"We are insignificant little shits in the grand scheme of things..."
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Another year rolls over. Other than switching out calendars, it doesn’t amount to much. If you have to sign and date anything, it’s tricky for a few weeks, but even that passes. We’ll get used to writing 2024 the same way we got used to writing 2023. We will ultimately wish its demise and tell ourselves that 2025 is going to be better, even though we know 2025 promises to suck also. As we get older, one gets used to suckiness. If things don’t suck for a few hours or days, surely some sort of comeuppance is on the horizon.
We are insignificant little shits in the grand scheme of things, fortunate if we need two hands to count the people who will miss us when we’re gone. Very few of us make any sort of permanent mark on the world. We’re here because we weren’t given any choice, and do our best to get through the working day and get home as quickly as possible so we can scream into our pillows. We turn prematurely fat and gray worrying about the mess (and the empty coffers) we’re leaving behind for our children. Our lives have been largely spent making rich people richer. We go to bed tired, and wake up tired. We’re part of a monstrous system that we’ve been told is the “best in the world”, and the ones who literally stick that belief on the back of their pick-up trucks are invariably the ones who are a single illness away from living under a bridge.
And yet, we have it so much better than most in the world, which only makes this orb more depressing.
So yea, there’s all that.
But we do find a way, don’t we?
If we can’t change the world, maybe we can change the neighborhood?
I know a lot of people who never changed the world. But they changed my world. I like to think this matters too. Amidst all the quiet desperation that goes into living, there are still those out there holding open doors, or waving you into traffic, or leaving a case of beer for the mailman. Those who donate clothes instead of throwing them away. Those who help fill food bank pantry’s. Those who put cool washcloths on fevered foreheads. There’s no style points for this stuff. Nobody is watching. It’s not being posted on TikTok. But it goes on around us, every single day. It should be just as noticeable as the assholery, but it never is. We live in a world where you must shout to be heard, and it really doesn’t matter how dumb the shit you’re shouting is. It’ll make the front page.
You know what sells? Volume. As in decibels.
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We each fight our own private wars. We don’t speak of them. They burrow too deep for that. They’ll erupt at times….temper and tears and the sort of late-night terrors that bore holes into dark ceilings, but for the most part we drag them along like the chains of Marley. The ones who change the neighborhood are aware of your chains despite their own. They make you feel lighter somehow. They have a light inside them.
But there is never enough of them. These last few years have been an avalanche of dumbness, and people who used to keep their dumbness to themselves now feel an insatiable need to share it with the world. The world of social media has created an ironic safe space, largely without consequences, as it’s difficult to get punched in the face when you don’t leave your Mother’s basement. It is no longer disqualifying to blatantly lie. Or to be blatantly racist. Or to foment a coup, for that matter. One of the leading contenders for President of the United States was asked “what was the cause of the Civil War?”, which is a question the size of a mutant watermelon. In her meandering “I don’t want to make the klan mad at me” response, in which she sounded like the ghost of Jefferson Davis, she somehow failed to mention the word slavery, and when she got blowback for this, she blamed the questioner himself, whom she called a “democrat plant”. Thus, the perfect encapsulation of 2023.
Half the nation is offended by the words “Happy Holidays” but not when their hero suggests that his political and legal opponents should “rot in hell”.
This is the level we’re playing at.
This is why 2024, on the surface at least, is going to suck.
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But we’ll rage against the dying of the light, as we always do. We’ll do the little things that may not change the world, but will surely make the neighborhood a better place to come home to. Even if we still need to scream into that pillow.
Happy New Year.
In a bit…
—tf