A new year already? What the hell happened to the old one? Seriously, 2011 is just a blur for me… as I think back and try to remember exactly what happened during the past twelve months, only four events come immediately to mind:

• The death of Osama bin Laden. (I wonder if this is going to become one of those “remember where you were when you heard about…” kind of things, or if the event proved too anti-climatic to make much of an impact on most people? I think I’m going to remember, at least, because the circumstances of my hearing about it struck me as very weird: I was at a TV-viewing party with about a dozen other people, watching the HBO series Game of Thrones. If you’ve never seen it, it’s when I got a text message from my friend Mike G. delivering the news. I thought he was yanking my chain for a moment… and then everyone else’s cellphones started lighting up with similar messages of their own.)
• The Girlfriend and I driving to Las Vegas to celebrate the wedding of our friends Dave and Sarah, and all the assorted misadventures associated with that.
• Meeting up with Cranky Robert in DC and road-tripping our way through several Civil War battlefield sites on the way back to his home in Pittsburgh.
• The end of the space shuttle program.

And that’s pretty much it.

Oh, there was a Rick Springfield concert with our friends Jack and Natalie in there somewhere. And another concert with Jack and Nat, one of those old-fart triple-threat shows comprising Night Ranger, Foreigner, and Journey. And I bit the bullet and took Anne to see Erasure, one of those inscrutable synthpop bands I’ve never cared for, but which she really likes.

And there was the wedding of Anne’s niece Kaitlyn (occasionally referred to in the past on this blog as “The Teenager”), which was a truly weird experience because it wasn’t all that long ago she was a jealous three-year-old who didn’t want to share her “Nana” (she couldn’t pronounce “Anne”) with some scruffy guy (that would be me); surely 16 years haven’t passed that quickly, have they?

And my uncle Layne died. And the father of my old friend Keith.

There was also a development in my personal life that I’m not quite ready to blog about yet (don’t worry, it’s nothing bad, and in fact, most of my friends already know about it; I just have other blog-business I want to deal with before I write about it).

But otherwise… a blur. My impression is that I was generally happy during 2011, not counting the occasional off day. At least I wasn’t as consistently depressed and angry as I was in 2010, but I couldn’t tell you why, i.e., I don’t know what changed or was different from the prior year. Certainly I didn’t experience any of the difficulties so many people faced in ’11; my job remained (thankfully) rock-steady. And it seems like there were fewer of those last-minute “wait, you have to stay late tonight because someone else screwed up and now our hair is on fire” moments at the office that so piss me off. But my more upbeat mood nevertheless puzzles me considering all the ways in which 2011 drove home the point that my youth is officially, irrevocably, irretrievably behind me.

Yeah, I know, I know. I’ve been talking about getting old and being out of touch for ages, but this thing I’ve been feeling lately is… something else. Something much harder to articulate. And somehow it’s also much more authentic and consequential than my earlier whinging about landmark birthdays and losing my hair, although, again, I can’t really put my finger on why. Or what caused it. Maybe it was seeing that grumpy toddler all grown up dancing with her groom. Or perhaps it was the startling moment a few weeks ago when I realized my friend Cheryl’s daughter is now about the same age Cheryl and I were when we met. Maybe it was the observation that all the pretty young things walking around out there no longer pay much attention to me (and why should they, since I’m the same age as their dads?) Or the even more unsettling observation that I now tend to find their mothers more appealing anyway. Probably it’s all these things and a million more, large and small, all adding up to an understanding of something I’ve been trying to deny or simply ignore for a very long time: that while there may always be possibilities — as Mr. Spock so frequently counseled us back in the days when Star Trek was relevant — the probabilities of a great many things are shrinking for me. It’s a thought and a sensation that should fill me with panic, or at least a tremendous slug of regret. And it does, from time to time. Still, the impression remains: I think I’ve been generally happy this year. Or so I believe at this particular moment. Maybe I wasn’t really as happy as I think and this is just some kind of post-holiday glow I’m feeling. Because Christmas in 2011, for the first time in recent memory, was not a completely depressing and anxiety-provoking ordeal for me.

What the hell is happening to me? No, seriously, this is weird… enjoying Christmas, having an epiphany about lost opportunities and not instantly overwhelming myself with self-recriminations?

Some among you may be tempted to suggest I’m finally growing up. And you may even be right. But if you say it to my face, I’ll most likely tell you where to stick it. Because there’s a part of me that really doesn’t want to hear that. The part of me that once made a pact with the very Cheryl I mentioned above to become Lost Kids rather than grow up.

I’m beginning to babble, I know, but I have one more thought about 2011 before I click “Publish” on this entry: generalized sense of well-being aside, I feel like I really dropped the ball on blogging during the past twelve months. I haven’t actually compared the number of entries I published this year to what I posted in 2010, but it seems like there were a lot fewer ones, and most of the ones that did go up were shorter and pretty superficial. Or so it seems to me. As I said, I haven’t actually quantified it. But our esteemed colleague-in-blogging Jaquandor mentioned a while back that he wished I wrote more, and this blog’s archive is filled with half-finished entries that I keep hoping I’ll get back to, but somehow know I won’t. Maybe one little guy out in Utah slacking off on his personal blog doesn’t matter in the Big Scheme of Things, since we’ve been repeatedly told throughout 2011 that blogging is over as a social phenomenon anyhow. But it troubles me to see myself letting Simple Tricks slip away from me, because my little rants and musings here are about the only writing I do anymore, and if I stop doing even those…

Which parts of your self-image — which dreams — are okay to let go of, and which do you have to keep fighting for?