The Year We Held Our Breath

In case you missed it: I have demonetized this Substack in protest against their Nazi Problem and will be transitioning off of Substack over the next 30 days unless this platform changes course. Click here for more info.

2023 felt a lot like halftime to me: not done with the game, but taking a bit of a breather. We ate our orange wedges and drank our gatorade. We got our pep talk from the coach. We exchanged nervous, furious glances with the team huddled at the other end of the field. No one is quite sure of the score. Everyone feels like they’re losing.

2020 was the most cataclysmic single year culturally, politically, and spiritually in living memory. The air was still so thick with dust in 2021 that it was impossible to see the new shape of things. That dust settled in 2022: a year of endings without resolution. COVID transitioned from pandemic to endemic. Most people ditched the masks and returned to what might from the outside, if you squint, look like a pre-pandemic life, though everything inside of us has changed and nothing will ever truly be the same. The January 6th hearings were winding down and, despite optimistic pronouncements from professional goalpost-movers, it was already clear that the hearings had failed to re-establish consensus reality within the United States. We weren’t sure whether the Republicans were going to nominate Trump, DeSantis, or a secret third thing, but it was clear that the GOP was Trump’s party in every way that mattered; if not the outright property of the man himself, than certainly as the thing he made them.

2023 was the year we waited to see what would happen next year. A lot of very important things happened, sure, but we won’t know exactly which things they were and whether they were good or bad for another decade or two, when the historians look back and piece the story together. Meanwhile, all of us are trapped within the tyranny of the fourth dimension, doing our best to prepare for a journey that no one has yet taken. This was a year of stocking up and reassessing and gathering our strength. Of making important decisions about food, bullets, and oxen before setting off across America in a pixelated wagon in search of Oregon and/or dysentary.

The year is ending. Time to hit the trail.

Last year, when I wrote my annual NYE overshare, I talked about The Prestige and the addictive terror of betting everything on a coin flip, night after night, in the name of gaining an audience. This year, I find myself thinking about Stephen R Donaldson’s Gap Cycle, the only science fiction series I have ever truly loved and one that comes with a dump-truck full of content warnings: a deranged sadistic masterpiece that I cannot in good conscience recommend to anyone.

Mild spoilers ahead: one of the main characters, Davies, has a mother who, in the name of survival, severely abused an illegal brain implant that allowed her to manually program her emotional state at will. As a result, Davies is addicted to unnaturally high levels of stimulations from the moment he is born. This comes in handy as the series progresses, since his world, even more than our own, is absolutely fucked, but it also makes him very weird when things calm down. He does not know how to calm down. He does not know what calm is.

I’ve thought a lot about Davies this year.

COVID changed everyone’s lives forever. Hard to overstate how radically it changed mine. I was reborn on May 28th, 2020, and everything that has happened to me since then still feels like a fever dream. The person I was in 2019 could not even have imagined the life I live now, never mind taken the steps necessary to get there. Now I’m here, and things are calm, and I am learning that I, too, do not know what calm is. I am not sure what to do when things are not on fire.

Two moments of relevation, this year. The first came in October during a brutal depressive episode. I had this vision of a pebble kicked by God. It sailed through the air, imbued with kinetic energy from on high, and hallucinated that it was chosen. It hit the ground, it bounced a few times…it came to rest. It waited to move again, eagerly anticipating the feeling of divine power once again moving it forward. But God had moved on. The energy was gone. The pebble lay inert again, one of many, lying motionless on a wide, gravel road.

The second revelation occurred at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a friend about a month later, just before Thanksgiving. We sat for about half an hour, staring at “Two Horses” by Charles Ray:

Some art photographs well, and some art has to be seen in person, and some art has to be seen in person on half a tab of acid, and if you ever get the chance to go to the Met I highly recommend finding this sculpture in Gallery 918 on the second floor of the Modern Wing, sitting on the bench opposite of it, and letting your mind wander for a while.

