Autopanegyric

Do I think I'm better than you? The only honest answer is yes. Yes, I do. But please understand, it's not because I find any particular fault with you. I find your desperate grasping at comprehenision, like a blind man flailing for the words to describe a rainbow, to be utterly charming and indicative of your adorable spirit of try-try-try. Watching a puppy chase a car is something I never tire of.

The relative difference has less to do with your ample shortcomings than with my undeserved and embarrassing overabundance of gifts. Am I tall, handsome, witty, patient, giving, forthright, understanding and kind? Yes, I am. But I find a way to be all those things with just the right amount of humor and self-effacing grace as to put people lesser than me at their ease. And damn, if they don't just love me all the more for it.

Beyond that, there are things about me that are truly remarkable (my prehensile vestigial tail is something about which textbooks have been written), but I don't advertise them. It's enough that people admire me. Admiration I can take. Awe might make me a little more uncomfortable. From there it's a short trip to people sacrificing virgins to effigies of your image and the last thing I want is the spoilation of a good virgin on account of me. There are so few left...

So I only post here once a week, work out twice a week, administer masked vigilante justice on the lawless streets of Greater Northwestern Riverside County a couple nights a month at most... I figure there's plenty of praise out there to go around. You don't need me hogging it all up, kicking off another self-esteem crisis like in the late '80s/early '90s when I volunteered for Habitat for Humanity that one summer and tipped the scales a wee bit too far in my direction. The ensuing spike in teen pregnancies and the rise of crack cocaine are consequences my conscience will never be free of.

The question then is: why write about this all now? Why risk the social upheaval, the backlash, the total collapse of conventional normative emotional order?

Well, depending on how schedules go, this may well be my final blogpost of the decade. I've done a lot this decade. I fathered two children, bought two houses, didn't get divorced, learned to eat fish, spoke no French, read some old books, got a job, murdered only when totally and absolutely necessary (in both legal and moral senses) and positively, absolutely turned down every single offer to commit adultery against my wife. Every. Single. One.

That's a lot. In light of recent events, I think you'd say the last one by itself should qualify me for some kind of Nobel or MacArthur prize.

But it's for all those reasons that I've decided to name the 2000s (wait for it...) the Me Decade.

I know that's been done. But Tom Wolfe, when he said it, wasn't talking about Me. He was talking about You. You and your petty little insular concerns with your poofy hairdo, your astrological sign gold medallions and your chocolate-brown flared trousers. Tom Wolfe, the man in the tired, affected I-wish-I-was-Mark-Twain white suit, was unironically making fun of You.

This Me, this 2000s Me, I think you'll agree, is much more specific, by an order of hundreds of millions in that it refers to just the one person (me).

It may seem self-serving to name a whole decade after me, but I think if you'll just give it a second to penetrate your precious, precious armodillo-plated skull, you'll find that this is me (again) doing you a favor.

We've all accomplished a great deal these past ten years. We ran two successful presidential elections and one very curious tie (GWB winner by shoot-out after extra time in 2000). We took over two different countries. We very nearly kept the Yankees from winning any World Series (pipped us at the final post... thanks for nothing, goddamn Phillies). We lost us two gigantor buildings in New York, a wing of the building housing a large portion of our defense infrastructure and one whole major American city (we love you New Orleans!). What other decade can say that?

But one thing we haven't been able to successfully accomplish? Naming the decade. None of the attempts have really caught on. Not the Zeroes or the Aughts or the Ohs or the 2000s. There's no catchy nickname for the rising generation like Generation X or Hippies or whatever. Identity for the last ten years have been as empty as its last three digits.

So, with humility and a heart bound only to service of you, my fellow man, I give you the Me Decade. Because that's who I am: dedicated to servicing as many men as I can.

You are welcome.