A thousand words about a dumb decade

As contractually obligated as a blogger, I have found my thoughts turning to the decade just ended and with it the state of things ten years ago today. I doubt it’s unusual that I can recall exactly what I was doing as Y2K failed to deliver any sort of dramatic mayhem, but I count myself lucky that the memory I have is so fond: with some very good friends I rarely see but still treasure I was hiking into the White Mountains of New Hampshire in frigid but bluebird weather for some winter camping. An auspicious beginning to the decade. I seem to recall — I always only seem to recall — that the mood was heady, not only in general but on an individual level; I had recently dug myself clumsily but definitively out of a long-term relationship which had been a serious mess for a long time, and I could see the light at the end of the graduate school tunnel. I had plans. Vague, half-baked, un-gelled plans, most of which would go nowhere, but they were mine.

It must be the rare decade that one can gaze upon retrospectively and think well not much changed in those ten years, but I think any ten-year span, particularly the one in which you finish school, somehow expatriate yourself, marry a Pole, father some simians, and spend it in South America and Slovenia and Bulgaria must be worthy of a lazy look back.

And this is going to be lazy, not only because that is the way that this macro-blogging thing has been trending in the closing days of the zeros (or whatever term we are going to settle upon to refer to these years), but because I am attempting, and mostly succeeding, to write this blog post on my telephone. While I realize that to be saying this in 2010 does not make me all cutting edge or anything, or even probably as pretentious as it makes me feel, it does seem emblematic of something, and I certainly wish the me of January 1, 2000 could have read that sentence written by the me of whatever day this is.

As 2000 dawned my computer, a hand-me-down Mac notebook upon which I would never write a blog post, or indeed visit a website, let alone use to search via Dogpile or employ Napster, was somewhat less capable than the phone upon which I now type. RAM was in shorter supply by a factor of 64; my PowerBook’s hard drive was 20 MB, compared to the 800 times more storage in this telephone, most of which is taken up by music in a format I would not even be aware of for another year. Speaking of mobile phones, I had just acquired my first, a Motorola whose battery was twice the size of the phone I’m telling you about it on.

Last night I scrolled through the music at hand to find something I would have been listening to ten years ago, and the pickings were slim. Plenty of music made it through the Y2K barrier, and in fact many of the compact discs upon which one used to purchase music legally are extant still, boxed up in my Bulgarian basement for no apparent reason, but still I found it difficult to find much that felt emblematic of those days. Beginning in the summer of 2000 and continuing for the next two years or so I underwent a renaissance of music acquisition — almost entirely unrelated to the changing technology, oddly enough — that changed my musical landscape like an ice age clearing a landmass. This was almost certainly related to the wrapping up of that insalubrious relationship, during which music was one of the few areas where we actually got along.

In early 2000 and the months that followed I discovered or had thrust upon me Belle & Sebastian (essentially the soundtrack for the first half of the decade for me), Dan Bern, Camera Obscura, Cinerama, Death Cab For Cutie, The Flaming Lips, The Go-Betweens, Hefner, Low, The Lucksmiths, Magnetic Fields, The New Pornographers, Pulp, what Radiohead was really for, Sigur Ros, Travis, The Wedding Present, Weezer, and the deeper genius of Brian Wilson. Looking at the music I listen to most, there are certain uneroded peaks left behind the receding upheaval that the early part of the decade wrought, but I can’t imagine the landscape without all that rich glacial flour ground out under the pressure of Stuart Murdoch et al.

At New Year’s 1999 I was exactly two years away from obtaining a digital camera and only dimly aware of the proto-existence of such a thing. I would be persuaded by the expense of film and processing in Argentina 18 months later during a particularly formative year in which I took, comparatively, no photographs at all.

A year in advance of that Argentina episode, meaning just a few days after I hiked out from Carter Notch, my father would take me shopping for a Brooks Brothers suit I would wear to a job interview in Japan. My father had precisely half a decade left with us at the time of the suit-buying expedition.

(The suit still fits beautifully, and the two neckties my father chose to go with it remain among my most elegant and favorite ties. In addition to the job interview, I would wear the suit to an all-night Argentine wedding the day after I arrived in the country, which is emblematic of something, too. I would not be married in the suit.)

At the beginning of 2000 I had never visited (nor in most cases particularly thought much about visiting) Argentina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Japan, Korea, Malta, Poland, the Republic of San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, (possibly?) Switzerland, Turkey, or Uruguay.

All of these omissions amaze me now, but of course the most glaring is that ten years ago Adam did not exist, Alek did not exist — I mean actually DID NOT EXIST, which may seem weird to you, but is almost literally unthinkable for me. For that matter, as far as I was concerned Magda did not exist. Which means that I did not exist ten years ago — that is, so many of those things that define me and my existence now, trivial and profound, did not obtain a simple (and by most accounts, dumb) decade ago.

This situation makes me feel exactly ten years old.

It all makes me think it might be worth sticking around to see if the next decade turns out to be at all interesting.