AND IT’S BEEN AWHILE

It's been awhile since I've had the time to sit in the dark. The rich smell of coffee. The dog bringing in pieces of it's breakfast to eat next to me in the den, the laundry room clearly a danger. The last time I sat, the humidity was keeping it's own zip code. Small pockets of crisp weather arriving only to disappear again. The small black space, the letters, white, appearing from without. Building the words. Building the ideas.

And it's been awhile.

I've missed these mornings. One can only get up so early and this time was sacrificed to other things. To important things for sure, but there's only so much  dark and quiet time, and one can only go to bed so early before one's family starts to lose patience with one's bed time.

Today though. Is mine.

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Pausing to google the lyrics to this Nickelback song. I realize. It's a a Staind song. I'm not sorry I had forgotten that. It takes me back to the back half of the 90's again. A time that hindsight tells me was an unraveling. When thinking of 90's culture, most of us stop at 94 or 95.  Or at least it feels like we should, the beginning of the decade crammed with so many changes. The fall of the Communism, the death of hair metal, the birth of grunge. Or maybe it's the grip of my early 20's. Or it's all of it.

It's funny to me how we assign things to historical periods. The 40's, WW2, the 50's the birth of the modern suburban family and rock and roll, the 60's, hippies and Vietnam. The 70's were disco and oil embargoes. The 80's Ronald Reagan, cocaine, new wave music. None of these generalizations tell the stories. I recently listened to a 34 hour long book on the 50's and can assure you. There was more. A lot. More.

The 90's have recently entered their heyday as the last great decade. This can't be true of course, but even my kids think of it as kinder. Gentler. There was prosperity. There was seemingly less world stress about nuclear annihilation.  We crushed a desert rat in a long weekend and the kids got Lollapalooza.

But towards the end there. As Y2K approached, it started to feel a little unhinged. Like the greasy version of Christina Aguilera. For the life of me I can't remember a song of hers. I mean one was actually called Dirty, but I remember not a note. Dirty. That's what 1995-1999 felt like.

After we all survived the last day of 1999 it's not like things got terribly better. We fumbled around for a year and change and then 9/11, which, likely changed everything a lot. Think of it as the COVID pandemic event of the early 21st century. War and hurricanes followed.

Not necessarily bookends. But giant bookmarks for sure. It's easy to remember the big ugly ones. But let us not forget the big awesome ones.

Marriage, kids, business, success, failure, fitness, achievement. All of these happened as well but we tend to sweep them away as the things that were happening when the other  bigger things were happening. This is the opposite of how it should be.

And it's been awhile.

Since we've been thankful. Appreciative of all the good we have.

Since we've framed our lives around the best that's happened verses the worst.

#hugsandhi5s