2010

Well, it's just past five in the morning and I'm awake and relatively clear-headed for some awful reason, so I might as well.

This, then, is 2010, the year when everything changes. (I've just made that up. Or, more likely, someone else made that up and I've just made it up again.) From the perspective of about an hour and a half of consciousness: it's not bad. The eggs are quite good, and going back to sleep will be lovely. I feel hopeful for the rest of the year.

And it's not hard to being feeling a bit of hope right now, not least because 2009 is, to slip into the parlance of the times, finally fucking dead in the ground, and we can get on with it. The 'it' is, I believe, living and growing and loving and pushing ourselves to do more and better.

2009! It wasn't the best year for me, but it certainly wasn't the worst. I've had major accomplishments and fuck-ups, but a lot of my friends have had it really bad. Things haven't gone right, and people and institutions were, and still are in some cases, collapsing all around us. There is fear and unease in the air, and the change promised us seems less real every day.

Winter showed up late this year, or maybe never left at all: if you think of centuries as having seasons, of hundred year cycles of growth, abundance, harvest and decay, or perhaps sleep, then we''re somewhere in February of the new century, marching on through the slush and ice.

On this scale, I've been in winter for my entire adult life. The whole world has. We've just come through the coldest, hardest part of winter: January into February, when trees explode and every living thing barely clings to life, when your breath freezes in your lungs and your face goes numb the second you step outside.

We're tired, but we aren't exhausted. And ahead--past the groaning ice--is the coming Spring. It's not quite here yet, and we're going to have to work hard to make it through, but on this day especially, you can feel that it might be true, that we are perched at the beginning of a new century, waiting to rise up out of the snow.

There is, of course, no reason to think about centuries having seasons. I've just been playing the oldest trick in the book on you, and myself: telling you a pretty story about how the sun is going to come back and there will be deer and blackberries and warm summer light again, here, in the dark and the cold and the ice. It's the oldest holiday tradition. Singing to keep the dark at bay.

But the sun does come back, and the world can get better. Spring is the sweetest season. Let's bring it.

A Brief Defense of Hedonism

I am a hedonist, and proud of it.

I do nothing except search after new experiences, facts, situations and puzzles in the hope that I will derive some enjoyment from having found them. My mind is ever-hungry, and the rest of my life is structured around feeding it. Everything else is less important, the body a not-always-so-distant second. The world exists, and I yearn to know it with an intense and bottomless hunger.

I'm no good at owning and caring for material goods. I don't keep my room in order or my clothing clean. I have a lot of trouble paying attention to things that don't interest me. But when I'm on my game, when my mind is sharp and my talons are out, when I can taste what I'm looking for in my brain, that's when I know I'm alive.

There is so much that I don't understand, so much that I have not seen, and I want to know it all. And there isn't time to do anything else but seek it out. If pleasure is the motivating factor in my continually deepening understanding of the world, then so be it.

I try to be the best person I can, because I find it hinders my ability to enjoy myself when I do not.

I don't understand people who don't set out, as best they can each day, to enjoy the world. Sure, it's a terrible place full of terrible people who want to do terrible things to one another. Sure, it can be pain and suffering and despair. Sure, we're a set of evolved neuroses competing for processor time and nutrients in a fleshy sack laced with poisons and a million different kinds of tiny battling monsters.

But it still beats nothing.

The rain on your face when you look up at the storm beats nirvana hollow any day of the week, as far as I'm concerned. Heaven, as the Talking Heads say, is a place where nothing ever happens. This world may not be the best of all possibilities, but it's the one we have, and it is fascinating, fragile, beautiful and terrible in equal parts.

In the face of such an existence, hedonism is the only logical way to proceed. Enjoy the world you live in, take hold of it, and make it an even more unbearably beautiful place.

I can't think of a better alternative.