“Waxing Gibbous”
“1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an annus horribilis.”-Queen Elizabeth II
Towards the end of the movie “What’s Up Doc,” Madeline Kahn’s character, Eunice Burns, is dropped off by a fast departing taxi at a ramshackle two story dwelling in the San Francisco warehouse district, whose address had been purported to house the prestigious “Larabee Foundation,” and as she assesses the general squalor of 459 Dirella Street, and prepares to alight the barely attached wooden stairs, she grabs her clutch with her two gloved hands, and wonders aloud, in a tone of highly indignant resignation: “What more can they do to me?”
The below meme came out last year about this time:
I believed I was signing up for the first package, and I seem to have received the second instead, with directions straight to 459 Dirella Street.
And while 2023 was not composed of “undiluted pleasure” either, there were some bright spots amid the difficulties, I got to spend a lot of time with family, and I could just afford to see both a chiropractor and a therapist. This year has featured more bullet biting than professional assistance.
I am still blessed with a loving relationship with my terrific partner, my Father seems to still outfox the perils of his age at every turn, and I now have two jobs at two separate restaurants that are both fairly nourishing environments (to understate the matter, restaurants aren’t generally known for being emotionally nourishing environments.)
My artistic vocabulary and technique have been pushed and sharpened with practice this year, and I’ve written some work I’m proud of. Both an old friend and my cousin improbably survived huge natural disasters in their immediate area mostly unscathed. We spent some great time with family this year too.
The above doesn’t encompass everything else.
At this time last year, you might remember that my bartending shifts at the hotel I was working at were suddenly halved, when a new supervisor was hired, leaving me working two days a week at the beginning of the slowest month of the year for restaurants.
Having created half the cocktail menu and gotten our bar national press in Whiskey Advocate had proven insufficient to prevent this calamitous state of affairs from coming to pass, during a time of year when four shifts would have barely just served our needs.
So I went out and found what seemed like a way better situation, working as a Lead Sommelier at a highly anticipated restaurant. I expended a great deal of time, effort and annoyance to help it open successfully, and very soon what seemed to be a very viable situation, due to business cratering after two months, turned into a part-time job with a lot of now risible drama attached.
Recognizing where things were headed early, I went looking for something new, but it took three months to find something new, by which point our finances were in so tenuous a state it has taken six months just to catch up. My giving proper notice at the French restaurant was rewarded with the few shifts I had left being cut.
In the meantime, a very close friend of ours, who had disappeared from contact completely in 2023, remained unreachable in spite of our best efforts, and another close friend suddenly died of a condition I was wholly unaware of her suffering from, previous to her being in a coma.
And then the election happened. And then another cancer diagnosis in the family.
Mind you, December is not over, and I have more reason to be suspicious of things having improved considerably in the last few months than not, given the number of rugs that have been pulled out from under me in the last two years, but I am trying to do something S. urged me to do early in our relationship, and “envision positive outcomes.”
I have been no stranger to reversals of fortune over the course of my adult life, but this year things were slow to bounce back to whatever “normal” currently looks like in our life.
Roxane Gay penned an essay shortly after the election in which she wrote “Everything has to be okay…”
Her point was not that we should pretend everything is actually “Ok” in the big picture, but in the sense that we still have to persevere in the sphere of the personal, regardless of larger circumstances beyond our control.
Her essay was written within the context of the hideous prospect of living as a marginalized person under the aegis of Trump 2.0, but it also applies more widely, “envisioning positive outcomes” is literally necessary to survival.
I think about my Aunt’s philosophy of “acceptance with joy,” which is a condensation of her larger, more nuanced, and intellectually generous view of the world I’ve always tried to emulate, and while it’s still something I still don’t fully understand, I think I once mistook her philosophy for being joyful about everything that might happen, when I think it is more about not losing sight of the fact that our existence and persistence is something that can house or be generative of joy, regardless of context.
To approach the question from another angle, I paraphrase a new friend who recently said, quite simply: “When you think of how short life is, do you want to spend it being miserable?”
I don’t.
I do not enjoy watching the tech, media and even the opposition party trying to curry favor with a seditious, mediocre and stupid man before he’s even retaken office as President, after an election that was won by a sliver of a margin, but here we are. He’s already going on about acquiring Greenland again. Thanks, America!
S. and I literally might not survive this second term, and given bird flu finally hitting a human host in Louisiana and the nomination of RFK Jr., we may not be alone in that, but we still have to press forward as if we might.
The most recent pandemic is a useful corollary for me as we approach a series of another terrifying unknowns. Early on, as things accelerated, I had to ask myself: “if we survived, what might that actually look like?”
Once we gave due consideration to the matter, we started making decisions we thought would keep us alive in as manageable a state as possible if survival were possible. It wouldn’t be the first pandemic we’d survived.
While I loathe the Winter cold in Chicago, Boston honestly wasn’t any warmer in Winter growing up.
So this Winter, I will put on as many layers as necessary and ride whatever bus is still running to wherever I end up needing to go, I’ll sell some bottles of wine, shake some cocktails, glue some trash down, and we will try to wring whatever joy we can out of actual circumstances yet unknown, and hope to survive them in our particular little corner of the world.