As the decade comes to a close I’m sitting here wondering what the 2010s decade meant to me. . .
For one thing it was the Moo Decade. Moo Cat was 1-year-old in 2010, and she spanned the entire decade for me.
And I would spend pretty much the entire decade living outside, aside from about a year indoors.
I started out the decade at 53, still a relatively young man. And ended it at 63, officially an old man, a bona-fide senior citizen.
The decade started with Obama. And ended with Trump. Which maybe was a sign of the schitzo state of America. That we’d go from one extreme to the other, both unprecedented, though in exact opposite ways — the first black president, and then the first billionaire non-politician president. It was like America was desperately searching for a new identity, a new direction.
2009 was definitely an end-of-an-era in my life. Just about everything about the life I had been leading for decades came to an end that year. I published my last book, my best friend Duncan died, and in December of 2009 the street vending gig I had been doing for 20 years came to an end.
For lack of anything better to do, I rented out a little studio apartment in this trailer park in this little town in the middle of the Arizona desert. And I sat there in my little room by myself for 3 months trying to figure out a new direction I could go with my my life (PS. I didn’t). I got drunk just about every night on beer and whiskey. And watched a lot of TV for the first time in 20 years (the shows I remember are The Kardashians, The Dave Chapelle Show, and this info-mercial for the Girls Gone Wild video that played over and over late at night). And I’d get this almost fiendish, feverish intensity from the whiskey, like I was sweaty-crazed and bouncing off the walls of my little room. And late at night I would come up with all these incredible ideas for the new direction I was going to go with my life. And I’d make all these incredible plans for what I was going to do next and how I was going to do it. But the next morning, when I woke up hungover, I’d realize they were just pipe dreams.
I spent New Year’s Eve 2010 in that little studio apartment in that mad state. As a new decade was about to unfold. . . The amazing thing is how quickly those 10 years flew by. Sheesh.
Acid Heroes 