Vice Grip

If I were to craft a capsule statement to represent the Terrible Tens in the context of my own life, it is this: The man I kissed at midnight to ring in 2010 is dead.

I have lived at 20 addresses, that I can remember, in three different states since 2010 began. I was effectively homeless more times than I can count. I have lost a whole pile of old friends to bizarre and untimely deaths. I gave up on my family of origin and spent the better part of the decade grieving that as well as my own lost naivete, which had long believed that you could always fix things with people so long as you were alive but had finally come to understand the corollary as well — that you can’t fix anything that involves you and another person by yourself; they have to, at a minimum, allow you to do so.

Everything sucked and was way harder than it needed to be for the large majority of the past 10 years. And plenty, even most, of that was my own doing, my own poor choices and bad planning, yet a nontrivial amount was the seemingly malicious doing of others. Apparently when your life craters out you start meeting a lot of extremely crappy humans down in the ditch with you, and they’re happy to knock you down to stand on your face — or even just for the hell of it.

People come and go. Homes and jobs and money, friends and relationships and enemies, it’s all ephemeral. We plan, life laughs. We’re all down here in the theater of the absurd, acting like all of our shit really matters while the world burns around us and we largely ignore it.

We could have had a female president but we got a rapist instead.

The last ten years of my youth were the worst ten years of my life.

The next ten years, so help me, will be the best. No one can make them such except for me, and here I am, 94 minutes into the new year, vowing to do so.

I cried, hard hot tears, two days ago when I read the news that John Lewis, an actual icon of civil rights and American liberty, had stage 4 pancreatic cancer.

Before I started writing here, I pulled up “Endless Summer Nights” by Richard Marx on YouTube, because little tween me had absolutely adored that song back in the day and he’d performed on… well, one of the several shows I flipped through earlier this evening, waiting for the ball to drop, bringing him to the very front of my ADD-addled mind. Autoplay proceeded to run through Roxette and The Cranberries and The Cars before I even realized what was happening.

One of the things no one warns you about regarding middle age is that all of your heroes die, and you have to watch, helpless, while it happens.

Jim Henson was the first big one for me. Then Kurt Cobain. Princess Diana. Jeff Buckley. Phil Hartman. All happened when I was younger, tragic preventable accidents afflicting people far too young.

Now it’s natural causes. Cancers, heart attacks. Older people simply winding down. Kurt Vonnegut was hard for me. David Bowie wrecked me for days. Leonard Cohen, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Elijah Cummings. And more accidents: Robin Williams, Prince, Whitney Houston.

“And then George Michael died on Christmas!” my friend Zoe shouted at me over text, lamenting the miserable year 2016 had been.

My friend David, who planted a huge wet kiss right on my lips, tongue and all, at the pub as we rang in 2010. His mustache tickled. I loved that guy. His hugs felt like warm flannel blankets.

Aimee, a woman I’d gone to high school with but only became friends with as an adult thanks to Facebook. We talked about everything. We mostly talked about how much time we’d wasted not being friends.

Kate, one of the best friends I’ve ever had. She drove me crazy but she loved me and I loved her. I remember, one time, spending a girls’ night at her house, making strawberry shortcake, her standing over her tiny sink, slicing moldy bits off the berries, sing-song saying, “Let’s not put the penicillin in our snack.”

I don’t understand how we do it. How we lose so much and keep waking up every day. How we keep hoping.

Humans are amazing.

While I was still planning this blog — an ongoing process even now, really — I talked about it with my best friend Beatrice. I talked about how I’d quit caffeine, how I’d quit smoking, how I was trying to make smart financial choices, how I was working on building a better life for myself, and how I wanted to write about all of that, but I hadn’t come up with a focus yet.

Later in the same conversation, we were talking about politics, and I said the phrase “vise grip.” B interrupted me to wax enthusiastic about “Vice Grip” as a title for my blog, which I’d never considered titling. “Get a grip on your vices,” she said. It sounded like a good idea and I liked the play on words.

Ultimately, though, I know that is not what I will be doing here. I would not recommend my path through life thus far to anyone. Even the choices I am most proud of worked out for me only thanks to a wild amount of luck. I am no one to teach others how to quit their vices. I am no one to teach anyone how to live their lives.

The other thing B said, though, was this: “Your writing is how you catch people. If you write it, they will come.”

And I think she might be right. Writing comes as naturally to me as breathing: I have been doing it for as long as I can remember and I can’t recall a single day in my life when I didn’t write something. I am interested in nearly everything, okay at a vast many things, and a natural at just one: communicating, especially in print.

So I plan to use this space to communicate a whole range of things to you. I will be your supportive best friend, your enthusiastic mentor, your cautionary tale. I can’t wait for you to join me while I tell you everything I know about everything: relationships, cooking, personal finance, politics, homesteading, genealogy, music, The Golden Age of Television (right now! We are living it!), and everything else that captures my fancy.

Blogs about a little bit of everything are no longer in vogue. Everyone has a brand, a specialty, a focus, but that is simply not me. I contain multitudes — and a lot of ADD. But I hope you’ll join me anyway, while I create a better decade than the last and share all the lessons I’ve learned so far.

See you soon.