What's Good, 2022
How was your New Year’s? The changeover from 2021 to 2022 was incident-rich for your humble essayist. Here’s a summary list of my 12/30/21 to 1/1/2022:
Left Santa Fe a day earlier than I needed to. I didn’t want to return to LA after a 12-hour+ road trip on the night of New Year’s Eve (or as my grandfather Buzz McHenry called it, “Drunk Driving Amateur Hour”1).
Stopped for gas in Gallup, NM.
Got a flat tire2 30 miles outside of Flagstaff, AZ. Fortunately, I made it into town before the tire disintegrated.
Spent over 4 hours wandering a commercial district of Flagstaff. Fortunately, I had my snow boots on; there were un-shoveled piles of it on the rarely-used sidewalks, and more scheduled to come starting late that night.
My tire was replaced over an hour sooner than projected. I got out of Flagstaff before the winter storm.
My father and uncle advised me that it would be totally normal and not-weird to spend the night in Kingman. There are over 30 hotels in Kingman, it turns out.
Stopped for gas in Barstow, CA and read my texts: a good friend had just gotten a positive result on an at-home COVID test. Then another3.
I got home on New Year’s Eve at around 1pm. For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel like staying up until midnight. I went to sleep around 11pm.
I woke up at 11:50pm to the latest of the premature fireworks that have been going off sporadically all evening. I got out of bed and, feet bare, I went out to my porch and watched the neighborhood — and much of the east side — ring in 2022. Then I went back to bed.
I woke up before my alarm on New Year’s Day to watch the Rose Parade with my 5-year-old nephew and his parents. Not as in “watch it on TV,” but “watch it from the street.” This was the second time we’ve done this and it’s just a top-notch way to start the New Year.
I spent the rest of the afternoon playing with Legos, boardgames, and airplanes before taking this group to my beloved Tacos Delta. Guess what: I had the chilaquiles.
I looked through my 2021 calendar, week by week, and wrote down everything of significance that happened.4
Now you’re caught up. So, tell me, dear reader: How was my New Year’s?
Isn’t this the way of life? Ups and downs. Even the flat tire situation had ups and downs within it: The panic of hearing a loud pop under my car, of seeing a low tire pressure warning, quickly morphed into the problem-solving urgency of what to do next. My fear of being stuck overnight in a strange city (yet again5) was usurped by the elation of finding a nearby shop that could get me re-tired that very day; there was the kindness of the people who helped me; the realization that I was at the foot of an absurdly beautiful, snow-covered mountain peak; then, the disappointment that I’d definitely not make it back to LA that night; then, the gratitude that the hard-working young guys at the tire shop finished the work over an hour earlier than they’d estimated…etcetera, etcetera, ups and downs, until I was safe at home the next afternoon. Then I went on to have an unremarkable New Year’s Eve — slightly sad, even, from an outside perspective — followed by a riotously happy New Year’s Day.
Which parts define these few days? More importantly, which parts will I remember come December 31, 2022? Do I have any choice in the matter?
Because I just looked through my personal calendar for 2021, I can report that (for me at least) it had a lot of really excellent parts, and some notably, inarguably awful parts. Yet, I think the question of “how was 2021?” demands to be relative. It was, in many ways, not as good as we hoped it would be (collectively, I mean; I can only speak personally and collectively; for all I know, your personal 2021 could have been monumentally great or an endless storm of shit). But then I think of my trip to Chicago this June — my first time back after the longest time I’ve ever been away. On the back patio of Antico with my dad, my cousin, and her husband, I was compelled to set down my cocktail and say: This feels so normal. But it’s also momentous. It would be so easy to take this for granted. Not long ago, I would have. But I don’t want us to take any of this for granted.
I greeted 2021 (and said smell ya later to 2020) by writing a reflection on what the year just-passed had taught me. I didn’t have the “newsletter” back then, but that writing of Jan 1, 2021 really crystallized my desire to create what would become Metaforia. It’s still out there on the internet for anyone to read, and if you choose to do so, maybe you’ll be struck like I was, by the difference between then and now. Or not struck…more like “punched.” For all its disappointments and challenges, both personal and general; and, okay, local, national, and international; it was not 2020. We got new things (vaccines! At-home COVID tests!) and we learned new things (Vaccinated people get less sick! Workers deserve to be treated humanely!). And we also got a bit of the old stuff back — movies, parties, concerts. It wasn’t the grand, maskless, fearless return that we hoped would come quick, but on a societal level we were able to move several steps closer to something akin to normalcy. I for one did a pretty poor job of not taking it all for granted. Ironically, even that fact is kinda special.
At Thanksgiving, SNL aired a holiday compilation special that included a “Debbie Downer” sketch from the Nineties; it reminded me of the way “The Californians” stopped reading as comedy after a few years living in LA. In the past two years, most of my conversations seem like they’re about 75% Debbie. Sometimes I’m the one bringing the Debbie; sometimes I feel helpless in the face of other people’s news-fueled doomsdaying. Given that, I worry that by not excoriating the year, I sound like a Pollyanna.
But is it really Pollyannaish to acknowledge that good things happen? That positive changes exist in the midst of negative ones? I would never sweep the negative under the rug — (a) that which we would fix we must first acknowledge, and (b) I have utmost respect for the variety of individual traumas that this year, like any, may have brought. I faced some of the biggest challenges of my life this year6, and none of them by choice (though I did choose to tough them out, for better and worse). We are reminded of the hardness of this life everyday, as if we might forget.
Anyone out there at risk of forgetting that life and the world can be really shit sometimes?
No? Nobody?
So I will continue my private little war against the creep of what’s bad. I will strive to acknowledge what’s good. And beyond acknowledging it, I’d like to remember it. The way that looking at my calendar week by week helped me remember 2021.
This year, I’m cracking open one of my many blank journals (that act itself being one of life’s little pleasures) and labeling it, “What’s Good.” All year, when something good happens, I’m going to write it down. Then, when the year is over — or during the year, or in any and all years to come — I can look back at my record and feel my assessment of the year, and of life itself, thusly swayed.
2022 will be different from 2021, but if all of recorded human existence is any indication, it’s gonna be a doozy. So I wish you all the fondest tidings, and hope you’ll hold fast to what’s good. At the very least, it will help carry you through the hard parts. At the best, it will be an ode to the ineffable beauty of this one life.
h/t to my cousin Meghan for keeping this amazing phrase alive
Not the tire with the slow leak. That was fixed. This was an entirely different tire.
They’re ok, but it still sucks. After all this time! Come on!
This as step one of Year Compass, which you can do for yourself. It’s free and analog. Yet another h/t (that stands for “hat tip”) to Meghan!
This marked my third time in 2021 being stuck overnight due to travel snafus; it was the first one not connected with a cancelled connecting flight to Burbank
maybe not #1 or 2, but solidly top-ten territory