I don't know anyone who says anything other than “good riddance” to the first decade of the 21st century. I know lots of people who hope it was the anomaly, that the rest of the century will get better. I know a probably-equal number who think it’s only going to get worse.

Personally, the decade was rock bottom and tip top. This was the decade I became a Real Grownup. I started it gliding along with a certain degree of dissatisfaction with success. I’d just stumbled into my new career as a web designer, and my new marriage to my first wife. I was six months away from rock bottom in that marriage but had no idea what was coming or why, only that the unstable place I was in wasn’t going to hold. On this subject, the less said, the better. That new career was subject to the whipsaw vagaries of the Dot-com boom — although in the long run I’ve never been worried about jobs or work or money in quite the way I probably should be.

In 2000, that all cracked up. The marriage wobbled through two separations and a little ugliness until it dissipated altogether in 2002. The cool new career ping-ponged between Real Jobs and freelance and outright unemployment, until I regained my footing at Curiosity (also in 2002). 2002 was the year I learned that I was boy who never quite figured out how to be a man. It took breaking my marriage totally and irreparably to figure it out. The pecularity of modern American manhood is that it’s defined in contrast to womanhood, which is all backwards. Manhood isn’t the state of not being a woman, it’s the state of not being a boy. Anyway, by the end of 2002 I was stable, back on my feet.

2002 was also the year I began riding my bike. A lot. I have one piece of advice for someone who wants to be happier: ride your bike.

Three really important things happened in 2003. I shaved my head. I met Jenny. I put Sitka to sleep. I didn’t realize it at the time, but those three things taught me to release vanity, embrace vulnerability, and accept loss. Together they taught me the only important thing I’ve ever learned: my life isn’t just about me. When Orion was born I learned that the rest of my life isn’t about me at all. The rest of my life until I die is about my children and their children. My haircut is not even remotely important any more.

The glide path of my life turned upward after 2003. Jenny and I married in 2005 — probably my favorite year of the decade, if you really pressed me. We moved to China in 2006, and back in 2007. Orion joined us in 2008. The only two years in which nothing much happened to me personally were 2004 and 2009.

So that was me: pretty good decade I guess. A little bumpy, but the bumps made it good, ultimately.

Impersonally, this was an awful decade for America. (It was a lot better for 2-3 billion other people, though, something I won’t touch on.)

I won’t dwell long on politics except to note that no one got what they wanted. The nation didn’t get the president it voted for in 2000, but we did in 2004. By 2006, we had serious buyers’ remorse. It sucked elephant balls to be a liberal this past decade, but it had to really grate to be a conservative. Conservatives got everything they ever wanted for six or so years and it was an utter failure. I wonder if the resulting cognitive dissonance isn’t driving the utter batcrap crazy nonsense coming out of conservative mouths these days.

Lots of people will want to think September 11, 2001, was a nadir for America (and maybe the world), but I think in a couple of decades it’ll look like the 21st equivalent of Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination. A big deal only for the stuff that happened around it. Really big objects are in motion, globally, stuff that only crackpots and visionaries discussed ten years ago. Global warming, peak oil, globalization, the shift of global capital eastward and southward, the imminent plateau of human population, the emergence of the infosphere as a pervasive element of society. Ferdinand’s death didn’t start the Great War; the Great War was the first, protracted battle of World War II. The whole mess fell out of the final crackup of the ancient world order of empires built by monarchs.

I wonder whether the 2000s weren’t so much the first decade of the 21st century as the last decade of the 20th. The 19th century didn’t really end until 1918. And then it got worse.

