Author Archives: Alan Ilagan

Halloween is traditionally my day off. I wear enough nonsensical costumes throughout the year that this has always felt like amateur hour, and I’d rather just do sweats and a roomy, cozy shirt that’s not slim fit on this day when everyone else is trying so hard (or hardly trying as the case may be). Not that Halloween here will be a total bust – come back later today for a post that will totally make you look… for now, on with the weekly recap. 

The week began with the ending of a quiet weekend in Boston.

Expressions of a godson. 

Scenes from Andy’s birthday dinner.

Hand covers bruise.

Not missing the hangover hunger.

Three years of sober living.

Beneath skies of blue and hairs of gray.

A $70 candle that’s almost worth it.

An experimental Halloween song, conjured in the musical lab of a madly-talented friend. 

A face at first just ghostly.

The virgin and the madame.

Sunday tea dance.

The wood witch.

Dazzlers of the Day included Zoë Keating, Chris Conde, Mary J. Blige, Tony Ardolino, and Chris Olsen.

Clouds and cool air moved in just as the full moon began its ascent. Shadows elongated as the sun lowered itself. The sky working its magical machinations as it did for all these centuries, confusing and confounding human logic and reason in wonderful wickedness.

The nature of a secret is to keep itself.

Seasonal ornaments lent the days a cozy and benign aspect, anything to blunt how cold and crisp the nights could suddenly get. Pumpkins of orange and sage combined with asters in purple and fuchsia to thrilling effect. Electric duets of saturated color sang their blaring songs, while the sweet call of a wood witch sounded like an echo, all faded and chipped by the wind. 

When I look out my window
Many sights to see
And when I look in my window
So many different people to be

They’re strange, so strange
It’s very strange to me

You’ve got to pick up every stitch (gonna be)
You’ve got to pick up every stitch (gonna be, gonna be)
You’ve got to pick up every stitch
Oh no, must be the season of the witch
Must be the season of the witch
Must be the season of the witch

Channeling the moonlight that sifts through the suddenly-bare branches of the trees, the wood witch basks in the absent glow of the done day. The crunch of the crisp oak leaves, the snap of a brittle, barkless branch, the whistle of the wind through the tattered remnants that cling to the trees – this is the wooded realm that he knows best. It was here where he came into existence, here where he roamed as a boy, here where his innocence was hidden. 

When I look over my shoulder (what happens then?)
What do you think I see? (Mm)
Some other cat looking over (shadoop, shadoop)
Over his shoulder at me (ah, at me)

And he’s strange, so strange (so strange)
He’s very strange to me

A woolen hood and cloak in a brighter shade of burnt umber, as far from a whiter shade of pale as one could get, floated about his shoulders, as if an article of clothing could conjure its own life and move of its own volition. Such a strange thing, the wood witch, lying buried so many days of the year, some years not stirring at all, and others reclaiming his rightful place amid the soon-to-slumber forest. 

Heavy is the head that wears the crown of the wood. 

You’ve got to pick up every stitch (gonna be)
You’ve got to pick up every stitch (gonna be, gonna be)
Beatniks are out to make it rich
Oh no, must be the season of the witch
Must be the season of the witch
Must be the season of the witch

Witch
Witch

Sunday Tea Dance once meant something vastly different than it means to me now, but that feels a world away. Today, Sunday tea is a very literal ceremony of having a simple cup of tea and mindfully sipping it slowly and quietly. On a Sunday. 

This is a day meant for slowing down and being mindful. A day for meditation and contemplation. A day for stillness. A day for quiet. 

A day for necessity. 

The art of a proper tea ceremony is far too complex and involved for me to ever research and pull off now, and I don’t feel the need to explore that fully. Sometimes it is enough simply to find a small moment of mindfulness in a day that too many of us pack with weekend activities, trying to finish whatever we might have started yesterday. That detracts from the purpose of Sunday. 

