The 00s

How far did you go? I didn’t get much done. Maybe a few of us could use a do-over. Maybe some of us would rather forget. What good is the immediate past if you’re forced to look over it and not be allowed to wistfully cherry-pick your memories?

We did good. Know that. Most of us made it without a scratch, some (bravely) lost a leg. Or a hand. Or a homeland. But that’s all water under the bridge. That’s a taxied plane in DTW waiting for the sniffer dogs. Touchdown, no shots fired. Call it in, kids. He’s the recap.

I don’t care about your hopes. 1999? Fuck that. We were all coming off some fantasy shit. Oh, the horror! Oh, the horror! Anyhoo, it happened. Then it didn’t. Then it really fucking happened. Then we forgot what we were talking about. Then Al Gore said something, and we were resolved to forget everything while we fought for anything. Then everything got bleak. Then the bleak got black (well, light skined). A few snags on the way and here we are, just as screwed up and hopeful (or deluded, depends on your news source).

What were the 00s to me? Fan art. Well, somebody else’s fan art. If you caught anything, low culture was in your lint trap. What kind of low culture? How about culture that anyone could access? No doubt file sharing is what made this decade… tolerable? But, if you’re like me it was one more tool in the arsenal. But what really came over the bandwidth? The torrents? The mp3 swaps? To quote every cheesy sci-fi film of the past few years, “The door was open long enough. Something got through.”

The mixtape may have died but the torrent bought that lease. Well, maybe it’s just squatting in the old glue factory down the road. You know, in the neighborhood where the guy still sells shaved ice from a cart and blue baggies from his pocket? Yeah, we still can pass it on. We still got that going for us. We can still hold our street cred while we download last weeks guilty pleasure while uploading next weeks new hot shit. Technology, man. It’s not just for girls jerking off in women’s college dorm rooms.

But what about class? Where are all the Blue Ribbon drinkers gonna go now? Now that everyone’s boned up to some Smuttynose and Canadian marijuana (not to speak of that still kind of difficult-to-get-on-the-East-coast Cali medical weed)? Has the revival of the Material Girl culture (thrift store and dumpster) come to an end? Am I gonna have to start shopping at the fucking Gap to get some gap (crass, but necessary)? These were the best of times if all you wanted was to roll the fuck out of bed and spend 15 hours drinking, sniffing and dancing. After you did your hair for 2 hours.

I wanna see the ground give way… I wanna watch it all go down… Mom pleas flush it all away…

I want a better world. I want to deal with people who give a shit. I want to know the best way. I want to know how I can help. I want to not be the sucker. I don’t want to pay for it when it’s unreasonable, but I want to be able to help out where it’s possible. I want to know what’s necessary, I want to be able to talk myself out of stuff that’s not. I want less noise. Wait, keep the noise, just make it more interesting. Give it a fucking beat.

What if we can make our lives our art? What if we could do what we want to do? What if we didn’t have these unrealistic expectations, the ones that keep us up at night? The ones we can’t put to bed, that won’t give away? What if we could do more with less? Isn’t that what we’re already trying for anyway? What if we could just leave each other alone?

If the 00s were all about sharing pirated music (detestable term), can we make the 10s a little more mixed media? I’m not talking about ransom-style mailing body parts (say no to the Van Gogh) but what if people got a little more involved with that personal touch? To hell with looking back, I say. It’s the future we need to be ready for.