It’s New Year’s Eve 2019, which means that social media and the degraded remnant of the once-mighty blogosphere are filled with reminiscences of the past twelve months, as well as thoughts on the preceding decade as we roll into the 2020s. (No, I’m not going to call the next ten years “the Roaring Twenties.” That one’s taken. And I’m also not interested in debating whether a new decade begins with zero or one. When people talk about “the ’50s,” they’re including 1950, right? It’s all arbitrary perceptions anyhow; it’s not like the universe actually cares about how we silly humans mark our passage around the local star.) I feel obliged to do some reflecting myself because I’m nothing if not a bandwagon-hopper, but… well… I hate to say it, but this past year and the decade before it are really just a blur for me. At moments like this, you’re supposed to make note of accomplishments and life changes and all that jazz, but off the top of my head… I got nothin’.
Professionally speaking, I’m still working for the same company and in the same job role I had in 2009, which honestly surprises me (frantically rapping my knuckles on the wooden desk in front of me… no jinx today, please!). I at least have a different job title now, copy editor instead of proofreader. Even though, in practical terms, I’m doing the same damn thing.
I live in the same house in the same town, and I drive the same car. I’ve had no children in the past ten years, although I have grown closer to two of my significant other’s nieces and come to think of them as quasi-daughters (the rent-a-kids, we like to call them).
I find myself thinking in much more fatherly terms in relation to a lot of people. Ah, advancing age.
Now that my brain juices are beginning to flow, I can think of one big change in my home life since 2009: Anne moved in with me and she’s shown no sign of moving back out, so I’d say that’s working out well. We’ve even established a few quasi-traditions, like binge-watching an entire season of The Big Bang Theory over New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day. I’m not sure how that’s going to work next year, though, considering the show has now wrapped production so this year’s DVD set will be the last one we get…
Quite a few of my friends lost parents and other loved ones during the 2010s; fortunately, I still have both of my folks, although the past decade has seen them cross that mysterious Rubicon between not-quite-old and oh-wow-all-of-a-sudden-they’re-old-how-did-that-happen. I haven’t lost anyone else, either, but the artists whose work meant so much to me growing up have begun passing on with greater frequency, it seems. Just in the past few months, we’ve lost a number of 1980s rock stars — Eddie Money, Ric Ocasek of The Cars, Marie Fredriksson of Roxette — and just in the past few weeks, a number of people associated with the Star Trek franchise. And then there’s dear Carrie Fisher, our space princess, gone three years this very week. I still mourn her as much as any actual blood-related family member.
I have lost a couple pets since 2009, and in the last year, a feral cat that I kinda-sorta called a pet. Or at least… a familiar presence.
I became diabetic in the past decade, which sucks. I lost a lot of weight as a result, and returned to looking and feeling like the “me” I’ve always seen in my head, which does not suck. A number of my friends have faced — and continue to face, in some cases — serious illnesses, which definitely sucks.
I visited Scotland during this decade, something I’ve dreamed of doing for ages, as well as a number of lesser bucket-list destinations, like Hawaii; Washington, DC; New Orleans; and most recently, Seattle.
In the past ten years, Salt Lake got its very own comic con, which surprised me by turning out to be been very successful but then it got a little too big for its britches and had to be rebranded as “FanX” because of lawsuits from, ahem, that big convention in San Diego.
I’m ashamed to admit that my writing has largely petered out, not merely this blog but also my creative writing. That really bothers me. Likewise my personal reading habits have declined, although I’m a bit more sanguine about that failure; I read eight hours a day for a living, so it’s hard to muster much enthusiasm for it after work.
Speaking of this blog, ten years ago, I was posting about the “miracle on the Hudson” when Captain Sully Sullenberger successfully belly-flopped a passenger jet into the river without losing a single person, and then a few days later the inauguration of Barack Obama and my hopes that bad old times of the previous decade were behind us. God, that seems like a lifetime ago, as well as so naive.
The 2010s have seen so much social progress — gay people acquiring the right to legally marry, the #metoo movement, a woman coming within a hair’s-breadth of winning the presidency, and even hope of finally passing the ERA — but there’s also been a truly disheartening backlash, which helped put a bellicose celebrity con man in the White House and led to literal Nazis marching in American streets. There have been countless mass shootings, countless conspiracy theories, and a rising background level of anger from all sides of the political spectrum. Every election now is a dire matter of life-and-death… or at least of Democracy vs. The End of All Things, depending on which side you’re on.
Ten years ago, nobody had heard the term “Brexit”; now the UK is on the verge of pulling out of the European Union and could face its own breakup following that, both of which used to be unthinkable.
In the past ten years, we’ve had five new Star Wars movies, but rather than them being received as an unexpected gift, the arguments are more vicious than ever and I’ve grown weary of the entire subject, as painful as that is to admit.
In the last ten years, movies I remember playing at the theater where I worked in my 20s have started to be remade.
In the last ten years, BluRay discs largely surpassed DVDs, and now both formats are declining in favor of streaming. CDs and even downloaded music files are on their last gasps, but weirdly, vinyl has made a genuine comeback. There are records on sale at Target, unlikely as that would’ve seemed in 2009.
In many ways, we seem to be closer than ever to the future I imagined when I was a kid: we now have reusable spacecraft that land on their tails like proper rocketships, solar panels are starting to pop up everywhere, electric cars are becoming a genuine thing rather than a weird niche market, and self-driving cars are just around the corner. Even my dad is using a smartphone. And yet… none of this seems very impressive. The world doesn’t feel that much different to me than it did in, say, the mid-’90s. Maybe it’s always been that way, although it’s hard to imagine someone who was alive in 1940 saying that 1980 didn’t feel different to them. Maybe it’s just me.
Now that I think about it, the past decade has been bloody exhausting. I never counted on that. In so many ways, this isn’t the life I imagined I’d be living, or the world I imagined I’d be living in, and frankly it hurts. So tonight, when I’m drinking my toast to the end of the year and the end of the decade, I’ll be wishing for peace. Not in the usual sense of an end to conflict, although that’s a laudable goal, but rather just the hope that things slow down enough for us all to catch our breath, to allow us let go of some of that… accumulated gunge that fills our heads and our hearts, so that maybe, just maybe, we — I — can dream again. I’m thinking of what Mary Chapin Carpenter once described as “cool quiet and time to think.” Wouldn’t that be lovely?
Of course, 2020 is an election year, so…