And so I stop to sip from this cup of tea. A delicate and earthy green tea, it sits without fanfare on the tongue, going down gently without screaming its presence, and I adore that unassuming simplicity. Every sip is a path, every lifting of the cup a journey. We travel together around the globe without leaving the home. 

These little fern fronds, drained of chlorophyll for the season, present their ghostly pallor in the dim corridors along the garden path. They almost glow, even as dusk descends – the last holdouts of summer light, grossly transfigured into these decaying remnants, soon to collapse on the winter floor. They are tiny things, as seen compared to the pine needles beneath them. Everything is falling to the ground these days. We all feel a little smaller. 

A wisp.

A chill.

An air.

And a song.

Certain music casts an unbreakable spell, but only for those who understand how to listen. A lost art these days – so many of us just wait for the next turn to speak, the next opportunity to allow our own particular diamonds to sparkle. It should be enough to bask in the glow of another’s genius, but it rarely is. I don’t blame us – we all want only to shine.

Yet when the orchestrations and the chorus kicks in on this song, it’s a transformative moment – achieved only through the participation of many. It’s the same way with plants that make an impression. Hundreds of ferns must rise for a swath, and for the greatest effect they must bend and unfurl in the same fashion. They must ride the wind together, in unison, in tandem, in togetherness. Only then will the magnitude of their power be felt. 

Diptyque holds its flickering candle-head high, and this top shelf exercise in wax and glass and light and fragrance almost achieves the value of its $70 price point. I was skeptical, because, well, it’s a goddamn candle. But it’s a godamn good one, and the scent of ‘Feu de Bois’ – also called Wood Fire, is the perfect fall and winter fragrance – elements of smoke and incense and forest combine for a deliciously cozy effect just as the temperatures turn down and the skies turn gray. 

Silly truth be told, Taron Egerton is the one who convinced me to try this candle. He claimed it was what Elton John was burning during a visit, and he said it was the most amazing thing in the world. Now, I wouldn’t say that I trust Elton John’s taste – I adore it for him, and God knows I love a sparkly tiara, but for the home I tend to veer away from the ostentatious, contrary to popular and misguided belief. When it comes to candles, however, Elton was absolutely correct. Taron was right too, as this one is exquisite, and practically worth the $70 price tag. 

Still, I had doubts. On a dreary morning, I crept up to the attic and lit it from a box of long-stemmed matches. (If you’re going to be fancy, be fucking fancy!) Some say candles, like cigarettes, are better when lit from a match rather than a lighter. Now that is taking things too far into the bullshit territory, but it’s not a horrible notion in the stupid world of the supercilious.  As I lit this exorbitant candle, I felt as foolish as I felt fancy – and neither was entirely unwelcome. 

After an hour of letting it burn (and for that first burn always keep your candle lit until all the wax on the top layer is melted, to avoid tunneling) I returned to the attic to find that this little glass votive had filled the space with a gorgeous fragrance, as if some elegantly-wrinkled piece of burnt firewood had crumbled and let out a puff of glorious ash-like cologne, then drifted away in a forest of pine trees.

Was it worth the cost? Did it smell that good? Yes and no – if you treated it as I did, making each burning an event and exercise in pampering, of heightened experience to treat yourself when we all need to be treated, then yes. Absolutely. I won’t light this one every night until it burns out in a week or so. It will be brought out for those special days and nights when I need a little extra self-care, or when I simply want to remember a certain moment.

If, however, you just want a fire-like woodsy scent in a candle, and one that doesn’t break the bank, then no, this probably isn’t worth it for you. There’s a solution for that, however, and a semi-secret substitution can be found in the ‘Woodfire’ candle by Illume – same approximation of scent, cozy and smoky and woodsy, but at less than half the price. (I found some at Whole Foods Market when I was there last.)

Of course, if you’re looking for Christmas gifts for me, a number of these have been added to my Amazon Wish List. ‘Tis almost the damn season!