The Internet and mobile phones — the democratization of information, actually — are quietly and relentlessly euthanizing whole industries. 2009 was the year people stopped consuming printed matter. Think hard about what that means. 20 years ago, if you wanted to know a random piece of information — for example, who played the second Catwoman in the Batman TV show with Adam West, for example — it would require several minutes, perhaps hours, of legwork. Minimally, a trip to the library. That’s a measure of how free information has become: we no longer rely on institutions or interlocutors to tell us what apartments are for rent, what a used car should cost, or how much our neighbors’ houses are worth. When people say “information is power,” there’s a concrete case. Twenty years ago, I was at the mercy of the used car guy. I had to hope he was honest, or I had to do days of expensive legwork to keep him honest.

The democratization of information will have consequences. Lots of people depend on that friction for their paychecks. In just a few minutes I can name a dozen or so professions fast becoming obsolete: publisher, newspaper editor, used-car salesman, newspaper carrier, ad buyer, payroll clerk, shipping clerk, bank teller, real estate agent, travel agent (anyone with “agent” in their title, really).

On the other hand, and this really blows my mind, my job title didn’t even exist when I graduated high school 20 years ago. The industry didn’t even exist. The words “web designer” were a meaningless nonsequitur. Man did I luck out there.

All this change was in the air 10 years ago, but most people overlooked the “destruction” part of “creative destruction.” The 90s had been pretty good — pretty great, actually...remember when gas was 89¢/gal? — and the 80s were nearly as good. The 70s sucked a little, sure, but Disco wasn’t as bad as everyone remembered, and black people could finally sit in the front half of the bus. 1975 was the point at which the disparity between rich and poor was lowest in the United States. (I wasn’t alive in the 60s so I can’t tell you whether anyone felt nostalgia for the passing decade on Dec. 31, 1969.) 1999 was coming at the tail-end of 50+ years of economic, political, and military stability for the United States.

I understood this, growing up, in an indirect way. When I read about Henry Huggins in 1979, the life he lived in 1949 was pretty substantially like mine. No kid lives like that in 2009.

So this is where “personal” hits “impersonal.” I’ve led a blessed life: a trouble-free childhood, my teenage and twenty-something years no worse than usual, a career I stumbled into by a fluke of history. All the troubles of my life — the divorce, mostly — are entirely of my own doing. This blessed life is a result of a lottery I won at birth. I was smart enough to be born in America, smart enough to have middle class parents with a good marriage, smart enough to be born into a largish extended family in a prosperous midwest state. All at the point in history when America was doing great and we had plenty of everything we needed: energy, water, topsoil, forests, fisheries, family farms, colleges, factories, credit cards, doctors. We still have doctors and colleges in good supply, I’m not too worried about those. Some of that stuff — e.g. factories and family farms — we’ve surrendered more or less intentionally through economic relationships, so we can get them back. Most of the rest we’ve simply eaten up and crapped out. However much there may be left of topsoil, or forests, or energy, or fresh water, we aren’t making more of it nearly fast enough. For 50 years, America’s been on a pretty effortless upward path; but there’s nothing in history or our present situation to suggest we can rely on momentum alone. I think we need to grow up a little and get a little serious about what America can do (halt global warming) and can’t do (build shopping malls in Kabul). But none of that is gonna fix itself, the way my life just kinda sorta turned out awesome. I think the “era of stuff just turning out awesome” is over.

Before Orion I used to say: I could imagine a heaven no better than to live my life again. But that’s not the heaven I want any more. Heaven to me now would be: I want Orion (and his sibling[s], and their kids) to live a life as good as mine. I mean this literally, by the way, not figuratively. I would gladly surrender personal immortality in paradise for the guarantee that my progeny get to live happy, fulfilling, plentiful lives.

From a romantic perspective, I want that life to have the exact elements I had: snow in the winter, trees to climb, bears in the mountains, paper routes and bicycles, cheap college with cheap beer, travel to fun places, no military draft, and a little dose (but not too much!) of free love. But that world isn’t gonna happen (see above re: creative destruction, stuff in short supply), and nothing as good as that will happen again unless we make it happen.

