islands

Happy New Year.

Last night I changed our blog description (and banner image and blog title font color). "High and Low," though still quite pertinent, felt too trod upon; So now: ", 2010." This is easy, to chock up our frenetics to a stated year and nothing else. But it's clean and real hot-lookin' and the more I speak it out--twenty ten--or read it--2010---EXCITING. I did learn this morning that "2010" will be the title of the forthcoming Whitney Biennial, which is a drag. I'm disappointed in how many of us get the same ideas. I blame the Internet? What am I doing?

The Aughts can't quite be over. Or that's what 20th century history has handed down. The way the very early eighties were so chicly, dimly beholden to the late seventies. The way the very early nineties were so vivid and danceable in the style of the mid-to-late eighties. But this past Thursday morning I was in Key West, a rented house on William Street. I woke at 4:30 with the wild chickens; there was no going back to sleep. I was positively vibrating. I took a swim and then a few pictures. I got back into bed. I read. I listened to my iPod, a bizarre, distended playlist I had cast right before my flight, mostly uplifting rap and sugar pop. I started to cry. Actual 'tears of joy,' a thing I don't know much about. They were sort of cool and didn't cause congestion or puffy eyes. I felt relieved from head to toe and grateful, really grateful, religious. It was over, the decade that bore me (and my best friends) from 14 to 24 was done, or nearly. It was the last day. I felt (and maybe it was an illusion but...) that I could pass through a stern (absolute), glass automatic door and proceed to watch from the other side...or not. I could remember neatly or engage a blank future tense. I no longer had to sit in a ghost trench. I was clear of the smells and sensations. And, most startling, I had, we had, survived the damn thing, the now sealed (or nearly sealed) container of ten essentially teenage years. The blue moon (pearl moon!) that night only stood to heighten my ecstatic religiosity, and at whatever juncture I could, from the backseat of the jeep or the patio set for dinner, I looked up and wished at it. And my wish was, as I suppose wishes ought to be, full of shining unscheduled prospects, whole new news, the future-for-real-this-time. Hedging the island was (still is) the Atlantic Ocean. The beaches are thin, hurricaned. The flat water/horizon/big sky is immediate, two rectangles, one light, one dark, seeming solids that say, "Yes, it goes on and on. You are here, and then there are other things too." Phew.