LET'S TALK ABOUT TIME, BABY (Patreon)

In Lieu of Title, Please Picture Jeremy Piven Yelling TEN YEARS in Grosse Pointe Blank

Greetings, my darlings. 

It is the end of the year. It is the end of the decade. I’m not even quite sure how to feel about that. The whole 2000s feel like one long decade; I don’t remember thinking too much about the 00s ending as a discreet unit of time passing in 2009. Did I take stock? Did I look back in anger? Did I list my accomplishments and disappointments on social media? I don’t even remember what I did for New Year’s Eve. 

I have long thought that the sense of a 20-year decade could be chalked up to never having settled, collectively, on a name for either the 00s or the 10s. The aughts, 2000s, naughties, teens, tens, 2010s, none of them ever stuck, so it’s difficult to talk about them the way we do the 80s, 90s, 50s. But of course the world of 1999 is so different to the one of 2019 I might as well sit in the cold of the snow and contemplate the differences between summer on Neptune and the color of a tree frog’s eyeball. And to be clear, WE ARE THE GROSS DISEMBODIED FROG EYEBALL AND WE ARE THE COLOR OF UGH.

But the excuse of nomenclature is gone now. We are about to enter the twenties again. I do hope flappers come back. And silent films. And some level of enthusiasm for life. I would like a champagne decade, not a wood alcohol poisoning decade. Though perhaps one without the other is not within the power of humanity’s gross motor skills. It feels like we’re careening into the 20s backwards and upside down, coming in hot at 1929, not 1920. Get ready for thin eyebrows, ladies. Thin eyebrows and making dresses out of flour sacks because there’s no fabric anymore since the trade war with China. Oh, except that companies would never make flour sacks out of something useful enough to make a dress from anymore. Back in the day, when flour companies found out that poor women were repurposing their bags, they printed them in flower patterns so the girls could have something nice. Nowadays, the minute they found out people were doing it, they’d release limited edition flour sacks, jack up the price, pay influencers to model the dresses and gush about how chic they are, and you’d see them on the runway next season for five grand a pop.

I’M FEELING A LITTLE CYNICAL THE DAY AFTER THE BRITISH ELECTION, CAN YOU TELL?

I was going to write about media tie-ins and fairy tales and writing in the margins of pre-existing stories, but fuck it. Fuck everything, since everything seems terribly damn keen on fucking us. 

LET’S TALK ABOUT TIME AND FATE AND LIFE ON PLANET STUPID.

I see all these posts online about the decade ending. About what people have done with the last ten years, what they wish they’d done, what they hope to do with the next ten. I find it so difficult for myself to think about these years in terms of my own accomplishments. Yeah, I did stuff. I wrote stuff. A lot of stuff. Some of it was popular. Some of it wasn’t. Some of it was good, some of it wasn’t. I got divorced, hardly an accomplishment. Did that the decade before, too. I’m a real over-achiever. Got married. I am a Commitmentsaurus Rex, always running at the stupid fence hoping this time, this time it’s not electrified. I went places. Most of them were really nice. I met people. Most of them were good and interesting, but what you learn in your thirties is that you meet good and interesting people all the time, and that doesn’t mean you can make a friendship happen, or keep them in your lives for a minute, or make a connection that will result in the metaphysical opposite of being left on read.  And that’s the weird thing about having been born at the end of a decade. Every artificially significant ten year period starting an ending is also the start and end of the next artificially significant decade of your life. What I learned in my thirties is what I learned in the 2010s. It is no less tied to a time and a place than the resurgence of handlebar mustaches and high-rise jeans, cronuts, the golden age of streaming television. The 90s aren’t just the 90s, they’re all of my teens. The 00s, or whatever the fuck you feel warm and fuzzy about calling them, were my twenties. The 10s were my thirties, and the 20s will be my forties. I, my whole existence and narrative, am inextricably tied to the cultural doomsday clock that so loves to jive in base 10. It can be so hard to look at history objectively when your life kind of went to shit at the same time the world went to shit, and for a hundred thousand reasons, the number 2016 has replaced 666 as the mark of the beast.

