowers and cosmos in our garden (and actually survived long after after I stopped caring for them at the end of the summer). In the kitchen, I started to experiment seriously with baking: cupcakes, cookies, empanadas. And I made a half-decent effort to walk to and from work during the spring and summer, but quit when it started getting just a little too hot and a little too far, which I regret. On the other hand, K. and I took many, many wonderful hikes through the Wissahickon Valley, which is now one of our favorite places.

On the nerd front, I started playing Dungeons and Dragons again, which I've now been playing on and (mostly) off for over thirty years. It's a really great group and our sessions are more like comedy improv than robotic dice-rolling. Someday I'll bore you all with a few of our adventures. I also got to revisit two former addictions briefly for free (World of Warcraft and City of Heroes), and was happy to find that a visit was all I needed. Oh, and I've been mainlining Battlestar Galactica over the past couple weeks. Watched the ker-a-zy season two finale last night.

I actually got some good work done on my novel, but got lazy during early fall and haven't managed to reignite the fuse yet. I still want to write it. I just have to figure out how to make myself do the work.

For next year, my plans are to develop something like discipline with the writing and to buy a bicycle and start biking to and from work. And maybe, just maybe, I'll go to India for a while. Who knows, right?

Anyways, happy new year, everybody!

Coming soon: the voting for Best of 2008!

Today they begin tearing down the South Street Bridge.

It isn't exactly a pretty bridge, but it is very, very endearing. It was built in 1923 and has been decaying rapidly for as long as I've been here. The concrete is crumbling. Rust creeps out through the pale blue paint at every corner, twist and oversized rivet. From time to time, it drops big chunks of itself into the river below. It can be frightening to drive over, as you feel the surface shifting under the weight of your car, physically painful to bicycle over its potholes and paving oddities, and downright dangerous for pedestrians at rush hour because ramps to the city's major highway crisscross it on the western end.

K. likes to tell people that we met on the South Street Bridge. This is a lie.

We met in a bar, where I chatted her up while playing pool with my roommate Stephen. But the very next morning, as she was biking all the way from South Philly to West Philly and I was making my even longer walk from Southeast Philly to West Philly, we happened to see each other crossing the South Street Bridge. To be fair, she saw me. I was oblivious, lost in the music in my headphones, unable to hear her screaming at me from the other side of the bridge. Finally I looked up and saw her waving at me and happily gave her a wave back as cars and trucks whizzed by in the lanes between us.

That was the only time we accidentally ran into each other on the bridge, despite eagerly looking from that day forth, so coming as it did on the morning after we met seemed a little like fate, or something, wanted to make sure we'd remember each other. This is what K. means when she says we met on the South Street Bridge. Because if we hadn't run into each other on the bridge that morning, who knows how things might have turned out?

And now they're tearing it down. I'm going to miss the view of the skyline from that bridge during the years it will take to build a new one. Maybe I'll try to grab a piece of the wreckage some night after work. That would be nice.

(Flickr user Serlingrod took a great series of photos of the various posters and paste-ups that local artists have decoracted it with over the years. It's well worth checking out: http://www.flickr.com/photos/serlingrod/2327659837/in/photostream)

On my way to the subway this morning, just as I was passing the Bisque House, I saw this totally white pigeon sitting on the sidewalk and we kind of stared at each other and nodded like we were saying hello or something. Then I went on, crossed the street, turned a corner and all of a sudden there was a fluttering of wings behind me and that white pigeon curves around and lands right in front of me. I gave him a look like "Fancy seeing you again!" and he gives me this real serious look like "Dude, I'm here for a reason!" But I just kept going, got to the end of the block and just as I'm about to turn another corner, the bird flies up and lands on the railing to this wheelchair ramp right next to me. And I give him a "What the hell?" look and he gives me this "I am a messenger from the supernatural! You must heed me as a warning!" look. That kind of freaked me out so I hurried on and got down into the subway without it following me.

Most likely it's just some pampered pigeon that's used to crazy old people in South Philly feeding it their leftover bread and was giving me multiple opportunities to provide breakfast. But it still struck me as rather odd.

Yesterday I dove into the sky and did not die. I fell for just over a mile with all the velocity that the Earth's gravity could give me. I spun and somersaulted in the air, not purely by intent, but because I was falling. It might have been dizzying if there'd been anything but sky with which to orient myself.

Finally I was righted and facing down the rapidly approaching ground. But still I did not die. With the tug of a cord, I stopped falling seemingly completely, held aloft like some dancing marionette by yards and yards of taut nylon. From there I drifted downward another mile, blissfully slow now, amazed by all the swimming pools in the towns below me. When I worked at the McDonalds down there, somewhere, briefly back in high school, those towns had always seemed so poor, but two decades later and miles above, it was another story altogether.

As the Earth approached, things sped up, pulling guide wires spun me around fast, making turns as fast as ricochets. I started to fear the landing more and more, but in the end the Earth was kind and took me back without so much as a bruise for all that had I cheated her hardness and gravity. And then it was over, buckles undone, feet back on the ground, hand slaps and embraces, waning exhilaration, and just a lingering pressure in my ears to remind that I just fell out of the sky.

One day about twelve years ago, I got a telephone call from my dad.

This was a pretty big deal at the time, as I rarely spoke to my parents back then and the few calls that were made inevitably came from my mom. Immediately I tensed up, preparing myself for bad news. "What's up?" I asked.

"I've got a problem," he said, "and I'm not sure I can trust you."

"What?" My dad and I don't see eye-to-eye on a lot of things, but I never would have guessed that his doubts about me ran that deeply. "Why?"

"Well, because the problem is that I'm not sure that you're really you." His tone was even, but concerned. "Really my son."

Oh, my god, I thought. Had he found some yellowed, old loveletter in my mother's underwear drawer? Had my mother made some drunken confession or talked in her sleep? When I was a kid, my mom told me once that she'd seriously dated some French boy when she was young and that if things had gone a little differently, I might have grown up in Paris instead of New Jersey. She was just being fanciful, of course, but I was young enough to think she was speaking literally. I was so mad that she'd broken up with that guy, denying me a completely different, and therefore better, life. It never occurred to me to wonder how my two older brothers fit into that storyline. In France, I somehow knew that I would have been an only child.

"So," he said. "Is it true?"

"I don't know, Dad. Why are you asking that?"

"Well, I was getting things ready for the movers, cleaning out the drawers in that desk in the den." My parents were in the process of moving out of my childhood home into a gated community for senior citizens. "And I found a note folded up and taped above the uppermost drawer."

"Ok…"

"The note says... To whoever finds this: Help! I have been kidnapped by aliens and replaced by an exact duplicate! Signed, Steve. P.S. THE DUPLICATE IS DANGEROUS!!!"

I laughed out loud, but Dad kept it up for a couple more minutes, asking me if I could prove I was really me and acting like he was scared for his life. Judging from the handwriting (which I got to see later), I figured I must have been around ten when I wrote it. It still cracks me up all these years later. Watch out, world! I've been a duplicate for three decades now… and I'm DANGEROUS!