Pixabay Image - by GDJ
Four years ago, I returned from a trip to Portland, Oregon, and found LA in lockdown. A virus had invaded us.
Some said it came from China. Others from from New York.
All I knew was that people were queueing up at Ralphs and Vons supermarkets and Trader Joe’s was setting up canopies and watering stations out front as people arrived at 7 am to stand in line.
What I knew was that I couldn’t find toilet paper. And when I did it was being sold by the roll.
What I found was that bleach was as rare as 20-year-old Scotch and disinfectant wipes were being sold out the back of Chevy 4 X 4 on the corner.
In March 2020 I became reacquainted with the word Pandemic, having first gotten a glimpse of its full meaning when I was on Ancestry.com and found out my grandmother died during the Great Pandemic of 1918, also known as the Spanish Flu.
I learned that working for a plumbing company and keeping LA’s pipes clear and moving meant I was an essential worker.
For a moment I was pretty proud of that then realized it meant I was walking into people’s houses every day wearing masks, gloves, booties, and a strange look on my face wondering what I was taking home with me other than a check.
2020 created stress everywhere. Overnight, America’s infrastructure was creaking like a 200-year-old bridge but we came together and got through it. The right way? Who knows. The post-mortem of our pandemic solutions ranged from a great job to Who the fuck came up with that idea?
In the end, though we all did what we always did – got through it and made the best of it.
I got a lesson in psychology in 2020 that I didn’t sign up for. That the constant threat of death or witnessing someone else’s put a hitherto unknown stress on the psyche.
Everyone knew what PTSD was in 2020, and knew our soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan were suffering from it. Knew it was once called battle fatigue or shellshock.
But what we didn’t know is that it could and would affect nurses and doctors. Truck drivers on extended shifts, meat processing plant employees, stock clerks at supermarkets and shit, pretty much everyone else that was in any way connected with living during the pandemic.
We received daily updates of those sick, dying, and already dead as newscasters with pointers showed maps marked in varying colors denoting which states were doing okay handling Covid-19 and which ones were essentially fucked as ICUs filled up and hotels were doing double-duty as emergency wards.
Not since the halcyon days of the Vietnam War would I be confronted with stats I had zero interest in knowing. Death is better left “over there” where it’s still a frightening concept but not one reaching its hands around your heart and threatening to make it stop.
2020 was also the year I lost a daughter. Not because of Covid-19. No, she didn’t pass thank God, she, along with millions of others got tangled up in the emotional fallout of having 330 million people worrying about the same thing at the same time.
Whatever bonds were created before 2020, bonds we thought would last forever, got damaged. Got split, frayed, undone, and otherwise failed to keep us together like we thought they always would.
The classic term used to describe this phenomenon is estrangement.
A word that means a breaking of a relationship and all the hearts connected to it. A sundering of a connection that was meant to last a lifetime and three long years later it’s showing no signs of remembering anything about its past.
A condition where some people, said lots of things about our situation they otherwise know nothing of while pretending they knew what they were talking about.
Thank you, Covid-19 for a lesson in family dynamics that could have waited – what, another 30 or 40 years at least.
2021
When you have a year like 2020 to use as a benchmark, damn, getting the crap beat out of you by an ex-boxer who mistook you for a mugger, doesn’t sound all that bad.
Which is sort of what the nation got on January 6. They now call it The Insurrection. When it first happened, we called it, What the Fuck?!
I thought maybe it was one of those flash mob things where several thousand strange-looking Americans would throw down their clubs, axes, or Confederate Civil War swords and break out singing the Jets song from West Side Story.
But no, it was real enough. Deadly enough to shake up America’s 250-year-old confidence in itself and elevate an ex-president into something even worse – a martyr.
After January, the year started off looking a lot like 2020 and after a few more months the daily “updates” began to lessen. ICUs started looking like their former selves and essential workers as a term receded into the background once again as everywhere started peeking out their front doors and not seeing a tornado, or ambulance began to think, maybe this shit will pass.
And it did – slowly.
People returned to work. Toilet paper returned to shelves, albeit at a 30% markup. Got to love capitalism where every weakness is pounced on like a fucking fumble during Super Bowl 50.