I am forty now. And it is the 20s in a half a blink. What will that mean, for me, for the world, for my child, for everything? I find myself fantasizing about 2025, when, for better or for worse, all this will be over, we will know how it all turned out, my baby will be in first grade and the mistakes I will inevitably make in raising him will have already made him who he is. And I will tell him how we lived through these years, and we will laugh, by god I hope we will laugh, and he will say: but it’s all right now, isn’t it, Mummy? And I fantasize that I will be able to say, with total honesty: yes, my darling, it’s all fine now, and we learned, just like you learn your multiplication tables and your spelling, how to never let it get so bad again. We will know where we’re living, and maybe more importantly, who we’re living with, Australians, Americans, Brits…who can say, who can know. What a terrible, quotidian fantasy, simply for the present to be the past. 

THIS TIMELINE IS GARBAGE, MAMA.

It is comforting to think of it as a timeline, isn’t it? Something you could fix. Just a road in the woods diverging, and we went wrong, somehow, but we are still good and worthy, there was just a mistake, a cosmic mistake, a mistake none of us could have made on our own, only collectively, and even that only through…inattention. An excess of faith that the world would be fine if we just focused on ourselves for awhile. And then it wasn’t, and it couldn’t, and we continually must confront now that nothing is as we thought it was, that our neighbors have dark hearts as often as they do not, that the line of progress is not always angled up, forever into the brightness of the sun. Science fiction told us that. God, she told us a hundred thousand times in a hundred thousand ways that we could lose everything and gain nothing but a slightly more marketable misery. But we believed Star Trek instead of cyberpunk, and forgot that Star Trek is far left socialist utopia created by a misogynist and possible rapist who, for all his love of humanity, wasn’t very nice to the actual humans around him. And that’s where we are in a positronic nutshell. 

And yet again I struggle—do I think that because the world has really changed or because I am forty now and I was 30 in 2010 and I still thought hope was a thing with feathers? Chaos and cynicism and optimism and ignorance—all forced to live in a house and find out what happens when they stop being polite and start getting real. Personal time and cultural time are cousins but not siblings, and I cannot tell.

How do you quantify a decade? It is so impossibly long and so impossibly short. We get around ten of them. A little less, most of us. Ten of ten. So little. So much. If the year has a 9 in it, everyone scrambles to bottle nostalgia early and hope it ages well in the barrel. It was the decade of Hamilton, the ACA, Marvel, local food, micro social media, millennials ruining everything, the dream of the 1890s, reboots and Occupy and banjos in pop music, Facetune, Obama and Trump, both of them, Cameron and Johnson, revolutions and protests that were successful, often, everywhere but the Anglophere, where they don’t seem to matter at all. Everything seemed more possible in 2010 than it does now. But we’re all paying attention, aren’t we? For all that it matters. 

Livejournal was still a big and beautiful thing ten years ago. It was where I met and loved so many people so dear to me. Now it is a cemetary with ads on the gravestones.

In the end I wonder if the great hallmark of these years won’t be that everyone stopped saying what they really meant quietly and started shouting it on the street because it doesn’t matter anymore.

You hear that phrase on the fucking news now. Nothing matters anymore.

Fucking hell.

I AM BEING A HUGE DOWNER SORRY YOU GUYS.

I think about timelines and science fiction and dystopia so much now. Far more than even a person whose job it is to think about these things should. Because we are IN IT, and what are we going to do? Because the old school SF masters kind of punted on that. Keep on loving Shakespeare, dudes, I guess, idk. Books say: if you fight, eventually you win, even if you lose in the short term. But we’re in the short term, that’s what the present is, it’s so hard to see the big picture, personally or globally. That has always been the province of prayer more than literature: please tell me this present horror is not permanent.

