It’s a rainy day here. I guess everybody knows it’s our turn to have a storm, here in Southern California. We really look forward to them. It’s basically a coastal desert, and we go months without significant rain. So I’m enjoying the sound of water running down the pipes on the side of my house. It’s a good sound — like the end of the year is circling the drain, and flushing away.

Thinking about 2005, as it finally crawls off to find a place to decompose, isn’t easy for me. It will always be the year that I lost the comfort and company of my very best friend. I can’t help that; the pain is very real.

So I spent some time yesterday writing a letter to my Tasha, recalling happiness, bright loyalty and abiding friendship. I know she isn’t dead, because love can’t die. But I miss her so much, and every day I think about where she is. Sometimes, the Rainbow Bridge, sometimes a star in the infinite firmament of Being; beyond Thought and Not-thought, between the shadows and the light, between the notes and silence of a music which eludes my comprehension. In other words, God.

I’ve been told that there are three relevant and important questions in a person’s life: Who am I? Where did I come from? and Where am I going? I told Tasha that she is love, she came from God, and she has gone home to Him. Does that make sense? And do you see that cannot die?

For the people generally, I think it’s been a year of storms and war, of national leadership so steeped in fear that the sour smell of their malfeasance has circumscribed the globe. I pity them their myopic judgment and their cruel and gory sins. I pity every person caught up in their world of tiny thought.

I don’t want to miss the chance to say this in 2005: Bushie, you’re doin’ a heckuva job.

Did we ever get a conclusive body count in Hurricane Katrina’s wake? And did we ever calculate how many died not from the storm itself but from neglect, abandonment and incompetence? I don’t think so. God knows.

On the other hand, two of my friends served as volunteers for the Red Cross, and went to help. Thank you, so much!

2005 has also been a year of hope for me. I started a weight loss program in August, and I’ve lost almost 60 pounds so far. So I enter 2006 with a lighter heart; when something changes, things are bound to change. And that’s good.

Said the king to the people everywhere,
“Listen to what I say!
Pray for peace, people, everywhere,
Listen to what I say!
A Child, A Child sleeping in the night
He will bring us goodness and light,
He will bring us goodness and light.”