The price of masks went down and latex gloves once again came in sizes larger than - one size fits all. My aching hands appreciated that.
Commerce was not in full swing – yet, but it was looking better.
Wall Street resembled less a corpse in transition and more its old self. A Vegas casino.
More people got to work. The stimulus checks ran out. Unemployment checks held on for a while as people started wondering what a workplace looked like and thought maybe this thing about wearing pajamas at work could stick around for a while longer. It did.
The plumbing business continued plumbing. When you gotta go you gotta go and nothing should stand between a man and his reading time.
A new President came on board. A familiar face. A great beautiful face many people thought after comparing it to the one that had been on all the news stations all the time.
America, less many of the kinks, melancholy moments, and never-ending reports on COVID-19, started receiving vaccines.
Numbers improved. Objections to vaccines went way up. People came out in greater numbers and stopped looking behind them as much and more toward the future again.
But things had changed.
The zeitgeist of America had taken it in the shorts. Positivity was partially replaced with skepticism, not helped by certain political members who thought setting fire to our national ideals and making fun of anyone not them, was a good idea.
The alt-right, a euphemism for fucking idiots, continued to be in vogue, though when indictments started being handed out to the aforementioned “flash mob” devotees, their national advertising scheme seem to dampen down a bit.
But then this thing called inflation kicked in. For most Millennials and Generation Zs, inflation was a word in the history books.
It was always there as a somewhat distant concept, replaced with terms like cost-of-living increase and adjustments. But at 15% and more, it became the Second Pandemic.
Lockdowns affected the production of goods needed for just about everything from iPhones and batteries to computer chips for new cars and so on.
2021 and 2022 saw the price on two- or three-year-old used cars being higher than when they were new, while dealerships sold new cars in advance by showing customers 4-color glossy photos of them in the showrooms, as manufacturers around the world caught up on production.
We began to hear. “Yes, ma’am the car is from 2017 and it does have 30,000 miles on it, so yes, the sticker price of $39,500 is high but correct. And yeah, I guess we are sticking it to the American people, but we’ve been doing that for a while. Only now we’re not trying to hide it.
And it’s all Inflation’s fault anyway.”
Corporations followed suit with the price for eggs, pork, beef, socks, burritos, tampons, linen, coffee, asparagus, underwear, cat food, the aforementioned toilet paper, spray paint, and cans of Spam all going up 10-20% and more within 18 months.
But the good news is that much of that number has been reduced to the more sedate 4%-5% range, we’re seeing now. Meaning that the rate of increase has significantly dropped – not that prices are returning to the pre-pandemic or pre-OMFG numbers that we saw throughout 2021-2022.
But more good news is that the Dow Index continues its rise to new heights. Dividends are healthy. Hedge fund managers and the 1% are keeping tens of thousands of people employed keeping track of their mansions, sports teams, and 500-foot super-yachts while many average Americans are staying nicely motivated working their 2 to 3 jobs to make ends meet.
Who says there’s no silver lining here?
2022
Kind of a Twilight Zone year in that it looked much like 2021 with the usual 12 months and 365 days. People woke up and went to work, albeit in pajamas and flip-flops with their commute times reduced to three minutes – just enough to get a cup of coffee and plug in their headsets.
But underneath it all something wasn’t quite right.
That guy with the comb-over was making headlines for all the wrong reasons. Indictments were imminent. Rhetoric was blowing at gale force as the American people started slumping over with a severe case of CSPAN fatigue.
The House of Representatives changed hands during the mid-term elections. Somewhat like Hertz and Avis replacing all their Ford and Chevy rentals with skateboards and publicizing their reduced carbon footprint and fiscal awareness.
If you remember partying on December 31, 2021, wondering if inflation would slow down, the news would stop talking about vaccines and if Trump would please for the love of God go away, then you can pretty much skip over 2022 and pretend it was never there.
2023
This year’s lessons came at a high cost.
Heartbreak, no matter what the books, Dr. Phil, or Opray might say, doesn’t simply go away. Like a rusted-out Buick on your front lawn, it’s not going to disappear anytime soon on its own.
Either you’ve learned how to fix it or hired someone to haul it away.
Government (or Civics as it was once called) was a subject taught in high school when we were young and now, we’re getting the idea of why it’s often removed from today’s curricula.
