New Year's Revelations

Well, here we are. 2010. I like the way that number looks on the page. It's clean. It has clarity. I think it's the zeros, they suggest balance, a leveling off. And why not after the year we just had? Michael Jackson dead. Farrah Fawcett dead. Tiger Woods' reputation nearly dead. An economy in the crapper. H1N1 hysteria. The Yankees winning the World Series. And it all ends with a 23 year-old Nigerian jihadi trying to blow up a plane on Christmas day. Could it get any worse? Probs yes, yes it could. But it won't in 2010. How could it with such a symmetrical number driving the train?

I don't do resolutions. Okay, I do do them, but they're a lot of pressure and ultimately disappointing, so I'm going to try something new. Here are my New Year's Revelations for 2010. These are things that recently were revealed to me by intuition or perhaps divine communique. I don't question the source. I am merely a conduit to enlightenment, here for your spiritual evolution. Hear then, what I have learned:


Time keeps on ticking, ticking, ticking into the FU-TURE. Sometimes it's like I can actually feel it ticking by, day after day, hour after hour, feel myself growing older by the second. I'm attending friends' funerals, watching my parents age, become forgetful and wrinkly, looking at myself in the mirror and wondering where the teenage me went. This is the stuff of which midlife angst is made. I read a poll that says that people are happiest at the following ages: 18-24 and 55-65. 35-44? Unhappiest. How can that be, one might ask? I can only figure it this way: 18-24 year olds are in college and graduating shortly thereafter. Or if not college-bound, they be clubbin', they be chillin', they all be too stupid and inexperienced to know what's waiting for them in ten to fifteen years. Optimism reigns. Disillusionment is a microscopic speck on the horizon that is imperceptible. The world is a red carpet and they have the young bodies and minds to run it down. Few mistakes, apart from drug overdoses, can break their reverie. 18-24 year olds are demigods. Broke and dependent demigods, but demigods nonetheless.

55-65 year olds have seen and done most of what they're going to do in life. They've already worked most of the hard hours they're going to work. They've come to terms with their failures and the dreams and ambitions of their youth that never bore fruit. For the men, sex is not the personal driver that it once was. (Fuck if that'll ever be me!) These AARP inductees possess new identities. They are calm. Sedate. They take painting classes. They play golf, chess, and poker. They enjoy their grandkids, who spark their hearts through toothless smiles, innocent questions, and absurd antics. The white hairs appreciate their health because too many of their friends have already passed. So they're happy riding this life thing out until they, too, succumb to a cough or chest pain that never leaves.

What of the 35-44 year olds, then? You'd think we'd be the happiest. We have money, decent jobs, and we pretty much know who we are at this point. Married or single, we get laid with relative regularity, give or take the societal fringe of course. We're independent, we can go and do what we want when we want. No parents to leash us. No osteoporosis to limit us. Why then are we so angst-ridden all the time?

Hell if I know. Ask me when I'm 55.

Sometimes it's not the place, it's the company. I tried Burlington, Vermont again for New Year's this year. Yeah. I did. It's just too nice a place to stay away from and I had some demons to exorcise. Made a few changes this time though. This time I: traveled there in a Volvo with all-weather tires; brought a snow shovel; wore a brand new Gore-tex lined L.L. Bean jacket that the tag said would keep me warm at -20 degrees Fahrenheit; and stayed there three nights instead of one. Most importantly, however, I was accompanied by my girlfriend of one year (today!), rather than someone I barely knew. And that, my friends, made all the difference. Let it never be said that I don't learn from my mistakes.

We are never EVER going to stop every single disgruntled person in the world who wants to kill himself and a bunch of other people. I am dumbfounded by the gnashing of teeth that is going on over this Nigerian dude on the plane. It's stunning how a single potentially deadly act can induce mass hysteria for weeks from here to Des Moines. It was a close call, to be sure. He should never have gotten on the plane. Security needs to be better. Intelligence services need to communicate with each other and learn how to distill, digest, and react to the billions of bits of data that fly by every month. It is a herculean task.

You know who did that remarkably well? Who had incredibly solid control over their country (and several others)? Who knew where everyone was and what they were doing virtually all the time? The Nazis. Stalin ran a pretty tight ship too, as did some generals in Argentina and Chile in the 1970s. You didn't see too many terrorists in those countries back in the day. Pretty high price tag for that "safety" though, eh?

I'm going to make a bold prediction: unfortunately, more Americans are going to be killed by terrorists in the future. It's going to happen on a subway. It's going to happen on an airplane. It's going to happen in buildings, outside of buildings, in the United States and in foreign countries. It's going to happen. I hope I'm not there at the time, but I certainly could be. So could you. Our leaders will and should do their best to protect us and catch the people who want to do us harm, but anyone who thinks that we can stop every single person every single time from killing people when he or she is willing to die him or herself is beyond delusional. We can't even stop disgruntled Americans from killing Americans, in schoolyards, malls, post offices, law firms, brokerage houses, city neighborhoods, and federal buildings. What makes us think we're going to be anymore successful at stopping foreigners from doing it?

