Today is my significant other’s birthday. I am using her birthday as occasion to write the first post here in a good long while. Really, I want to just draw a portrait of the Zeitgeist and its garments while noting that, for me, there is nothing more important today for me than my love’s birthday.

Life has never been an easy proposition for me. I’ve had trouble for most of my years. Some years have been bad enough that, to this day, I wonder how it is I survived them. This is doubly true for my partner. Yet, here we both are, living our lives as best we can, imperfectly and not always (or often) easily. We’ve been together for over seven years now. As this day commemorates the day she entered the fray, unarmed and as innocent as any newborn child, it seems to me important to note that she has come a long way from the worst of her life and has reclaimed a great deal of all that was, by force and cruelty, taken from her. I am proud of her more than I worry about her; I trust that she will only get stronger, hold her life more tenaciously, find ever more to take joy in.

The world around us in chaos. Chaos is not a bad thing, per se, but it often is troubling for those who find themselves thrown by it from the comfort of stability into the maelstrom of uncertainty. The fires recently raging in California, having claimed the homes of so many, having injured people and having seriously disrupted the lives of so very many, seem to underscore the chaos of the times. Then there’s the Prop. 8 (”Propostion Hate”) issue still unfolding. A longtime friend of mine only recently married her partner, and now there are those who’d see their marriage and the possibbility of marriage for all gay people denied on grounds that are selfish, bigoted, narrow, myopic and solely self-serving. It is the touch of chaos in people’s lives again. And then there’s the financial crisis in America, and California’s deep debt. Job loss is significant. Job scarcity a problem. Mortgages and foreclosure are topics of anxious conversations everywhere. Chaos visits us all. I’m so glad Obama won.

My partner lies across the bed, napping, an audiobook playing in her ear (I can hear it, like a cricket scratching at paper or a radio with a poor AM signal playing in the other room). I made sure she had a good birthday this year. Her mom wasn’t going to make sweet potato pie this time, which would have been a first, but I paid for the ingredients and ensured that it would get done. I couldn’t let her down, couldn’t see her let down. After more than seven years, I’ve only come to love and appreciate her more.

The light falling through the window is yellowish from all the smoke. If I look out, I can see Chihiro, my Toyota Corolla, parked in the shade of the trees. Someone recently broke into the car. The thief broke out the back window and went through the car, pulling stuff out, opening everything. All the thief took as the power cord for my iPod and the cord that connects it to my stereo. I’d taken my stereo face inside, like always, and I’d never leave my iPod in the car. Minor damage, really, but I felt violated. I got the window (and its tinting) fixed the next day and installed a car alarm. I feel safer, a little more protected from the chaos.

More recently, I was able to go out to dinner with my ex-wife. She was on her way through Southern California (where our marriage ran its course) on a roadtrip to San Francisco to see the Legendary Pink Dots play. She lives in New Mexico now. It was a really nice visit for the most part, the only real faux pas being committed by yours truly. sigh But it all turned out well, and we had a nice dinner at Real Food Daily in Santa Monica. We shared music in the car as we drove. We talked about our lives. I dropped her off at her motel and came home with this sense of my life being just so long, this long series of events, a collection of changes and adjustments, with retrospect always coming in clearest. I came home to my partner and wanted nothing more than to fall in her arms… followed by some Web surfing, of course. Chaos prowled in the distant miles.

My throat is sore and my sinues are irritable. Still, in this tiny little pocket of the world, there is peace. I wish it belonged to everyone. I’m glad that it exists at all.

Happy birthday, my love.