If a really strange kidnapper ever asked me at gunpoint to name my favorite song, I think I’d say “Once in a Lifetime”

Everyone knows this song as an anthem of midlife crisis. (“This is not my beautiful house.”) A few people pick up on the existential theme. (“Same as it ever was.”) I think they’re missing that this is a song about the irrational absurdity of natural reality, which is utterly indifferent to a human life. (“Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground.”) Byrne himself makes this connection explicit in the video, and in his twitchy marionnette dance, evoking images of voudoun possession — the rational mind completely consumed by a primal animism. He also stares in the depth of infinity, and comes away with what Milan Kundera called the unbearable lightness of being. Against the unimaginable span of infinity, the ethereal nonsubstance of our lives provides us with liberation. “Time isn’t holding us, time isn’t after us.”

For years — from 1980 until today, in fact, when I looked up the actual lyrics on the Internet — I thought that last verse was “Time isn’t holding us, time is ineffluous.” There is no such word as “ineffluous” (I checked), but there should be.

• dig
• dada
• mama
• big
• baby
• mine
• banana
• apple
• cheese
• more
• mouth
• eye
• that
• up
• down
• dog
• ball
• bubble
• no
• Bob [the Builder]
• duck
• owie
• uh oh
• hi
• bye

animal and machine sounds:

• dog panting
• cat meow
• sheep baaa
• cow moo
• duck quack
• pig snort
• fish gulp
• horse gallop
• lion roar
• peacock yelp
• bird caw
• car/motorcycle vroom
• airplane/ helicopter zoom
• beep beep

So this morning a guy yelled at me for signalling a legal lane change.

I made a (signalled, legal) lane change into the far right lane on a one-way street. Then I noticed that on the next block, this lane was closed for construction. So I immediately signalled a change back into the lane I had been in. I noticed the car that I had just changed in front of was immediately to my left (i.e. in my line of travel), so, while signalling my lane change I gave him a little wave-wave gesture meaning “you pull ahead so I can pull in behind you.”

At which point he rolled down the window and shouted at me: “You just changed out of this lane!” (For the record, he was driving an Acura, which I’m fast learning is the preferred car make of egotists with entitlement issues.)

I knew he couldn’t see the lane ahead like I could (cyclists have good visual command of the roadway, being up at SUV height and having no blind spots). So I said, as politely as I could while being yelled at, in traffic, with only one hand on my handlebars: “The lane ahead is closed, you fucking moron.” (OK, I left out the last part).

He dropped back (!) so I changed lanes in front of him. As we passed the obstruction I pointed at the lane closure and mimed “This is what I was talking about. You fucking moron.” I don’t know how well this translated, especially that last part.

But here’s what gets me: everything I did was completely, totally legal. Courteous, even. And we were all moving at the same (downtown rush hour) speed: about 13mph. There were a great many nonlegal, noncourteous things I could have done in this situation, including ride through the lane closure past the construction equipment, cut the guy off without signalling, or ride down the lane stripes. I didn’t, but got yelled at as if I had.

On my last few blocks into work, I tried to parse exactly what the Acura guy wanted me to do, and the best I can figure is “vanish from the face of the Earth.” Not just me, specifically, but all traffic between his present location and his intended destination. It’s just that I was on a bike and therefore a) unprotected and b) available for yelling at in a way I wouldn’t have been were I in a car. So he felt he could yell at me without fear of retribution.

So this reminds me of two stories.

Story the First

When I was in elementary school, all the teachers held the boys in my grade late one day. Someone, they said, had pooped in a urinal in the boys’ room, and we would all be punished until the culprit(s) stepped forward. No one stepped forward, so we were all punished. (I forget the punishment.) Indignant, all the fifth grade boys met at recess to find the bad guy, but again, no one stepped forward. While we were meeting, some of the popular girls came over and asked what we were doing, so we told them. They started laughing: because one of them had pooped in a urinal one day. (In thinking about it now, I wonder if she — one of the really pretty teacher pet types who teachers would never imagine doing such a thing, but who was one of the chief psychological tormentors on the playground — hadn’t done this particular deed to achieve just this effect: to get some boy(s) in trouble.)

