Noughties Highlights #1: Y2K

I think that the mass hysteria concerning the coming of the new century because of the computing code issues around the changeover from 19__ to 20__ almost epitomizes how the decade played out. It started with the terror of our capitalist structure collapsing without computer monitoring/infrastructure and mutated into a different beast altogether after the assassination of the twin towers in NYC. Y2K was a joke; much as the terrorist manhunt is a joke. The reaction of people, especially in America, of stocking piling supplies, etc. was a bit much. I remember New Year's eve of 1999 and getting completely wasted off whiskey sours with old friends Bradly Vickers and Lindsay MacPhee in a little over a hour or so. Whiskey sours are so tasty regardless of alcohol content and the classic binge drinking I ended the 90s with are symptomatic of the way I spend the last part of that decade. There is something about growing up in Rural NS and alcohol/marijuana abuse that seemed to gel when I was a teenager. This continued into my early twenties and still lingers sometimes to this day. Drinking heavily was our social activity, and on Dec. 31st 1999 I was true to form. My brother Doug had this huge house party in his apartment on Kent St. in Halifax's south end that he shared with old friends Ryan Peterson, Steve "Doctor" MacDonald and the aforementioned Mr. Vickers. I managed to get blackout drunk, puke all over the front of my shirt (+ their bathroom and their tub), passed out for a hour or so then somehow got a second wind just before we rang in the New Year. A mass exodus from Doug's apartment towards Grand Parade in downtown Halifax left us strolling down Barrington St. in great expectation of the end of the world when our clocks struck 12. For some reason, I remember expecting the power to just go out and us all just to be standing in the street left wondering when/if it would ever come back on & to be caught up in a mass drunken looting session the likes of which you only see in post apocalyptic films. In reality, I remember us braying out that Y2K was going to destroy us all only to have the biggest anticlimax I'd experienced in life up to that point-- after all that hype, absolutely NOTHING happened. The Noughties were meekly born despite the apocalyptic fanfare but a decade was born that would leave its inauspicious birth far behind. Never in human history would the very technology we were so afraid of crashing down around us and leaving us cut off from everything bring us the capability of coming so close to each other. A little thing called Google was about to take the fledgling "internet" to places that could not be imagined by those outside the realm of computing science. Access to information, access to each others lives, were about to shape a decade like no other before it.

Counting down to the end of the Noughties

Quite funny what a year can bring with all of its peregrinations. I wrote that last entry as I way to kick start my life when I was in a place where I felt like I was floundering far, far from the shore of what I consider a normal life to be. In a way, simply writing that out then disappearing from this blog again until today was the spark I was looking for. Writing has always been therapeutic for me but I've never been able to commit myself to a steady flow on ink on paper. I tend to have a nadir then reboot myself in a different direction by pouring my feelings out on paper in a burst, always promising to continue in the near future but never committing to that. In a way that is a metaphor for how I've spent the Noughties; searching, searching, searching for answers but never living in solutions. Very backwards. However, considering the various traumas that this last decade has served me up, I think that the way I've handled things was my defensive mechanism against myself. Living with a mental illness is an extreme challenge; coming to terms with psychological break downs is THE necessary step to being able to life a normal life after those episodes. That process takes TIME. Until that healing takes place living with a mental illness is impossible. It really is that debilitating. Trust me, I know, I've been through it three times in the Noughties and have had to rebound from each one. As this decade closes, I feel like I'm ready for the challenge of living with my disease instead of suffering from it. A huge difference in scope. Like I say, implementing solutions instead of searching for more problems to try to find more solutions and on and on and on in a cycle that has in its own way stolen much of the past decade from me in terms of experiences I had always envisioned myself having when I was young, naive, and unaware of the capacity of my own thoughts, and potently, the significance of my emotions and how they are sculpted by what I think about. To clear that up, I think feelings are your barometer to how your thoughts harmonize with what IS, not what you think what IS. That dichotomy is the key to understanding how mental illness can sneak up on you, it is a deficiency where intellectually you override you emotional self without a fail safe button in place like a disease of the mind free person has. That person catches themselves and adjusts there imbalance. I don't do that without effort. I don't have that autonomous capacity so I have to consciously make adjustments, which is hard work because my mind tends to focus intensely of things outside of my body. It has hard to rein myself in and just be without letting my thoughts start up there engines again. It still is.