Another Year Over

The wife and I on New Year's Eve



It's been a decade since someone last said "it's been a decade since..." and many things have happened since then. Theoretically, many more things will happen before someone again mentions that it was ten years ago today that we were talking about the end of the last decade. Let's see, In 2000 I graduated from High School. Since then, I have
played in 7 different bands; made two short films (and one documentary short); traveled to Spain, England, Italy, New Orleans, Florida, New York, Washington, Wisconsin, Iowa, Texas, and, on the way to moving to California, traveled through Nebraska, Utah, Nevada, and Wyoming, and Oregon on the Washington for a weekend visit to Seattle. I started classes at UW Madison in 2000 and finished about four years later, meeting many people that I still talk to on the way. I moved to California with some of those people, one of whom I married a year after I proposed to her after a Green Day/Jimmy Eat World/Flogging Molly concert at AT&T Park in San Francisco, which, incidentally, is directly across the street from where I started working in 2005, Current TV. I'm still working there. In the last decade I saw more movies than I can count (reasonably close to a thousand, probably...I don't know, maybe not...but a lot.), saw tons of live music, played tons of live music, went to several plays, two operas, and was even in a few plays myself (two, for sure, maybe more...I'm fuzzy on years sometimes). I was in two car accidents, had one surgery (unrelated), visited 7 therapists, took five different behavioral medications (not all at once; at one time three at once, but that was short-lived and ill-advised) and have since stopped taking all of them. I lost someone very important to me and was not there to say goodbye, I began to try and become a computer animator and then thought better of it, and I thought better also of beginning to try and become a teacher. I've drunk a lot and smoked a little and have since stopped both...for the most part...I love a good stout and a glass of whiskey now and then. I've read a few hundred books, wrote a good number of poems and a slightly larger number of song lyrics. I've downloaded and listened to thousands of albums, bought and burned hundreds of CDs and amassed a relatively small, but valuable (to me) collection of records. I became a vegetarian, an uncle (twice), and a pet owner (three fish, five rats, and, most recently, a dog named Hank). I've been to art museums in three states and three countries and made a fair amount of what some could (I suppose) call art myself. I released a very short-lived comic book that I handed out to local bookstores to give away for free. I've seen redwoods, mountains, oceans, and olive groves. I've seen cypress trees bent and gnarled in the fog and oak trees alive with color in the crisp air of autumn. I've seen monuments and mosques and I've walked the same path to work for four years straight. I was in love twice, thought I was in love many more times, and was lucky enough to find someone that loved me as well and wanted to spend the rest of her life with me and I was able to see clearly long enough to know that what I really wanted was to spend my life with her. I thought a lot about love and death and time and futures and souls and purpose and destiny and meaning and food and movies and music and art and poetry and war and hate and power and friendship and knowledge and ignorance and compromise and belief and family and suicide and fear and nature and beauty and corruption and decisions and dreams and penguins and myself and what I can say is that what one has done in a decade can be listed in fairly random order on a web page that people may or may not read and can mean whatever one would like it to. I have lived for ten more years and so have many others. Together, many of us will live for ten more. I hope that I am among that group and that my loved ones are as well. It is likely that some of them will not be.
Here's to ten more years of striving to live gracefully among the fabulous eccentricities of this world. Enjoy yourself and help others to do the same.
love,
David