Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life

You know you wanna hear the song!

People like to reflect, at this time of year, on the momentous crap that transpired over the previous 12 months. Why 12 months? It's those minions of patriarchy, the TV gasbags, trumping up nostalgia for the good old days of last February with heartwarming footage--gosh, I hadn't thought about those swift boat guys in weeks! Oh, and there's dear old Abu Ghraib! And never mind, my darling, we'll always have Paris Hilton--and they keep promoting this fiction that a "new year" begins in a couple of weeks.

A year is just the length of time it takes the earth to complete an orbit of the sun. It has no more meaning than that. It might as well be the length of time it takes to smoke a cigarette, for all the cosmic significance it has. The earth will eventually stop orbiting the sun. At which point people, if there are any left, which I doubt, will look back on this and laugh.

For most people there won't really be anything new on January 1. Things will continue just as they were before the stupid holidays supervened and brought everything to a screeching, nutmeg-flavored halt. New Year my ass. If it was rotten in 2004, it will still be rotten in 2005.

January is a crap month to start a year in, anyway. I'd like to meet the bonehead who thought that up. There's barely 2 hours of daylight in January. Who doesn't want to blow their own head off in January? I'd like to meet the freak of nature who doesn't, for at least a few seconds, want to blow their own head off in January.

Anyway, a year is too long to wait between evaluations of important stuff like "well, is this life worth living or isn't it?" Too much happens in a day, let alone a year. Which is why I like to divide time up into manageable epochs of about 49 hours' duration. This approach promotes highly satisfying, introspective wallows with far greater frequency. Why condemn a whole year to the crapper by labeling it "the year my dad got cancer and my dog died," when you can reflect, at the end of each bittersweet 49 hours, on the principle of equilibrium, and how it keeps you from killing yourself?

By equilibrium I mean a condition of psychological poise wherein pleasant and unpleasant events are perceived at equal rates, so the overall comfort level remains unchanged over time. Try it out. Tally up the momentous crap that transpired during the last 49 hours. The super-automatic espresso machine threw a rod. The cat got in a fight. The can of anchovies you opened when trying to make a Caesar's salad--a real Caesar's salad, not the bullshit kind with "southwest fajita chicken ranch" currently poisoning the American culinary ethos-- was off. Yet you discovered the new taste sensation of deep-fried wasabi peas, and got a really good parking spot downtown, and scored the second-to-last bottle of Château Jeanin-Bécot 2001 in all of Austin.

Equilibrium.

Today, for example, I have a gruesome torn ligament in my shoulder, which is unpleasant, but this morning when I walked the dog (with my good arm) I saw a homemade plywood yard ornament in the shape of a sunflower with the word "Hi!" painted on it, which is pleasant. 10 minutes ago the espresso machine manufacturer called me up to say that it will take 4 weeks and $150 to fix my broken machine, but equilibrium was maintained when I remembered that I have an emergency backup super-automatic espresso machine in a box in the garage, and that if memory serves, it makes even better coffee than the broken one does.

So far, my equilibrium has been holding steady for 45 years. When it begins to destabilize, which it's bound to do sooner or later, I most likely won't be able to tell you about it, because I'll be dead.