Another Annus

Looking at the little calendar feature in the dock along the bottom of the screen of my now-geriatric MacBook Pro laptop, I see we're almost four full weeks into January and I have neglected to wish any of you readers a Happy New Year for 2022. It's a redundant hack joke to point out that between the lingering Trump stain and the pandemic taint of the last compounding five years or so, what would be the point of wishing anyone a "happy year" given the evidence and the trajectory, am I right? Besides being lame and obvious, that would just be deflecting from the fact that I just kind of forgot. When the new year rolled over, I was about half way through my one extended time off period for the year, so my brain might not have been at its sharpest, most vigilant or plugged in to minor details like when was the last time I washed the pajama pants I was wearing, let alone what year it happened to be. I was hard in it, relaxation-wise. Sometimes self-care and self-neglect look very similar. Both can feature pound cake.

I know we're only 27 days in, but I can say, as far as years go, 2022... pretty fucking terrible! Even the stuff that seems maybe like a positive, like a Supreme Court justice retiring when there's a Democratic president and a Democrat-controlled senate; even that is just one liberal(ish) justice being replaced by a new liberal (hopefully) one. You know it's tough days when the ties feel like wins. Or at least what we imagine wins used to feel like.

We've had some setbacks here in the extended family, and some pretty whacking tough ones to boot. Everyone is still alive and nobody's got the 'rona, but the fabric of everything is going to be disrupted at least through the next several months, and there will be stretches where instead of just doing what we want to do (which these days is mostly spending too much on DoorDash and watching whatever's new on Disney+), we'll be required to set aside the cloistered hedonism of Covid Winter III and engage in active, bummerific downer shit like waiting and hoping. What good thing has ever been associated with those verbs in gerund form? Don't say "sports" because that only works out for about 50% of the people watching at any given time, by default.

So yes, this year so far is shit, just like the previous ones were, except now it's a bit more personal, infinitely more specific and genuinely exhausting in a way I only imagined things had been back when the worry was other people dying of stuff (a very reasonable thing to preoccupy oneself with during a global pandemic, I'd like to emphasize).

All you can really do is try to live in gratitude in the moment. As I sit here and type this, everyone is fine, if a bit more agitated, a tiny bit less well-rested and a bit more prone to lost moments of furrowed-brow reverie. Anxieties come and go, like all things, sic transit, etcetera. No sense contemplating the bridges still uncrossed. Just maybe look ahead to see if they're not already on fire. That's just practical.