But there has been love, there has been solidarity, there has been this sudden focus, even if the powers that be have already rigged the game, at least we are seeing the pieces clearly for what seems like the first time. We lost Bowie and Thompson and now we must be our own Bowies and Thompsons and more. There is no one coming to save us, but perhaps there never was and only now must we face the literal villain of 80s movies and see if we are the heroes or not. And in our own lives. In my life. Who am I, now, that I was not in 2010? Do I even remember that girl? That hopeful, depressed, desperately passionate and desperately lonely girl? Always reaching out, reaching out, until her fingers were the length of a time zone, hoping to find another hand in the dark?

The Harry Potter movie franchise hadn’t even finished in 2010. I was completely committed to MY ART, MAN, and would write nothing but FANCY-ASS PRETTYBOOKS. Now my Minecraft novel just came out and I’m even happy about it even though someone on Twitter told me I’d sold out. You know, the Person of the Decade should probably be Someone on Twitter, because damn have they had impact. 

2009/2010 is another universe. An alternate timeline. I had just moved to Peaks Island. I had written the first Fairyland book and won the Nebula for it, but it wasn’t out in print yet. So little of who I am now had come to pass. Yet I thought life would just continue more or less as it had been going then. I had no idea. This is what I meant when I wrote the Prester John series, that I still haven’t finished, what I meant when I wrote about the Abir, the great lottery that shuffles the lives of immortal beings every hundred years so they don’t get bored. And I wrote that in 2010 of all times, having no idea that mine was coming. You never have any idea. But it’s always coming.

What do I have no idea of now? Who will we all be in 2029? Will this seem like the good old days? The golden years when nothing was quite so bad yet? Or will it be a darkness we tell our children of, and hope they never make their own? Ah, the world was ending, but, my darling, there were so many comic book movies. They lay on the land like autumn leaves. It wasn’t all bad. We knew the taste of avocado once. You cannot imagine it.

So what is ten years? 20 books or so, two marriages, a child, a hope, a dread, debt, memes, hospital stays, shows, airplanes, friendships, good and interesting people, being left on read, life, the universe, everything? The only thing I know it isn’t is a list of things one has done on social media. The distance between 30 and 40, between 09 and 19, is measured in love and loss and light years, not a bullet point presentation of milestones. I feel almost no sense of accomplishment in those terms. Only that I survived. We all did. We got through. 

The sun will come out, tomorrow. Always tomorrow. I am your tomorrow, you are mine. We are each others'. 

Ages and ages ago I wrote about a New Year in Japan, with my high school love who straight hated me by then, and my husband and all his military friends, and how all the noisemakers were broken, so when we tried to make noise at midnight, we got only silence and the Beatles and uncomfortable stares. I think about that every New Year. That time, when I was not very grown up but thought I was. And now, when I think I am very grown up and cynical but probably I am not, I am not different than I have ever been, hoping and reaching out and trying and not looking too long at the dark lest I fall in and never climb out. Always feeling old and worn out, but pushing on, with pretty nice skin when you think about it. Always blowing into the party streamer and always finding silence instead of sound.

I want the 20s to be better. I want it so much. For all of us. 

But I don’t know, guys. It’s a weird time and a weird world and maybe we’re all about to roast alive together in the big hot dystopia. The only thing there really is is to love each other and hold on to that love. It’s cliche AS FUCK and you hear it in every song and Hallmark TV show, and when you’re younger it seems so stupid and inadequate, but as I grow old and wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled, it seems more and more the only truth there is, people just say it wrong and say it stupid and don’t give it the weight we all feel when we drag it through decades.

You just try to love everyone around you, even if they suck, and you try to surround yourself with people who love you, because it’s always the apocalypse and you always need a tribe, and the years, the decades, when you have that ring of loved humans are the good old days, and the ones where you don’t are the dark times, and that’s literally the only difference between the good and the bad, between feeling like progress is possible and stagnation is inevitable--whether there’s love, whether there’s loyalty and hugs and warmth, and it’s all any of us are looking for, in the night, in the cold of the end of the year, just the candles that are people who never fail to light. 

I love you. Happy New Year.

It’s all gonna be okay.

Eventually.