2020: Generation XX

When you commit to a regular schedule of output, the one thing you're always, always on the lookout for is something to make the content easier. The occurrence of something sensational or gross or idiotic can be a godsend when you've been walking around all day bereft of inspiration, trying desperately to think of something interesting about whatever happens to pass in front of you, like traffic or the weather or the rotting corpse of late-phase consumer capitalism or pernicious sartorial persistence of plaid.

But of course all of us know the worst thing you can do is openly wish for it on your own terms. Content is a fickle lover. You can start with a lot of deep eye contact and meaningful caresses but if you don't keep your feet planted, you can find yourself suplexed into a full-on pegging you're not ready for.

The end of a year is usually a slow-pitched softball for content. It's a stampede of lists: What books did I read? What movies did I see? What songs did I like? What were my personal growth goals and in what way did failing them confirm my parents' worst instincts about how I would turn out? Really typical stuff.

I'm certainly not immune to this particular siren's song. And the pull is all the stronger for it being the end of a decade. If you know anything from reading this, all up to four of you who still might or the Russian bots here aggregating social engineering data for future weaponization against all of Western democracy, you'll know that I'm not above either an easy out or a cheap pander. Shit, last week I wrote like 1,500 words on Star Wars. And yeah, the stat-reader built into Blogger says that's already skyrocketed up to three views thus far. The lucre is filthy, but I'm not ashamed. The system is here to be exploited.

You'll find that ten years ago, I did post a sort of a "The Author Looks Back" kind of a post, but that was cheating because the god Content had just handed me a gift in the form of my very rawly recent divorce. A ticking, smoking gift.*

Sounds like a bomb, right? But sometimes the ticking, smoking thing is just a clock with a nicotine habit. Except for the secondhand smoke, everyone emerges from the experience more or less OK, plus you get to know what time it is!

In the ten years since I got divorced, I have become a vastly different person, that is true. Same house, yes. And same job. Same three kids, only taller now and 67% more bearded. A different car, though! One that's cost me about $4,500 in repairs and maintenance this year. I guess the only significant thing I can say I've picked up is higher cholesterol, which makes meal-planning more of a fun challenge. All I have to do is think of things I really like and then eat something else.

OK, so mostly I'm the same. Except for the accumulated life experience, most of it in the form of relationships I've had with women I've met, all of them stunning and remarkable humans, all in vastly different ways, all of whom had the generosity of spirit and enough of a hint of masochism to let me spend some time in their company. Even as I am, currently uncoupled and thrashing a bit through a combination of angst and ennui at sometimes clinical levels, I'm awed by the stupidity and randomness of a level of fortune that had I planned for it, would have been laughably unachievable. It's an avalanche of rolling providence that strains the idea of luck as a concept at all. Some of my exes I'm friends with. Several of them I'm sending occasional texts back and forth with even as I type this, as I do every single ridiculous day of my exaggeratedly fortunate life.

Every relationship I've had in this decade has ended. But then, very nearly all of them do, right? Ups happened, followed inevitably by downs, some of which were survivable or teaching moments, others of which were extinction-level cataclysms. Every one of them left me knowing something I hadn't known before, from granular trivia* to grand metaphysical truths.** I've made a lot of mistakes. But I've also made some of my very best friends. I'm better for all of them and (here's the gratitude kick in the face) my kids are better people for all of them, either by knowing these people directly or as recipients of their reflected light, where I got to play the role of Big Dumb Mirror. I'd thank them all individually, but they laugh at me when I get schmaltzy, which is undeniably the correct response.

It's fair that the end of the year is a time to take stock, and then the end of a decade a bit more so. I want to make it abundantly clear that I have DEFINITELY NOT decided to write about this romantical and philosophical stuff because I'm embarrassed about the vanishingly small number of books I read in the past 10 years, or the fact that most of the ones I did read featured wizards. Definitely focused on the growth whatever stuff I said.

See you in 2030. I plan on getting there one Thursday at a time.

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*Tanzania got its name from the combination of the countries of Tanganyika and Zanzibar.

**There are arguments so banal or maddening, death doesn't seem so scary in the moment.