And why does everyone shit their pants when it's a foreigner -- an AL QAEDA OPERATIVE -- who does it? Aren't they murderers just like every other murderer? Isn't every homicide victim equal to every other? Maybe it's the mass scale of what the Nigerian tried to do that makes it more frightening. Tell me though, how many people in this country have died at the hands of mass murderers since 9/11? There was Columbine, there was that guy at Virginia Tech, there was that nutjob at the Amish school, there was the BTK Killer, there was Ted Bundy. No - Bundy was way before 9/11. So was BTK. Alright, so we've had mass murderers around for a long time in this country. I'd be willing to bet that more Americans were killed in school shootings during the past 8 years than were killed as a result of foreign terrorism.

Of course we need to try and stop it. I want to clap and dance a jig every time I find out that a drone has offed some human garbage in Pakistan or Afghanistan. But we need to face reality too. We can't stop everybody. There's a risk associated with being alive: you might get killed. We can't invade every country -- we can't afford it and it's bankrupting us. Bin Laden has said from the very beginning that he wants to bankrupt us. Bin Laden has known all along that when we can't afford our tanks, our drones, our military excursions to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, when Americans are hungry and can't find work or decent health care because we're spending billions upon billions outside the country on war after war after war, when America shreds the Constitution and creates a police state like the Nazis and Soviet Union in an effort to keep out every brainwashed Nigerian or Yemeni or Pakistani who has so devalued his own life that he thinks dying and killing is the only thing that will make him important, well, that's when he knows that he's as close to a complete victory over the United States as he's going to achieve in his lifetime. That's when he and Al Qaeda will have won. He knows it. He's planning for it. And so far, it's working. Because we overreact to every action Al Qaeda takes. Because we fear death so much that we're unwilling to accept a single casualty -- excepting those to our military forces, and even those we find virtually unbearable -- as the cost of doing business in this "War on Terror."

We haven't been asked to do too much in this War since September 2001. The very least we can do is keep our wits, not piss our pants when bad things, terrible things happen -- and unfortunately they will continue to -- and understand that there will be casualties in this War, both civilian and military. It's a War. That's what happens in Wars. People die. When we avoid disaster like we did two weeks ago, we should count our blessings, fix the problems we can fix and accept those that we can't. Because some can't be fixed.

Remember, it wasn't airport security, Predator drones, or the billions of dollars spent in Afghanistan and Iraq that stopped the Nigerian on that Detroit flight. It was two alert, clear-eyed passengers who figured out what was happening and brought the hammer down on that asshole. Same for those passengers over Shanksville, PA on 9/11. They died fighting.

Damn, that was a rant and a half, wasn't it?

Rants can be cathartic.

At some point, I became the parent of my parents. I'm not sure when it happened, but here we are.

I want to ski again. I left this expensive hobby behind when I moved to the city eighteen years ago. It just wasn't easy to keep it up what with law school, no car for more than a decade, and the long hours I worked earlier in my career. Plus it's hard as balls to get out of the city and up to a mountain on a Friday night. Plus no car. Oh, I mentioned that already. Anyhoo, after viewing the whitecapped Alps during my plane ride home last November and driving by the Green Mountains in Vermont over the holiday, I realized that I really miss skiing. I miss being on the mountain, skis underfoot, and trying to figure out how I'm going to survive the black diamond that I mistakenly thought was an intermediate slope. I don't miss kissing tree stumps with my face or bloody lift tickets, though. I'm going to Vail, Colorado in two weeks, so we'll see how strong this rekindled ski bug of mine really is. I heard they wear helmets now, that's probably a good thing for me.

I crave light. I think I have seasonal affective disorder. All I feel like doing this winter, besides skiing of course, is sleeping. I slept so much over Christmas I felt like a hibernating bear. This winter has been cold so far and the darkness is so damn depressing. I'm going to need to wedge in a beach trip before April, methinks.

In another life, I'm an artist. If I wasn't so damn materialistic and attached to my thus far cushy lifestyle, I'd be doing full-time what I enjoy in my spare time: writing and photography. Hell, I might even be a painter! I just know in another life, another version of reality in the multiverse, I'm sitting with an easel somewhere, Mandrake goatee on my face, mixing acrylics and painting the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Or, having graduated from the renown MFA program at the University of Iowa, I'm working on my third novel after publishing two lengthy short story compilations. Or I'm a photojournalist documenting atrocities in Darfur. In this life, I catch fluorescent tans in my Aeron chair, work in front of the computer until 11 p.m., and return home only to collapse on my mango sofa from Design Within Reach and click on my plasma t.v. in a vain effort to forget about the stress of my day. Which sounds better to you? I'm just saying, I was probably destined for more arty things, and I got sidetracked somewheres. I think it was when my Uncle Saverio let me borrow his bottle of Paco Rabanne in the seventh grade before a school dance. (I needed all the ammo I could get, you know, to impress the LAY-DEES.)

It was all downhill from there.