After a slew of melancholy posts this week, it seems a good time for this slight change of pace, with a hopeful rendition of ‘Blue Skies’ from Ella Fitzgerald to set the tone. We’ve had some incredible blue skies lately, in between some dreary gray days – and without the latter the former would shine quite as brilliantly. Contrast and clarity. 

Gray and blue often mingle on my lunch-time walks in downtown Albany, where buildings frame the sky, and bricks balance the clouds. 

Beauty doesn’t always strike in bold and brilliant strokes – sometimes it’s softer, found in the basic purity of a blue sky, or the simple quiet of an afternoon’s stillness. You have to listen carefully to find it then, you have to look a little closer, but it’s there, in the subtle mottling of a wall of bricks, in the winks of a series of windows, blinking back at the astute observer. 

October 26, 2019 marked the very last day I had a drink of alcohol. 

This morning marks three years of sober living. 

And when I look back and consider all the crazy shit that’s gone down in the world during that time, not drinking was a pretty big fucking deal. 

Luckily, I didn’t see it as such in the very beginning, or I might not have stopped. During those first few days of not drinking, it was all I could manage to locate myself in a day. Who was I without a martini glass in my hand and a bolt of harsh truth on my tongue? Who was I without simultaneously charming and offending dinner guests from soup to nuts, or in my case from pre-dinner cocktail to greeting cocktail, to dinner wine, to after-dinner cocktail? Who was I without a pre-gaming drink to quell the nerves and calm the social jitters? 

When that kind of existential crisis hits, not drinking happily felt like something of a cake walk. When I thought of the reasons I drank, it was mostly to calm and quiet my social anxiety, something I had only recently discovered around that time. Such a discovery was at the heart of how I could simply stop drinking one day, and be entirely ok with it. The second I was aware of why it was happening was the second I didn’t feel the need to do it anymore. It didn’t take away the social anxiety, but it stopped drinking from being the crutch I used to deal with it. Then the real work began – the therapy, the reading, the meditation, the examination – and the redrawing and re-envisioning of my life. Not drinking was a part of that, but it was secondary to the main part of learning to be a better, healthier person. 

I thought those early days would be fraught with the panic of not having a drink on hand for when I felt nervous or anxious or simply frazzled by life, and I wondered at how I might function without having my usual friend out there. The world is tough enough – it’s not getting any easier – and even on the best days only an idiot would think things are all ok. And while not drinking itself proved to be rather simple, it was everything else that left me challenged and terrified. For so many years, the support of a drink had been what got me through every difficult situation. It was a universal band-aid that covered and protected my heart and head from a multitude of injuries and pain and, above all, worry.

Without alcohol, I would have to deal with all of those things head-on for the first time – and with a clear mind and no excuses. That was the scary part. That was the part everyone wanted to hear about because it can be torturous to turn your regular life upside down. People love that kind of drama, and for a while I kept that part quiet, tamping it down when I explained how and why I stopped drinking, but after three years I feel even less afraid, and maybe it will help someone else to hear that it was frightening at first, but ultimately rewarding. 

Once I learned to give in to the honesty and the fear, to let it out in therapy and to close friends and family whom I knew wouldn’t judge me, I could begin to tackle the origins of a lifetime of feeling like I needed a cocktail in my hand. For someone whose image has a life of its own – an image that has protected and ruined me in equal parts – drinking was inexorably bound to my perception of myself, even as I knew it shouldn’t have been. Even if I knew it wasn’t totally true. I played it up so much that it started to take hold, and maybe I caught it just before it was about to come into existence. The question of whether I was a full-fledged alcoholic is a tricky one – and I have genuinely been on both sides of it through the years. 

Today, that question is moot. 

I’m comfortable with saying I was an alcoholic.

I’m comfortable with saying I wasn’t an alcoholic.

