After what felt like eons, we arrived at the last day of 2020.
New Year’s Eve is one of few holidays I actively celebrate. I wouldn’t say I’m big on Christmas. I’m usually preoccupied with adding bits of good karma to my little world (or serving penance from my negligence of it, depending on my vestigial Catholic mood). Thanksgiving, well, we’ve been over that. Much as I enjoy the food and commune, that day is finally done for me. Easter’s a total goose egg in my household. No pun intended. I’m just not big on resurrections or chocolate bunnies. I stopped celebrating the 4th of July partly because the fireworks deal is bad for the environment and stresses out our wildlife and domesticated animals, but also because when the Supreme Court took away the reproductive rights of women when they overturned Roe V. Wade in 2022, celebrating our ‘freedom’ in America became even more illusory than before. I miss the fireworks more than the Thanksgiving food. I’m a red blooded American whiteboy. The bing bang boom holds as much sway over me as the next dude. Monkey-brain thing.
Interesting how so many of our traditions marginalize or harm something or other, or someone or another. Goddamn, do we love our holidays. It’s Covid which revealed so much of our dependence on marking tradition. Memory is everything that we are. Once we lose it, we’re only shells, as we so often see in our elders who develop Alzheimer’s or other neurodegenerative issues. Our holiday memories tend to be top shelf priority. Good or bad, those impressions define us for life. They ought not to be life or death absolutes, but for most Americans that’s exactly what they are, me included.
The one thing that wins over sentiment is survival instinct.
It’s too bad it only kicks in when distant observations transcend to real time.
The hammer beats the rose every time.
I’ve always enjoyed New Year’s Eve. New beginnings, renewed hopes, fresh starts. What’s not to like? Sure, it’s just a stupid human Gregorian calendar marking, same as any other holiday, meaningless to the universe outside our little planet. Still, it’s nice to have a demarcation line of transition somewhere, sometime, someplace. We linear humans need that on occasion to make sense of the passage of time. I usually do something typically privileged. Fancy five-star dinner. A formal New Year’s Eve event. A concert from one of our favorite musicians. Of course we watch the ball drop at Times Square on the tube, toasting champagne at midnight. Oftentimes my girl and I headed to Monterey on December 31st, at a rundown dog friendly hotel in the twilight of its heyday. Few hotels accommodate more than two canines, so I’d have to sneak in my four Aussies one by one, or charm a front desk clerk to look the other way. We’d run to get piping hot clam chowder at Fisherman’s Wharf a few miles away, a few cheeseburgers for the dogs, head back to the room, ring in the New Year snuggled on a dingy hotel bed with the doggies watching Dick Clark or Ryan Seacrest countdown the old year. Another Gen X staple, mister Dick Clark. The $20,000 Pyramid game show probably raised me more than my mom did. That and Match Game. Just kiddin’, mom. Sorta. ;)
That evening in ‘20, we were of course stuck at home. My girl whipped up a fine dinner. Steak, wild rice, brownies. We were fortunate. We were not dead. We were not sick. We were not hungry. We were not losing our housing. The lights were still on. Nobody we loved was holed up in a cold field hospital tent praying the Remdesivir worked. We were damned lucky.
Too many other Americans could not say the same.
On that day, I didn’t want to journal about Covid statistics or elections or systemic racism or any apocalyptic musings. This journal had admittedly become a sad sack of marbles. So I thought it’d be nice to pen some thoughts on a few good things 2020 gave us, buried as they were under all the calamity.
To that end.
The Southern African Wildlife College trained a number of bloodhounds and beagles to track down rhino poachers in South Africa’s Greater Kruger National Park, resulting in the estimated rescuing of at least 45 endangered rhinos. Good doggies! Did you really think I was gonna start a list of 2020 good stuff that wasn’t dog-related? Do you know me at all by now?
Speaking of Africa, they were steadily progressing in their battles against disease. In the Congo they finally beat the Ebola virus they’d been enduring that last decade. The WHO announced the entire continent was at last completely free of wild polio. Let’s not forget there are third world countries still battling diseases we first worlders have put behind us.*
*Editor’s note: Apparently, thanks to our recent secretary of health who’s putting his uncle’s legacy to shame, some of those diseases are making a comeback here in the U.S. thanks to his anti-vaccine horseshit.
The Global Carbon Project reported greenhouse gasses fell by 2.4 billion tons that year thanks to quarantines and lockdown orders around the world, the largest decline in recorded history, the right thing happening for the wrong reason. A rare hopeful analysis of the general prognosis for the oceans was published by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 14 coalition, where a group of accredited international scientists posed compelling evidence that rebuilding the oceanic ecosystems was possible within a human lifetime, if worldwide policies on over-fishing, habitat restoration, and pollution were implemented shortly. It really was not too late. It was almost too late. Six years later, well…we’re staying positive this segment, right?
