I spent New Years Eve in a delirious haze in my old alma mater of St. Augustine – which is a consummate beach town where I often like to spend a day or so when I get the chance. This time I was all about writing. I had a bunch of projects I was trying to finish up and just send out. I’d been slacking on it. It’s like sure you can be a writer just by sitting alone in rooms and writing. If you’re not putting anything out in the world, though, did it even happen? Like that old tree in a forest adage.
I spent most of 2021 partying and going on sightseeing adventures around Florida and elsewhere. I guess it was some kind of a reaction to the lockdown conditions from before – especially after I got a vaccine, it was like fuck it, why not, I’m driving most of these places alone anyway. Life’s only so long and I didn’t want to spend too much time cooped up. This is a personality defect, maybe, this need to constantly go places. I feel now like I really compensated for a lot of things last year. I was always on vacation. I had the resources from money I earned, so fuck it. Maybe it was a way not to think about anything in my life, as if to permanently put it off, kick the can down the road. So what if life was becoming an unstable, unpredictable mess? I can go visit The Shining Hotel. Maybe it’s really time for therapy now. The comedown. It took about a day and a half without lavish spending on hanging out in cool places to be like ‘yeah maybe therapy is a good idea.’ So I’ll see.
I left the year financially bruised and frayed. I’m 31 in early February. Got no owned home and no stable life – though at the least I’m trying to find one. I think last summer I had something of an existential crisis about all this. What was the point of planning for a future if climate change is going to keep accelerating and the pandemic isn’t stopping any time soon? I did whatever I wanted. I feel like it was aggressive hedonism. A way to fight back against the uncertainty.
But that’s no excuse. You got to have something. I spent a long time just sort of transient. Job to job and not much permanence. So maybe that will bear out. Or maybe it won’t.
The world keeps moving on. It becomes harder by the day to support a U.S. political party. I’ll always at least try to vote for whatever change we can get. But it is tough to support the Democratic party as some alternative to the much more insane Republicans, when the Democrats have mostly just thrown up their hands and shrugged at everything. But at the same time, here and there we’ve been able to bully Joe Biden into sending us things like masks and tests for COVID, even if we have no fucking clue when that will happen. I guess it’s still better than a Republican nakedly and openly hating us, but both of them are such rotten fucking apples anyway.
Like you got both Biden and Harris at this point just telling us to google where to find COVID tests. Yeah, awesome. The effort I’d put into telling a guy I disliked how to find a restaurant is what the government is putting forward. The press secretary openly scorns the idea of helping average people in the middle of an ongoing pandemic – the worst part of it thus far, even. What am I rooting for here? It’s like being asked to choose between which faceless corporate shill you think is mildly less offensive. My God. How great it is to be an American.
Whatever minutiae argument you make, a lot of the political system continues to seem like broken, groaning gears, just cranking out more for the wealthy, and yet inertia for everyone else. There are some who seem like they want more than that. I guess we’ll see if those ones make it further.
Until then, I plan to keep just enjoying life… there are many people not enjoying it right now, many stuck indoors, many with COVID. I do not have COVID as of this writing. I may wake up with it any time. I’m not too worried about it, but then again I have spent large portions of the past two years so drunk I barely cared anymore about the virus. It wasn’t the time to be sober. I’ve spent this particular night listening to the band Budgie and writing after hanging at a comedy open mic. I don’t know whether the writing or the comedy will lead anywhere. But it doesn’t matter for now.
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