The year ends, as it always does, leaving me wishing I could travel back in time and do a hell of a lot of things differently.
As the clock strikes midnight I’ll inevitably look around and wonder how I got there, at the end of an entire year of my life seemingly empty handed. When did that happen (and more importantly - why haven’t we yet mastered a time machine?). I guess that’s just how fast it all happens - seconds, a moment, a word, a choice, a glance, a feeling - that’s how life happens, quickly, and most of the time without my even realizing it.
Life and the years of our lives happen as fast and fleetingly as it takes to count to ten, and I’d like to go back in those countdown seconds and warn my previous countdown self to the dangers looming in the distance of the upcoming year. I would have resolved then and there to proceed with extreme caution: warning, injuries and mistakes are closer than they appear. It would make a difference, wouldn’t it, to be able to go back right before you’re forced to go forward? Go back with clarity and distance and knowledge and collect what evidence you can on the inner-workings of your downfalls so you can stop yourself (for God’s sake) from making the same mistakes (again and again and again).
Because the answer isn’t to stop caring or to start caring about something like quitting smoking or losing weight or signing up for speed dating. No, we can resolve all we want to (and who are we kidding, really? Well, ourselves, always), but who we deep-down-are isn’t going to change no matter what promises we make for ourselves. All we can do is try to go back and in those ten seconds attempt to see ourselves in the harsh light of the year gone by. Shine the spotlight on those pivotal seconds and defining moments, those nasty words and foolish choices, those lost glances and forgotten aching feelings and continue to let life happen (quickly) but this time realize it.
And if you’re like me you’ll want to cling desperately to what little you got right (ok, so maybe my hands aren’t entirely empty...), and in those ten seconds you’ll vow to make every attempt to know better what you’re doing so you can do it all differently with your eyes more open (and your heart a bit more closed), so that maybe next year, if you can at all help it, you won’t have so many regrets.
Because until we can actually travel backward (and it’s only a matter of time, really) and allow the chance for history to diverge from our original past, we are stuck on a linear path moving forward into complete and total uncertainty which is both thrilling and terrifying at the exact same time.
Cause for celebration? Well, I guess.
December 30, 2010
December 21, 2010
It's always the ones -
Tall,
Dark,
(Not particularly handsome)
Who you know -
Could never understand you and,
Would never make you happy
That track you down through a friend of a friend
(Who was that girl in the black dress at the party on Saturday night?)
And want to date you.
Dark,
(Not particularly handsome)
Who you know -
Could never understand you and,
Would never make you happy
That track you down through a friend of a friend
(Who was that girl in the black dress at the party on Saturday night?)
And want to date you.
December 14, 2010
Odds-wise
To me there’s nothing quite like being in a church watching a wedding take place to make me think about odds. This weekend as I sat there looking at these two people getting asked the standard round of questions: do you take, will you honor, do you pledge to love (I do, I do, I do), my brain couldn’t really quite wrap itself around the fact that it’s possible for two people to find each other at the exact right place at the exact right time and agree about things in terms of their lives forever-wise.
I mean, we’re talking about for-as-long-as-you-both-shall-live in a world where most of us don’t like to feel committed to anything much beyond the weekend, (and when it comes to love, well, are any of us ever really planning ahead?). I listened as the declarations ranged across the spectrum of health and illness, prosperity and unemployment, to the inevitable drastic flux on the good times v. bad times scale of things ending with the ultimate question: in light of all this, will you remain? And there they were both saying yes. Yes emphatically before God and everyone else with lots of money gone on invitations and venue fees with too many Tiffany’s candlesticks and pieces of flatware piling up on their kitchen table back home.
I sat there and thought about life and love odds-wise, and by the time they got to the you-may-now-kiss-the-bride part I figured that you probably have a better chance hitting the lottery than finding yourself up there saying yes to all that and really meaning it (and having the other person really mean it, too), and be able to look back years later knowing you were able to make it to death do you part. Because I think that’s the way it is odds-wise if you know what you’re looking for and don’t want to settle for anything less. How great can the probability really be when we’re all scared and confused and messed up and selfish and stupid most of the time anyway? At weddings I really feel like you ought to be up there acting like one of those people on the evening news in Gary, Indiana or someplace, in just total absolute shock at the sheer fortuitous luck of having struck it big. What were the chances?!
While I’m not typically big gambling-wise because the purchase of a lottery ticket is, from the standpoint of classical economics, foolish (did The Wealth of Nations have a chapter on marriage?), I do realize that in order to ever win one does, at some point, actually have to play the game. Yes you can bemoan odds and statistics all you want, but if you’re too scared and confused and messed up and selfish and stupid to at least get in line and pay the dollar for your ticket, well, you simply just can’t expect the windfall will find you eventually (in fact, I’d venture to say it will be lost to you forever).
So as the happy couple passed by me on their way back down the aisle I figured it’s best to go about the daily business of your life and from time to time take a chance on some of those numbers you have a particularly good feeling about and hope for the best.
A crapshoot? You bet. But that’s just the way it crumbles, cookie-wise.