Students today hear about it every day on Twitter (excuse me X), Instagram, Mastodon, Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat, Google, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Facebook, and how their parents and grandparents dealt with it, that now they would rather have jets of hot steam blown up their ***** then have to discuss this subject in school.
And it is our fault.
Not in the way that – Gosh I should have ground out that cigarette butt better while camping in Yosemite.
More along the line of doing something over and over again assuming that luck, serendipity, God, or Harvey, the six-foot rabbit was going to save the day, no problem, I got you covered.
We elected officials, no I won’t say, George Santos, who were as prepared to be senators and representatives as a boll weevil was prepared to knit the cotton it was eating into Christmas sweaters.
We watched as members crashed and burned. Bounced checks, and sent dick pics to female associates. Accepted bribes and didn’t think anyone would notice them driving to work in a Lamborghini with a vanity plate that read: DCStud23.
Now too many under 30 voters look at the upcoming election prospects, compare it to their recent visit to their dentist’s office for a root canal and seriously think about booking a second visit instead.
Why?
Options. We’re not giving them much to choose from. And when there is a good one or a better one it’s hard to convince someone who has been disappointed the last 8 cycles to believe anything we’re saying.
Solution? Keep trying. The alternative is – no, I can’t say it. You know what it is.
Change – not what you get back from Starbucks for your triple shot Americano on ice – but that thing that gets dangled in front of all of us all the time that’s supposed to motivate you to take action, disavow past logic-based decisions to not do that ever again and believe that this time it will be different.
Change comes at a cost, especially if we wait too long. Like ignoring that flashing Oil Needed icon on your dashboard until your engine freezes up like grandma’s bad knee on a January morning.
If nothing else 2023 is telling us in big bold letters that if we don’t change, if we don’t reset our brains, park our fixed ideas next to the RV that hasn’t run since 2004. Recalibrate the way we talk to people who we swear have lost their minds – which by the way is exactly how they feel about us – and stop listening to people on TV who start their programming with assertions that they are 100% American-made and represent only our best interests, then maybe we can rewind the clock a little to pre-Pandemic levels of madness – say 2015 or 1952 – and look at our future together without breaking out the Civil War flags, weird headgear and placards with more grammar errors than sense.
2023 wasn’t a bad year, how could it be? It’s 365 days just like 2022 and 1969 when Woodstock made many of us feel pretty good about things.
It can never be the year itself, that would be like blaming your mattress for the bad sex you’re having on top of it. Getting a new one ain’t the solution even if it makes you feel better.
It’s us. All of us.
And owning that isn’t a bad thing, it’s just life.
You see, the world of social media does one thing better than anything we’ve known in a long, long time – it distracts us.
It seems like fun when it’s happening. How can kitties dancing for treats and dogs rescuing their owners from body-surfing raging rivers be a bad thing?
It’s not, not if we see it for what it is, a distraction and look away a little more often to see that the bus we’re in lost its driver some time ago and all that’s left is a cardboard cut-out and a recording saying – Have a nice day.
We can, lots of them if we pay closer attention to the noise, fade it out so we can hear the music again. Kind of like getting rid of the fuzz on the Beatles’ White Album and hearing the message about Paul.
In many ways, 2023 was a great year. We’re still here. Taylor Swift is playing in 2,713 cities around the world. Baseball has a clock in use to make the games shorter – they already got them under three hours.
The NFL is playing games in Europe and soon hopes to play In Australia, Estonia, and Reykjavik, Iceland (just waiting for that damn volcano to calm down).
All kidding aside (but just for a minute) years don’t just happen, they’re made and we’re making them.
So, let’s make 2024 different.
How? By being, doing, and thinking differently. Be Contrary. Listen to your neighbor. Turn off social media from 3 to 5 PM every day. Laugh at Fox News and CNN and do the opposite.
Take a walk, say hello, and mean it.
Do one thing, not twelve. Write that letter, make that call. Don’t beat yourself up, there are already too many out there ready to do it.
2023 was years in the making. Its undoing will take time.
We’ve had enough practice making mistakes, let’s learn from them.
“Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.”
“You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”
We have plenty of past quotes to remind us of what’s already happened. Let’s start making some new ones.