A few days later, a couple of the more-troublesome boys pooped on the floor in the girls’ bathroom. The logic was flawless: if we’re going to be punished regardless of our behavior, we might as well do the things we’re being punished for. Of course, we were all punished again, but this time we knew who did it, and why, and we felt triumphant, not indignant.

So the next time you see a cyclist blow a red light, remember this story about fifth graders pooping, and my altercation with the Acura guy.

Story the Second

At some point in the 1980s, when systemic homelessness was a relatively new problem, I recall watching a talking head TV show about the subject. One of the panelists was a lady Reaganite, someone in the Phyllis Schafly mold. Hell, it might have been Phyllis Schafly. She offered no useful solutions to the problem of homelessness beyond, basically, “people shouldn’t allow themselves to be homeless.” When pressed about confounding factors like drug addiction or mental illness, she had no quick answer and kind of got flustered. She blurted out something like “if we quit feeding the homeless, pretty soon they’ll all go away.” The subtext was obvious: they would either clean up, or die. (This might actually be a workable solution, I dunno. This story isn’t really about homelessness, so lets don’t talk about that.)

Her “solution” to homelessness was exactly the same “solution” that many noisy anti-bicycle commentators (and I imagine Acura Guy) offer: ”couldn’t you all just vanish?” This is the de facto behavior of many drivers. They cut me off, hook me while turning, jump stop signs in front of me, refuse to yield right of way. They fail to see bicycles as legitimate traffic. They may (like Acura Guy) hold this view consciously, which is bad enough, but I have enough faith in humanity to assume most of the people who honk and yell at me won’t, when pressed, actually murder me.

But most drivers hold this view unconsciously, like the woman who damn near right-hooked me (i.e. turned right across my line of travel) this very morning at the Vermont/Capital Highway intersection. She wasn’t mad at me — she didn’t even recognize my humanity enough to hate me. I was not even worth looking for. These are the people that scare me, although they don’t make me nearly as mad. I have such encounters — which could quickly injure or kill me — probably two or three times a week. I’m still alive after commuting by bike in this city for nearly a decade, because I have to make the sad assumption that I actually am invisible, unless I’m directly in front of someone’s bumper, pissing them off. I’d rather have a motorist angrily acknowledge my existence than accidently kill me. Equal road access isn’t just an abstract principle; to someone on a bicycle it’s a matter of life and death.

In the “war” between cyclists and motorists (which I think is bogus, BTW, but let’s just play along for now), cyclists “win” if they continue to exist. Conversely, motorists will “win” when all the cyclists have either given up and quit riding, or died gruesome deaths in traffic collisions. These are not morally equivalent outcomes.

So the next time you hear a pro-cycling commentator bluster about equal access to the roads, remember this story about the lady Reaganite and homelessness, and my altercation with the Acura guy.

By which I mean: they don't understand basic principles of operating a motor vehicle.

This has been a painful realization for me. For most of my life, most bad drivers were people who either knew the law but chose to drive otherwise, or who simply didn't know the law. It was only a tiny subset of drivers who showed no indication of, for example, the size of their vehicle, or how long it would take to bring it to a stop, or how to park. (Not parallel park, just regular park. Like the kind of parking where you just point the front of your car at the place you want to park it, and then put it in that place. I see someone stymied by this intractable puzzle almost daily.)

The last couple of years I've noticed a rash of people who not only don't know the law, they show no clue of knowing how to drive. They don't know how wide their cars are, whether their turn signals are on, how fast they're going, whether the stoplight is green, or other basic driving facts.

I don't think we need to outlaw texting, or improve road safety with hinky methods with roundabouts or somesuch. I just think that getting a driver's license should be at least as hard as passing seventh grade.