A retrospective of a strange decade and a welcoming to the new year.
I was there in 2010, sitting crosslegged beneath a concrete awning on a bus bench. You've probably read about those times. They called them The End Times.
The banks stole our houses. Wall Street stole our savings. The pubs stole our paychecks. Families ran thin; hope disparaged. Everybody was educated and uneducated at once. China played puppetmaster and requested a slow dance. We danced. Our debts outlived our children and our government sat back in an armchair and eavesdropped while we cried the blues.
The corporations shifted shapes and disappeared in the shadows. They existed one minute and were gone another. There's one! No, wait . . . There's one! I swear, it was just there, behind the shadow!
We gave the Other Guy a voice. Flip on the TV and there's a dark man in a turban; flip on the radio and there's a lesbian in eyeglasses; flip open the newspaper and there's Charley the Chimney Sweep and his two children, Milo and Millie. He used to afford himself a shave, but not any more. Not in The End Times.
We had hippies, conservatives, gays, immigrants, rich, poor, fat and ugly in the same soup bowl. The good guys and the bad guys held hands around the fire and listened to the wind.
There was coffee in every corner of this tired country. If not coffee, then tea, and lots of it. Flannel roamed the streets but nobody chopped our trees.
People stood scared. End times felt nigh and you could smell it in the air. Whispers roared across the internet like the midnight screech of a banshee. Our government had turned on us. The new president seemed a phony and Americans talked stupid. Each and all of them. Education became wrong. Finances became wrong and polka dots became wrong in the same twist, and nobody knew how to dance. Except the Latinos. And the Latinos were as wrong as the wrongest.
Hard work died with the Great Generation. It died on the bottom of the boots that stomped across Europe during the second Great War. Jaw lines gave way to softer silhouettes and baseball players quit smoking in the dugout. Children wondered why their fathes took them to ball games; fathers wondered, too. You could taste the difference in the bun of the hot dog.
The road trip died with the gasoline and that small town between Sesquallah and Mackinaw filled up with meaty cheeseburgers before disappearing into the potbelly sunset behind a fleet of warm rubber. Nobody stopped the change; nobody knew how or if.
Antique collectors died beneath the war boot and left vast collections of soiled memories in worthless commercial dens.
New shiny things sprang from our pockets and rested upon bald foreheads. You couldn't fill a dusty garage with products built in the End Times. It showed on the streets and in the mirrors. Cheap. Dirty.
Art jogged in a cloud of confusion and died bedside during deep sleep. Nobody knew; nobody remembered. We stood immovable. Please me, don't push me.
And yet some things stayed the same. Nobody stopped celebrating, building, talking or using the bathroom and locking the door on the way in. Babies birthed, fats skinnied, skinnies fatted and strong vision blurred. Chefs cooked. Locksmiths made copper keys and Americans released the clutch and nodded into the rearview.
Rich people in suits sold money and poor people in jumpsuits sold electricity. The Grand Canyon became an inch deeper and a foot longer. Coffee stayed hot and liquor strong. Fresh girls flirted, charmers charmed and angry lovers cropped scandals in the doorway of a frosty motel off the main strip.
Men sported, women gossiped and doctors spoke the nutritional benefits of low cholesterol and seafood. The air improved and the government worked slowly on forgotten highways and promised promises. Small businesses grew up to become international cyclones and big businesses grew stale and old in a musty cupboard. Thanksgiving brought turkey, the holidays brought ham and vegetarians ate neither. In the cold, we wore gloves and scarves; in the country, we wore cowboy hats and in the summer we wore bathing suits and sunglasses.
Good people did good and good people did bad. Bad people did good and bad people did bad. Politics remained politics and voters voted. The distrustful didn't trust and the spinsters spun.
Trees grew, the sun rose, flowers bloomed and we fell humbled by sunset to ensure the stars got a chance, too.
The strong continued to fight and the weak were pulled tirelessly through history, into the future. And through pungent trials, we became reminded, after a long forgotten spell, that life lived, and with it came unequaled opportunity, and that love and hope could break the dreary spell of anguish that shadowed our sights.
And at the end of the hollowest night, amidst the darkest length of the western horizon, beneath a thick winter's mist, a warm glimpse of silver sun rose, casting a long light through the oceans and over the mountains, and we could say that the past finally lay ahead of us. Take a quick step without notice. Quickly now, take another.
