And now 2007

It seems the du jour act here in the blogosphere is that we sum up the past year and talk about the coming one on or about New Years. So to maintain consistency I guess I need to add my two cents. Aside from offering up the customary good wishes (Digital Balloons and the like), New Years always seemed arbitrary to me.

Each culture and religion picks its annual mark to delineate the year. According to Wikepdia, the Romans celebrated New Years about March 1st which makes more sense to me as the weather starts to improve in the Northern Hemisphere and offers more to celebrate. Raised (but not absorbing much) in the Jewish traditions I had Rosh Hashanah. Arriving in September it seemed inopportune as the weather cools and the school year starts.

So the traditional Western Gregorian Calendar starting on January 1st is as random as any other choice. So here we are everybody goes on parties up and ties one on. Except me. In twenty seven years that I can recall only on December 31st 1999 did I venture out lured by the obscene amount of money I was paid by Fidelity Investments to hold their hand if the dreaded Y2K demon reared it’s ugly head (it didn’t). I spent the night intermittently dozing and watching the consoles in their Network Operations Center which indicated that all the various computational devices were nominal. At day light my shift ended and I arrived at home on the morning of January 1st 2000 where nothing monumental had changed.

(As an aside, there was a Y2K problem as opposed to what was subsequently reported. The first one was the “bug” on which companies spent untold billions and multiple minions of technocrati including myself toiled for years and stayed up all night on December 31st 1999 to fend off. The second was that everybody during those years were grossly overpaid leading to massive layoffs and a general slump of IT staffing we still endure.)

So as required, I will sum up the last year as I saw it. More war, more political madness with no end in sight (you think the Dems will fix this mess?), more decline (I never thought I’d see the fall of the latest empire in person), and more human behavior that makes me waver between mild bemusement and pulling the remaining hair out of my head.

Personally, I went bankrupt from a business failure, worked my brains out helping build up another business from which I was laid off after the owners squandered the profits. Had to find work again for which I have mad my fourth major move in five years only to discover my new employer is already planning to drop me after less than 90 days in my new abode. Just to add in the mix I probably had a stroke, only the doctor won’t give me a diagnosis because I cannot afford to pay 20% of the enormously expensive tests he wants to run first. So that weakness on my left side, numbness on my right side, dizziness and change in personality is from? 2006 has not been my favorite year.

And what personality changes are we observing. Since the apparent stroke about a month ago, some moments certain things I see or hear make me want to cry. Other times I have found myself laughing longer and harder than I ever recall. Like friends of mine from childhood who had the giggles so uncontrollably I didn’t understand why. Pieces of music that had lost their emotional impact on me do again. “Chestnut Mare” by Roger McGuinn of the Byrds makes me choke up again after decades (more to do with achieving unattainable goals and lost love than anything else). I have fallen in love again with Humble Pie and I’m playing Def Leppard way too loud for my aging hearing. The good news is the dizziness is subsiding, the weakness is going away but the numbness remains.

So now we have another knew year everyone around me seems to be celebrating. There seems to be more discussion about renewal and resolutions than normal. Maybe some of the news that has impacted me so negatively has also affected others. Unlike them, they have the hope that by “starting over” with “resolution” we can fix some of the mess. I on the other hand understand what it means to run out of time to fix things

For me the clock is ticking and the timer has almost run out of sand. That which I loved is gone never to come back. I probably will publish a book soon but it is out of monetary need not personal inspiration. I will probably once again tread the tumultuous waters of my career without perishing but with little joy. I was going to restart playing the guitar once I settled into my new house but the demands of writing and recent health problems seem to overwhelm that commitment.