December Is Blog Month/Twenty-teens We Hardly Knew Ya/I Have Plenty To Say and Will Get Around To Saying It Eventually/Bandwagon Packer Fans and Other Signs of the Apocalypse

To borrow something a friend said to me recently, things have never been better and never been harder.

Doors have opened for me in California that I never could have anticipated when I moved here. (The one that remains closed was wholly predictable.) I get to work at playing, mostly with musicians who are as good or better than I am. I've been able to graduate from Valley Boy to Gentrifier. After years of uneasy compromise I've been able to return to my roots and ditch my car. I've replaced basketball with Scrabble, to the great benefit of my knees and ankles and who knows what other body parts I might have ruined.

Things couldn't be much better, but they could get much worse at any time. It is not pessimistic to say that, just realistic. There's no meritocracy to be found here, just chaotic systems and revolving doors. Uncertainty and insecurity reign even among very successful people. This mirrors the concurrent inability to establish and agree upon basic facts in the political arena. If it once was hip and new-agey to Live In The Moment, this choice has since become a stifling imposition which precludes setting goals or even knowing what realistic goals would be. Radical empiricism and anomic strain carry the day. I think often of the role that trust plays in behavioral economics and wonder how we are managing to have an economy here at all. I am being conditioned to treat successful people with more suspicion than respect and to accept that reaction in others as I've moved up the food chain.

Things could be worse, but they could also be better. Just in the last six months there have been two appalling train-vehicle collisions along the line that I take to work. A local LA Scrabble player whom no one would suspect of such a thing was accused of cheating and kicked out of the Nationals. The vaunted diversity of Southern California increasingly seems only skin deep. US life expectancy has declined three years in a row. There are rear-guard hipsters and bandwagon Packer fans everywhere. Something is very wrong.

The freelance life may be supremely insecure, but the cycling between frenetic overcommitment and chilly underemployment is ideal for creative artists who are anything less than robotic in their work habits. I understood this in the moment and I understand it even better now. Working at playing has intensified my extra-musical interests, dulled my musical ones, and left less time for both. It has helped me understand why so many doctors and techies seem to have listened to so many more records than I have. When work is scarce it never feels like an imposition; as I write this, meanwhile, I am less confident than ever before that I can run the gauntlet of Blog Month given the slivers of time I'll have to piece together in order to make it happen. Stay tuned for the pretty much meaningless conclusion?