I’m comfortable with saying I genuinely don’t know if I was or am an alcoholic, because the bottom line is that you don’t have to be an alcoholic to be sober. You don’t have to be addicted to alcohol to live a life of sobriety. You don’t have to explain why you don’t drink any more than you have to explain why you don’t like Brussel sprouts or the color magenta. Once I took out that socially-induced need to label and act accordingly, it became a question of choice – and the over-riding theme of my life, of the person I most want to be, has been making choices that are not always socially-sanctioned or common, but have always turned out right for me. This was just another of those decisions, made in defiance of what anyone else thought or assumed. 

And so I begin another day of not drinking. It may lead to another week of not drinking, then another month of not drinking, and then a whole season, and then another whole year. 

Three years ago tonight I had my last cocktail (sober anniversary post to come tomorrow). That last cocktail had been several months, perhaps years, in the making, and while I knew it would eventually arrive, I just wasn’t exactly sure when. My mind and my body had been whispering for some time that it was enough, that they weren’t getting the protection and joy they once did from alcohol, that they couldn’t properly defeat the demons with liquor getting in the way. In my head, I understood all of that. It made sense and sounded like reason, but fear has a way of overriding sense and reason, and back then I was simply too afraid to go out there alone, without a cocktail.  

It wasn’t that last night of drinking that did it. It wasn’t that last hangover. It was the culmination of all the hangovers that had come before, in the stark light of the next day. At those times I would be filled with the dread and depression of having flushed my body with alcohol, of altering my brain and bending my perception to the point where I didn’t remember things or know what I was saying. The cumulative effect of those mornings eventually clicked over to being something I didn’t want to do anymore. I’d had enough. 

Those hangover mornings felt haunted. The quiet felt more quiet, the gray light felt more gray. The world took on a somber aspect, and I always felt more alone than ever. It makes sense when one considers the basic fact that alcohol is a depressant. I remember on one such day sitting at a cafe and watching people walk by, wishing I could have been more like them, wishing I didn’t have to get drunk the night before to handle whatever social situation was worrying me. Everyone else seemed to go through the day so much easier than me. I didn’t realize how much drinking played a part in those thoughts, how it all fed into a slow, downward slope whose ending I dreaded as much as I wanted to watch it play out. 

Was I having fun on the night of October 26, 2019? A little. Not very much though, if I’m being completely honest. Drinking had ceased being fun for a while, and it was verging on simply being a habit. It was time…

Standing half-naked in the sunlight, I still manage to cover the decades-old bruises left on my heart. Back in the 90’s, I remember listening to Trent Reznor scream, “I wanna fuck you like an animal!” and it was all just a way of getting ‘Closer’ to God. On this particular Sunday morning, God feels far away, so I put on a piece by Reznor and Atticus Ross that was produced over a decade after ‘Closer’. What a difference a decade makes, and now almost another decade has passed beyond that. Still, I stand at the window from time to time, soaking in the sun to feel some sort of warmth in this wayward world, decade after decade after decade. I feel the subtle shift of time. I feel the differences in the years, knowing much of that is simple shifts in perspective and perception. Getting closer to peace within, even as the world grows ever divisive without. 

I like this music. It’s calm and tense at once, the way most of us are living each day out. Even at our most peaceful moments, the tension of a country teetering on the brink of collapse does’t fully allow for total release and meditative bliss. All I can do is approach… gently, slowly, in each and every breath. It’s a lovely reminder that life is never fully done, and nothing is ever truly complete. It’s all one continuously flowing stream – we dip in and out of a day, we dip in and out of a lifetime. We do our best, even when it’s all falling down around us, and when I try to sort it out in words, as in this very post, it crumbles in my incapable hands. 

Working to embrace the imperfect aspects of life, I strive to make my peace with such failures. I tell myself I’m ok with it, even though it still bothers and worries me. Putting it down here, literally and figuratively, helps a little. I put it down in writing, and then I put it down in my head. The power of acknowledgement is one of those hidden secrets of life that no one ever tells you about – at least no one told me. I only knew the power of writing – of putting thoughts to print or paper – and in a way that was its own acknowledgment. The demon is always less frightening when it can be named, then trapped on a piece of paper or in the confines of a soon-to-be-buried blog post.