In Spain, Barcelona’s opera house briefly reopened and performed its first concert since Spain’s first lockdown…to a room full of plants. Honest. The venue’s 2,300 seats were filled with houseplants brought in from local nurseries, a plan conceived by conceptual artist Eugenie Ampudia. The eight-minute gig was streamed for patrons watching from lockdown at home. In an interview with the Associated Press, Ampudia said he was inspired by nature during the pandemic, that singing birds seemed to provoke his home garden plants and flowers to grow faster, so he thought he’d do the same for some local greenery, then donate the plants to first responders and front line workers. Throwing a concert for plants. In a regal, fancy pants auditorium. Gods, I love that story. Is that not awesomely human?
Crayola released a box of crayons with diverse skin colors, a long overdue overhaul of the former single option of ‘flesh,’ which you Gen X whiteboys and whitegirls remember was conveniently shaded in the tone of you-know-who and you-know-why.
That’s just a handful of the inglorious happenings. There were more.
I signed off my very last 2020 segment with a parable regarding one of my sacred places, Lake Tahoe.
I mentioned the Big Blue Lake a few times herein. It is the only place I’d ever consider residing outside of Southern California. I used to include Maui, but in my old age I’m somewhat certain I’d develop island fever sooner or later. I need big, wide-open spaces these days. I’m a Californian hick all too used to driving several hours to reach my destinations. I’ve spent a lotta time in Tahoe, particularly with my pack of mutts, but I was hanging out there as early as eight years old when my parents took me there on a gold rush country vacation. Later on in my collegiate years I marked my 21st birthday at the south shore. Me and my college buddies drank ourselves almost to death, hitting casinos with a reckless abandon common among privileged whiteboys extending their adolescences well past their primes. Through my twenties, I continued to visit twice a year or so. It’s a long haul from my part of SoCal, usually an eight to nine hour drive one way. I learned to snowboard at Mount Rose and Diamond Peak, I hiked the Tahoe Rim trails in the summer. I played barroom poker in Carson City. It wasn’t until I reached my fourth decade that I truly started appreciating the Tahoe basin for what it really is, which Mark Twain aptly described as “the fairest picture the whole earth affords.” I tend to agree with his assessment though I’m no world traveler and my observations must be vetted as such. I’d still wager on its beauty being a top ten contender.
Here’s the thing about Tahoe.
The majestic scenery is the draw, but it’s the water itself that holds all the juju. It’s bone cold year-round and the most crystal-clear blue freshwater you’ll ever experience in your life. Its healing properties have long been coveted by Indigenous peoples and the Washoe tribe.
East shore is where one finds the most arresting access with sandy beaches and rocky littorals lining the Nevadan side of the lake. It’s over there where I take the dogs to swim and play. In the spaces between those scarce moments is where I took my zen simply by floating in the water, that kind of flotation where your ears are half submerged and you hear a muted version of the outside world, much like being in the womb might be to fetuses. The most prominent sound is that of your own breathing. We’ve all done it, mostly atop the surfaces of pools, a kind of pseudo sensory deprivation sensation. Surrounded by all that greenery, under sweeping blue skies, floating on my back above those dark depths, I find myself having those existential drift moments we all have, wondering why I need to check my cell phone so much, why I’m driven to honor an American existence so prone to the subjugation of conformity, why the tribes of humanity aren’t living in simple agrarian harmony instead of their concrete jungles, why we’re so inclined to compete instead of cooperate. We’re not biologically or neurologically wired to sustain ourselves in the manners we accept as the norm. What we’re doing is living within a façade. It is a kind of matrix of a sort. We’re bit players in an existential Ponzi scheme cooked up by the ruling classes many centuries ago.
Yeah, I know. Listen to the man of privilege whitesplaining his oh-so-easily-accessible methods of chillaxin’ good vibes and easy street enlightenment. It’s always fair to say, as I said earlier on, exactly as my father did, there’s only one reason philosophical types exist at all in the world and that’s because nine times outta ten they’re lucky enough to come from a background where they didn’t have to worry about where they’d get their next meal.
There’s truth in that. Many people don’t have the time to take a break from their schedule to address the meanings of life. More often than not they’ve worked a long day and barely have enough mojo to feed the kids and watch a little TV before going to bed and doing it all over again. I’m the first person to admit I’ve had a leg up on the average American. I would humbly suggest that makes me a decent authority on some of the subject matter I’ve posed in this column. Constructive decomposition of the ruling tribe ethos by someone from within, someone who sees the scope of class warfare for what it is even as they accept their own culpability in it must be part of the process.
My takes on colonization, imperialism, and marginalized classes are only ally supports and little more. What I am, with my stick-up-my-butt academia and my white trash street cred, is an amalgamized human. As such, I like to think I’m relatively representative of both sides of the whiteboy coin, the left and the right, the upper and lower classes, the haves and the have-nots, the traditional and the nontraditional. I know what it’s like to have nothing. I know what it’s like to have more than I need. I’ve lived and breathed on both sides of the aisle and all the grey limbo in between. I’m as comfortable in a Texan roadhouse bar filled with Stetsons and sawdust as I am in a Castro district burlesque club stacked with feather boas and stiletto heels.
I know what it’s like to prioritize protecting my own and I know what it’s like to put the needs of nameless strangers before myself.
I’m a wild card.
I’m a Californian.
Don’t you forget it. :)