I mean, we’re talking about for-as-long-as-you-both-shall-live in a world where most of us don’t like to feel committed to anything much beyond the weekend, (and when it comes to love, well, are any of us ever really planning ahead?). I listened as the declarations ranged across the spectrum of health and illness, prosperity and unemployment, to the inevitable drastic flux on the good times v. bad times scale of things ending with the ultimate question: in light of all this, will you remain? And there they were both saying yes. Yes emphatically before God and everyone else with lots of money gone on invitations and venue fees with too many Tiffany’s candlesticks and pieces of flatware piling up on their kitchen table back home.
I sat there and thought about life and love odds-wise, and by the time they got to the you-may-now-kiss-the-bride part I figured that you probably have a better chance hitting the lottery than finding yourself up there saying yes to all that and really meaning it (and having the other person really mean it, too), and be able to look back years later knowing you were able to make it to death do you part. Because I think that’s the way it is odds-wise if you know what you’re looking for and don’t want to settle for anything less. How great can the probability really be when we’re all scared and confused and messed up and selfish and stupid most of the time anyway? At weddings I really feel like you ought to be up there acting like one of those people on the evening news in Gary, Indiana or someplace, in just total absolute shock at the sheer fortuitous luck of having struck it big. What were the chances?!
While I’m not typically big gambling-wise because the purchase of a lottery ticket is, from the standpoint of classical economics, foolish (did The Wealth of Nations have a chapter on marriage?), I do realize that in order to ever win one does, at some point, actually have to play the game. Yes you can bemoan odds and statistics all you want, but if you’re too scared and confused and messed up and selfish and stupid to at least get in line and pay the dollar for your ticket, well, you simply just can’t expect the windfall will find you eventually (in fact, I’d venture to say it will be lost to you forever).
So as the happy couple passed by me on their way back down the aisle I figured it’s best to go about the daily business of your life and from time to time take a chance on some of those numbers you have a particularly good feeling about and hope for the best.
A crapshoot? You bet. But that’s just the way it crumbles, cookie-wise.
December 7, 2010
It's hard work being out there. And everyone is.
Everyone is out there with their pasts stuffed in to invisible luggage by their sides as they sit on bar stools waiting for someone to make things right (as though some stranger could possibly fix all the broken hinges that are somehow, miraculously after all these years of abuse, still holding our hearts together).
And any day that someone could be anyone and most days we’re too busy to notice or particularly care. We keep on thinking we have more of the one thing in this city there’s never quite enough of, time (and an infinite number of chances), and we let it slip by us (December, already?) more easily than we should.
Isn’t that so funny about time and December and how that last month of the year always comes up slowly and then bam! there it is right on top of us, suffocating us, leaving us all asking the same questions: where has the time gone, where has the year gone, where has my life gone? It’s as though we’ve misplaced all the days of the year in the attics of our lives and here we are now frantically trying to find them beneath all the dust to take some of them back, to make things right (and there’s just so much clutter). And we make many failed attempts and that’s okay because it’s the holidays and we’re told repeatedly in greeting cards and by Burl Ives and George Bailey that this is the season of perpetual hope.
But we will not find the lost days of our year hidden under Christmas trees or in wrapped packages, boxes, or bags. They are gone, and so too soon will this season and then where will we be? Having to start all over again, I suppose. Out there tediously searching for the same things in different people at different bars - only then our bags will be heavier. We’ll be carrying with us what little we were able to salvage from before and everything we were able to survive. We’ll continue to chase time because that’s what you do when there’s something you want that there’s never quite enough of, give chase, pursue persistently, (possibly forever). And everyone will say the same thing they always say to me as though somehow it makes it all better, all worth it no matter the end – well hey, at least you’re out there.
And any day that someone could be anyone and most days we’re too busy to notice or particularly care. We keep on thinking we have more of the one thing in this city there’s never quite enough of, time (and an infinite number of chances), and we let it slip by us (December, already?) more easily than we should.
Isn’t that so funny about time and December and how that last month of the year always comes up slowly and then bam! there it is right on top of us, suffocating us, leaving us all asking the same questions: where has the time gone, where has the year gone, where has my life gone? It’s as though we’ve misplaced all the days of the year in the attics of our lives and here we are now frantically trying to find them beneath all the dust to take some of them back, to make things right (and there’s just so much clutter). And we make many failed attempts and that’s okay because it’s the holidays and we’re told repeatedly in greeting cards and by Burl Ives and George Bailey that this is the season of perpetual hope.
But we will not find the lost days of our year hidden under Christmas trees or in wrapped packages, boxes, or bags. They are gone, and so too soon will this season and then where will we be? Having to start all over again, I suppose. Out there tediously searching for the same things in different people at different bars - only then our bags will be heavier. We’ll be carrying with us what little we were able to salvage from before and everything we were able to survive. We’ll continue to chase time because that’s what you do when there’s something you want that there’s never quite enough of, give chase, pursue persistently, (possibly forever). And everyone will say the same thing they always say to me as though somehow it makes it all better, all worth it no matter the end – well hey, at least you’re out there.
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