A 439-Year Practical Joke

I can look back with fond nostalgia at the blithe naïveté of the late-2020 version of me deluded enough to think that something as arbitrary as a change in the ones-place digit of a calendar year was going to be some kind of historico-karmic wendepunkt, a cosmic reset to unfuck all that had been so thoroughly fucked in the preceding four years generally and the last 10 months specifically. It sounds even more amusingly stupid when I type it out.

Without getting too deep into it, four weeks into this year and I'd almost--I said almost--be willing to consider swapping them for four different but carefully selected (almost certainly non-consecutive) weeks in 2020. I'd be way more amenable to the possibility* if literally all of 2020 wasn't swamped in the lung-searing skunk-musk of Trump taint.

The kids are OK and I'm doing fine (all things considered). Nobody's got COVID.** Everyone who was employed remains so and nobody is dead. It's just more a morbidly relentless black comedy of vignettes reminding us that human mortality is both real and inevitable and the people in front of you, though undeniably corporeal and solid-seeming, are mostly shined-up mannequins hiding innards made of sawdust and rubber cement. It's been like a Sartre play, but with a Big Bang Theory laugh track and no punchline.

The real trick to being a successful human, as I always tell my sons, is of course to find a way to take these inevitable moments of challenge and lighten them by finding perspective in the suffering of people who are not you. That kind of schadenfreude*** therapy is in plentiful supply at the minute, which is probably the main unambiguous improvement over this time last year. What situation isn't made better by watching Nazis suffer?

And add to that a bunch of reddit trolls interrupting the unbroken forty-year winning streak of hedge fund gargoyles while also exposing the stock market as the most unsustainably insane Ponzi scheme for an entire economy to rest on and hot damn... If you can't enjoy an immediate situational peace from your own circumstances, the best you can do sometimes is the lamentation of your ideological nemeses.

I guess in a more positive vein, I could look toward the lifting of the latest lockdown order here in California, triggered by an easement of the immediate crisis in intensive care availability, but then all I can really think is "yay, more spaces for people to die of something else." Sometimes you have to manufacture the silver linings.

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*I'm not sure "possibility" is the right word for the prospect of a temporal swap.

**In any of the fun new flavors!

***Second German word of the day. You can really judge your emotional headspace by how much Deutsche falls out of your head.