2004 Brain Dump

My first reaction, upon thinking back on 2004, is that not a damn thing changed, that it was just a marking of time for 365 days while our globe whipped once more around our sun.

Warren Ellis, on one of the last entries in his now-defunct Die Puny Humans 'blog, described 2004 thusly:

2004: the year blogging got boring and the year commenting systems broke. The year Bit Torrent got really big and the year the Motion Picture Association Of America somehow became a world power. The year Indymedia finally managed to frighten someone and the year MoveOn.org managed to convince no-one. The year of podcasting, and the year no-one had anything to say. The year no-one paid any attention to Mperia while labels like 555 starved to death -- but that's okay, because people with day jobs tell us that art on the net should be free anyway. The year I actually read someone on a website say "I want hospitals to compete for my business." I find myself desperately looking forward to that man's first tumour. The year that the half of America the coasts sneer at as "flyover country" voted George W Bush back in because, according to one of his creatures, "they like the way he walks, they like the way he talks, they like the way he points at things." The year the rest of us laughed at the electoral college system, while looking uncomfortably at our own stark lack of choices in our next general elections. The year I heard Air America radio and realised the left wing in America is beyond doomed. The year I saw The Daily Show and understood that Jon Stewart and his team realise that too. The year that the ambient sound of Britain became a collective mumbling noise. The year I discovered videoblogging and the year I discovered that almost no-one knows what to do with it.

2004: another step to the boneyard in the continuing Death Of Western Culture. You're welcome.

So, stuff happened if you write comic books.

Last night I went to see Q and not U at the Black Cat, only to find the show sold out. No matter, it turns out, because I serve enough of the people who work there their coffee that I not only got waved in, but then got free beer once inside. Chris talked about how he felt like 2004 was a year of percolating and gathering strength for DC music, how he felt like 2005 was going to be the year everything came to a head and DC would explode all over the place. I dunno if I bought it. I dunno if the crowd bought it. But hey, infectious optimism is one of the hallmarks of their shows.

Maybe I should think of oh fo' as rebuilding time for me... but isn't that what 2003 was supposed to have been?

just for the list here. In 2004 I:

• Blundered into yet another romantic charliefoxtrot
• Got my car smashed
• Moved into my current basement digs
• Sold my car
• Didn't go on a single vacation, hardly left DC
• Did not so much as kiss a single girl
• Spent a large portion of autumn in a depressed cocoonfest during which I tried (successfully in some cases) to burn as many bridges as I could
• Voted, for all the good it did
  
• Started writing again in November, attempting NaNoWriMo yet again, crashed out and hardly wrote at all in December, currently trying to regain momentum

I keep thinking there must have been more to it than that... mainly too many iterations of the old painfully familiar two-step of reaching out trying to meet new people, to make some meaningful contact, then retreating in a panic as soon as it seems like I might.

So, there have been better years.

There have been worse. It wasn't 1999, for example.

Tomorrow I should eat some peez and kahbahzh and sit around thinking about what to do to make '05 (the year I turn 30! oh dread!) less of a waste.

- posted by Bob @ 2:27 AM