It would be a nasty disservice to 2008 to call it a so-so—or worse, ugly—year of my life. For one, I kept a job and had been happy with it most of the time. A great guy stuck it out with me despite many, many unhappy facts about me. The family won many bouts against sickness and discontent. I dealt with scathing words, anxiety, physical pains, slight stagnation in the intellectual department, and participation in some unresolved hullabaloos. I didn’t come out of everything unharmed, but there’s comfort knowing there had been events in my life; I had some real action going on(some of B-movie quality) and I’m actually looking forward to some more this 2009.
My yearend read is Malachy McCourt’s A Monk Swimming. The memoir deals with running wild in life, the carefree narrative a far cry from the melodrama of a poor family in Limerick, Ireland who had nothing but deaths, a father with more love for the pint than for his life, cold sores, empty stomachs and pissed-on beddings, as told by Malachy’s brother, Frank McCourt (no matter what they say of his later books, he has already sealed his grandeur in Angela’s Ashes).
Malachy’s adventures in NYC circa the 1950s—drunkenness, divorce and heartbreaks, the world of theater and prison and dark saloons, and smuggling gold in different parts of the world—dwarf every little ugly detail I can call to mind about myself and my life, and there’s something about it that reeks of hopefulness, of wanting to experience how it is to be alive to the last drop of blood and booze. And, of course, one of the strong points of the book (with Malachy a poor Limerick slumboy to a bit of a celebrity in NY to a struggler once again) is if the universe has a weird sense of humor, why can’t you?
Indeed the best New Year greeting I received was sent today at 9:30 a.m., saying “Happy New Year, live life.” Perhaps nothing could be as bad as a 2009 with no misery to anticipate, no emails to be written, no books to be devoured, and no fears to be accounted for. The idea of being alive is an intoxicating thought in itself, meriting fireworks and trumpets and human noise during a rather rainy situation.
Happy New Year and live life.
