I had a long, meandering, overwrought newsletter that I was fiddling around with last night. This draft included, in no particular order: Frida Kahlo, Nelson Rockefeller, Leon Trotsky, Substack, and Chaac the Mayan god of rain. And then I sat down, on an air mattress that had lost most of its air, and none of the words meant anything anymore. Days of work: kaput. I did not want to think about Historical Materialism, or the false allure of techno-optimism: I wanted to lay in bed, pull the blankets flush over my chin, and listen to the sounds that pour in through the windows.
Every new year begins with grand plans, and ambitious resolutions. Very few of mine panned out in 2023. I wanted to read more good novels, finish more long-form fiction pieces, hike in the mountains regularly, practice my Duolingo Spanish, and eat fewer meals that left me feeling like Violet Beauregarde from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. But I scrolled more than ever this year. Marcel Proust was left untouched. I finished several stories, but never enough of them. I ate trash, because I am a human garbage can. And now I’m in Mexico, and have been two weeks, and I still break out in cold sweats when the waiters ask me about dessert. Things have not gone exactly as planned.
It’s in vogue to be skeptical of New Year’s resolutions. For some, they’re ‘psychologically ineffective’ or examples of a ‘capitalistic growth-above-all-else-mindset’. I disagree. I like waking up on the morning of January 1st with the renewed optimism of Mario jumping through the green pipe into a new world. There’s a period there in January where I set my alarm bright and early, eat fresh fruits in the morning, take brisk cold showers, stretch before lifting weights, drink less cheap beer, and eat in-season home-cooked meals that have actual colors on them. It’s a glorious time when anything feels possible. That happened this year longer than I expected. I felt steady, and decent, for a very long while. But then I didn’t. Cracks began to emerge. And then everything slid backward. That’s how it goes.
When the words of the old draft turned into ash in my mouth, I decided to look at this year’s photos from my phone. All 2,000 plus of them. January: fireworks, hikes, homecooked dinners, drinks with a lovely person looking across from me, a birthday celebration for my 29th year. And then I wanted to stop looking at the pictures and hurl my phone at the moon. February was nice. The last nice of that stretch that I had. And then March. April. May. The meals were simple, frozen, or take-out. My selfies were… peculiar. I wasn’t really smiling in them. My eyes were baggy and hollow-looking. The backdrop of the pictures began to change. The lovely person from earlier was no longer in the photographs. Many of the pictures were lists, wifi-passwords, snapshots of piles of items and cardboard boxes, and then an empty room in an entirely different place. And then a summer that couldn’t be caught by an iPhone camera: grueling humidity in an old shoebox apartment, the sky outside orange and red from wildfire smoke. The lens did also not capture how I had to bore a new hole into my leather belt, or how long I would lay in bed on some of those weekend evenings just staring: at the walls, or the mulberry trees outside, or nothing at all.
But the camera did capture some little spurts of life. Rose bushes at the tail end of September. Baseball games, sitting alone at the U.S. Open, the Cascade mountains back home in the Pacific Northwest, streaming rivers that cut through the woods, tubs and tubs of tzatziki, jack o’ lanterns, smiling friends, backgammon games, new books, the Christmas lights strung across two-story homes in Queens, the streets of Mexico City overwhelmed with red poinsettias, murals of smiling Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, views from the top of ancient Mayan temples, long iguanas sunbathing on stone mesas, piñatas swinging from clotheslines.
I’m glad, too, for what technology wasn’t able to capture. 2023 was the year that I first read Karl Ove Knausgård, and Elena Ferrante, and many others. I made some new friends. I hiked mountains, and felt the air whip through my lungs as I skipped down through the fog. I listened and cried to John Prine. I played the same Josephine Baker record on vinyl about… 100 times. I dusted off my desk, and began to write again. I even tolerated some of the stuff that came out. For some reason, I restarted blogging, and kind of liked it. I saw dozens of my favorite houseplants thrive in the direct sunlight that my bedroom gets in the new apartment. I watched the sunrise with morning coffee from my reading chair. I saw Chicago again, and the bookstore that I used to live above when I was a stupid little shit at age 19. I made my family try malort. I sat in Icelandic steam baths in the middle of winter with someone dear, and felt contentment. I walked 60 miles in five days in Mexico City. I watched groups of kids playing football in the street here in the Yucatan, and after I said Hola one of the boys mimicked my deep American voice and replied Hullo. I feel old, in ways that I didn’t expect on January 1st. But I’m no longer afraid: I’ve embraced what I can’t change.
And tomorrow I’ll start all over again. I’ll wake up early on January 1st, 2024, open up my notebook, and sketch big plans. This year I’ll get some things publishable, tighten the flab on my hips, figure out how to be good with money, read great long books again, write letters to friends, eat more veggies and fruits, and finally figure out where I belong. Things won’t pan out, entirely. I will stumble, a lot. Who knows what it will be all for. But I’ll try to remember what Steinbeck wrote, in East of Eden: “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” Perfection no longer exists for me. This will be a year of hopeful good, little things. Thanks for being one of those for me.