So it's a new year and I'm supposed to just forget that all that crap last year happened and move along, is that the deal? I'm trying. I just can't let go of a few issues yet. Maybe next week. Maybe if I just take a shitty thing that happened in 07 and work on one per week in 08, I'll be able to get over my shit by the time we elect a new president. Maybe. I'm not promising you anything. I come from a long line of grudge holders and bitter, harsh, cruel people, and I can latch on to issues with the pros.
So my New Year's party was pretty much a blur. I don't think I was drunk, just harried. I like to party, but I came to realize during my post-New Years binge at Arriba's Mexican Grill coma that I like people too much to be so casual with them. I want to just sit down and really talk to a person, ask poignant questions, smoke a joint with them and talk about what they were doing on 9/11 and shit like that. I love people too much to just chit-chat about how much they like this certain kind of cheddar, without probing and asking questions about their childhood and their relationship with all of their grade school teachers, individually, as if I will reveal to them that the secret to their love of only certain types of cheddar might lie in their reading group assignment in Mrs. Crayton's 4th Grade Class. Because to be honest, I think about that shit.
I do.
It's true.
The horror is that I usually start thinking about that right about the time the other person gets to the second or third word in their chit-chat and before I know it, I'm blurting out some non-sequitur that only makes sense in the fucked up cocktail party world in my head. It usually goes something like this....
Partygoer: Who brought this Shiraz? It's so good with this cheese...
Me: The Chinese, but my aunt swears to god my uncle killed it just so he wouldn't have to pay taxes on it.
Partygoer: Huh?
Me: I'm just kidding, I love the wine. (We were talking about the wine, right?)
Someone needs to track down the home phone number of the members of the band Of Montreal, then prank them late at night, every night, by calling and reciting the names of their songs to them over the phone. Just read one right after another. Pretentious bastards.
I would be remiss, or is it remissed (?), if I didn't also admit that 08 is all about politics. I really wish that I could bottle up and capture the spirit of how wide open our political future is right now because I know that as soon as the Iowa caucuses happen tomorrow, the vision of what we can change in America will start to narrow. By October, we'll be so sick of looking at those two or four faces that we'll just start voting out of anger.
But today, oh today, this lovely day. Today America can dream of ending poverty, of sweeping domestic changes. Today, we can imagine a world where we embrace each other for out diversity and begin to place value, real value, on the encouragement of ideas, education, respect and dignity for every person living in this country. (Fuck the dead, they can't vote)
Today we can dare dream of the day when we begin to assume the best in a person, not the worst. When it suddenly becomes en vogue to work towards a goal instead of force a rigid set of standards down the rest of the worlds proverbial throat. Of course, today is only 24 hours. After that, we'll start scrutinizing the punctuation of speeches, making big sweeping judgments about how a person looks in a suit or how they did their taxes 30 years ago. We'll start telling each other what a dumbshit some other person is, because of what we heard about them in a 30 second commercial. We'll start allowing the media to waste money on stories like "What does John Edwards order at McDonald's, and how does that determine his policy on North Korea?" It will get old, and tired, and tedious, and by October, we'll be too pissed off at the candidates, the media and each other to make a clear and honest decision about anything. Sound cynical?
Maybe.
But my cynicism doesn't stem from a lack of respect for our system, it stems from a frustration with our choices and the people who run our system. I can't think of any aspect of American government that isn't already chewed up and manipulated to either make money or gain power for someone I'll never meet or know. Every politician is bought and sold, that's not cynicism, that's a fact! I'm not saying I'd do any better! I'm sure every one of them, or at least the majority, heh-heh, started out meaning to do good. But special interests, whores, lobbyists, and the scum of the earth, three steps below car salesman and food reps on the sleaze-o-meter, have figured the system out. They've figured out how slowly government can move and used it to their advantage. It worries me.
Case in point. Just today I saw a story on CNN about how a greenhouse in west Texas has figured out a way to grow green algae in hanging plastic bags, and turn it into usable fuel that out-powers corn at three to four times the rate. The reporter said that if we simply covered 10% of New Mexico, to put it in relative terms, with these farms, we could power the entirety of the U.S.A. without ever buying, selling or drilling for another drop of oil again. The very next story was about how oil hit $100 a barrel today, and how we should all take a CNN online poll to discuss what we think about that.
This green algae story should be HUGE FUCKING NEWS! It should be "we hate to interrupt your soap operas, but look what we found" news! The president should be standing with that farmer, awarding him some sort of medal of freedom or honor and pledging to build those farms. Perhaps he could even use cheap Mexican labor and divert the funds from building a wall to keep them out, to building algae farms and keeping them employed. I mean, it's free fucking renewable fuel! Right?
No.
I just now went to CNN.com to include the link from the story so you could see for yourselves, but I gave up looking for it after 10 minutes because it's fucking buried so far up someones ass we're going to have to invade another country to find a drill big enough to bore it out. It disgusting. And unrelenting, if you ask me.
But it's a new year, full of possibilities and hope! A guy can dream, right?
And what New Years blog would be caught dead to rights without a predictions section? Here's a couple that I'm anxious to see come to fruition:
- Someone famous, possibly black, Asian or Hispanic, will come out of the closet this year. We'll be shocked. We'll all talk about how it's so brave of them because it's just not done in their culture. We'll make a few jokes and see a few cartoons on mass-email-forwards that our second cousins husband will send around on one of the three times he sits down to a computer this year. At the end of the year, we'll all applaud him/her again when they present a Grammy or Golden Globe. We'll all secretly wait for them to get a DUI, check into rehab, get into a public scrap with a conservative celebrity, or take out an ad in the New York Times. Then we'll cackle like witches while simultaneously swearing to our friends that we don't know that much about it.
- The country will get caught up in a flurry of frenzy about a social issue and the Catholic League will issue a statement. Millions will hear about it on Headline News and never ask themselves who is in the Catholic League, where their headquarters is, how much dues are to join, or do enough poking around to find out that it's literally like the Wizard of Oz, just a man with fancy contraption like computer that writes to newspapers and businesses on behalf of his notion of the catholic congregations of America.
- There will be a half ton man or woman somewhere in this country who gains fame when they check in to a hospital to try and lose weight. We will never know if they do or not. We will never ask them to describe that day when they could just barely fit through the front door and what they did that night in response. We'll never know what flavor pizza, or which brand of chips was the magic one that put them over the edge and made them an invalid.
- There will be a natural disaster somewhere. Americans will be moved by 24 hour reports and graphic pictures to donate. We'll forget the name of that place within 30 weeks. We will forget how much we donated within 10. We will literally say at a dinner party in 09, "Hey hon, what was the name of that place we saw on TV. The one that we donated money to? What language do they speak there again?"
- Someone in your office, work or family gathering will start a story with "I'm not prejudiced, but...." and will contradict themselves before the story is finished. At least once.
In the meantime, I will keep reading my horoscope everyday, even though I have no clue who writes it or why I should trust them, let alone the stars, to guide me though my day. (It's just so much easier to blame when you're an asshole) I'll play the occasional lottery, but not every one, even though I know in my heart that my randomly generated numbers are always called, in order, on the nights when I don't buy a ticket. I'll only buy when it's on the news, or I'm broke. In so far as resolutions go, however, I'm making none. Well, maybe one. To spend more time with friends. And I don't mean fair weather friends, but the ones who really matter. You know the ones. You know who you are. I love you, if your reading. More than you know. Enough to sit here in the middle of the day and wonder about your 4th grade reading assignment and it's connection to your taste in cheeses. And that's a lot.
No comments:
Post a Comment