december 31st

First, or should I say final?, blow of marks have come out. In opposite-land somewhere, a cherry is being placed carefully atop a great heap of ice cream. This past half a year has been a miserable experience. With little redeeming gems here and there. I had banked on the possibility of a final saving grace. But of course, that material belongs mainly to myths and Hollywood. In real life, real life with pantyhose and 9 to 5 workdays and gas price escalations, limits are quickly coming down like a metal netting over the exuberance of youth. Every five year old dreams of being the President or an astronaut, somewhere along the spectrum of the golden years, subtle and invisible things chip away at those dreams: maybe just Senator, local congressman, school principal, salesman. Slowly, we grow up. Or perhaps we grow down.

People say there's nowhere to go but up, but they never tell you how to go up. As a corollary, they fail to mention that there is a way to go down. A very plausible way. And that way is to stay the same. Not stay in the darkest pit for now, but for tomorrow, and the day after that. What is worse than bad? Bad without hope. How to climb out? How to stop the stagnant trajectories sputtering out in every aspect and direction? New Years are meant for new beginnings. But wait, that is another child of myths and Hollywood. It is an artificial and unfruitful cut, like taking a sword to a stream of water. There are no clean slates anymore. And the more the golden years slip by, the more the slate hardens and becomes harder to mold, yet easier to break.

Excuse this post for its rambling and uncohesiveness. I don't know how to make sense of something I have never known. These are failures both new in kind and more in number than I have encountered. And now I'm no longer fearful of the failures themselves, but of their persistence. Somehow, New Years does not seem enough a cap to stop the flood of the last few months. December 31st is still very much alive, stretching past its human-imposed bounds.

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