Another year! How they pile up. Or rather, how they melt in the mind, into hosts of memories with puzzlingly different time-stamps. Right after taking in a movie that you think you saw “ages ago,” you had dinner with a friend “just the other day.” And then there are the intense experiences that simultaneously whoosh right by while taking forever. All of 2010 was one such experience for me, and today I celebrate its first anniversary, in the birthday of our grandson Will, who seems to have arrived only yesterday but who has palpably been with us always.

The most important thing that I heard in 2010 was William Gibson’s remark (made more than a few years ago) that the future is already here, but unevenly distributed. That’s another way of saying that, while almost nothing ever really happens, everything is happening all the time. Will is a bit of a baby, and a bit of a young adult, but he is mostly a little boy. The only statement that makes complete sense is also completely tautological: Will is — Will.  

As are we all; all of us are more complicated than we can know, even if we could strip away the callouses of inattentiveness and the built-in oblivion that make life bearably uneventful. I can’t tell you how much of me is sitting here writing, how much stuck somewhere in last week’s projects, or how much has shot ahead in pursuit of, among other things, plans for the ongoing development of this Web log. All of me that’s present wishes you very hearty good wishes for the New Year — and all of me that’s anywhere thanks you for reading.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Saturday, January 1st, 2011 at 11:54 am.