It is hard to imagine a more intensely stationary object than a 10’x14’ slab of granite featuring a bas-relief of a horse standing still. And yet, barely visible, we see a shadow of something else that should not exist concurrently: how the horse got here, or perhaps what it will do when it leaves, or what it might be doing in some other, barely-altered timeline.

This is a three-dimensional sculpture of a four-dimensional horse.

Think, for a moment, what one would need in order to execute this sculpture. A mastery of the craft itself. A deep understanding of the anatomy of a horse, to the point where you could not only create a perfect, photo-realistic rendering in unforgiving stone, but could position those subtle, barely-there hooves in motion, these whispers of straight legs. It would require the perfect piece of granite, with its strange ripples that look a bit like a horse’s flesh and sinew.

You would also need the mad vision to even conceive of a piece like this, of course, but what struck my friend and I as we stared at it is how profoundly insufficent this vision on its own would be. I could never in a thousand years conceive of such a sculpture. I am a word person; the visual and tactile world has never been my playground. But even if I somehow dreamed this premise — if God kicked me and I dreamed this strategy for rendering a horse as I flew through the air — I would never be able to create this work. It would take decades to learn and practice and repeatedly fail at all the things you would need to be good at in order to execute the sculpture. Unglamorous. Unheralded. Unsung.

My year could have been better. I spent a lot of my summer and fall waiting for God to kick me again, unsure of how to deal with stillness. Becalmed and wondering where I’d gone wrong. Last year I vowed to party hard and get famous but I spent a lot of this year waiting for parties and fame to happen to me, the way 2020 and 2021 and even much of 2022 happened to me, unsure of what to do when things settled down and stopped happening. The answer is obvious to anyone who did not come into this world soaked in adrenaline. What I needed to do — what I am now doing — is to stop waiting and roll up my sleeves and lace up my boots and set about the unglamorous work of making those things happen for me.

2024 is going to be the Year Of Hard Work. Work on the incredible projects I have lined up, one after another, finally sold after months of selling nothing. These are big-deal projects, cooler and more complicated than the things that led up to this point. They will require a level of skill beyond anything I’ve done so far, which means it will not be enough to be clever, or witty, or to do deep research and draw surprising conclusions. If I want to make something truly beautiful, I have to work very hard. I want to, so I have to, so I will.

I’m going to work towards the personal life that I want in 2024 too: a life full of thrilling adventure and fun, fascinating people and innovative forms of wild debauchery. My career is what it is because I have the ability to crash parties and make friends and talk to just about anyone, but I only seem to use that skill when it’s time to write an article or find a new story idea. This year I’m going to deploy it in settings that aren’t conservative conferences or afterparties or the demented countercultural playgrounds of New York’s national populist scene. I’m going to use it to meet all kinds of people and grow my circle of friends. Partying hard is hard work, and I’m ready to put in some serious hours as the calendar changes over. In three hours there will be a warehouse in Brooklyn full of EDM and strangers and my makeup is on point and my dress is gorgeous and I am going to bathe in neon and let the music soak into my bones as the clock strikes 12 and sends us hurtling into what promises to be a pivotal year in the history of America.

I’m not sure God really gives his toughest battles to his strongest soldiers, seems more like God gives his toughest battles to whoever happens to be around at the time, but the battles are coming either way. The decisions we make in the next year or two will radically alter the trajectory of the United States and also the world. Academics will spend decades, maybe centuries, studying the decisions we are about to make. We will never be fully prepared for what’s coming, any more than we could have fully been prepared for COVID in 2019. But we’ve all been through hell these last four years. We’re as ready as we’ll ever be.

Wherever you are tonight, I hope this year takes you somewhere even better. Whatever your hopes for 2024, I hope your year exceeds them. May we all find happiness wherever we can, fight the battles that need fighting, and walk away from the ones that don’t. May we look out over this fucked world with clear eyes and find a way to laugh when things get dark. We are gloriously, beautifully human, and no one can strip that away from us, no matter how bad things get. We must walk, hand in hand, into whatever happens next.

Let’s do this.

Onward.