Started 2000 fevered and ending the decade fainting. In deference to my iron-depleted attention span, the ten words--well, occasionally two-word phrases--that sum up the decade, to me. Not really in priority order, except for Number 1.
10. Roll. As in the heroic-turned-jingoistic "Let's roll" and a thousand other uses. We do not lope, nor do we glide. America will always be on wheels, until it crashes.
9. Bottle service. Big silly demanding babies paying too much for everything, aren't we.
8. Known unknowns. Two words scarier than any Saw marathon could ever be.
7. Derivative. They couldn't even think of an original way to rip our asses off.
6. Abs. Tossup between this and yellow teeth. Doesn't matter which type of marketing, media, social networking or information-type-service you subscribed to--unless your face was buried in a library book, if you want to find anything out, you'll have to face down someone telling you that you must change the color of your teeth or the appearance of your external abdominal area and they, they alone, have The Secret. Everything we bought and sold in the past decade comes down to this: There's something wrong with you that you need to pay to fix.
5. Baby blues. Rush's alleged name for his alleged favorite poison. The various forms of hillbilly heroin edge out meth for me this decade, because I suspect they'll have a longer character arc. Hey, I like vic as much as any other gal, but things are getting a little out of hand for those who can least handle it. I think they'll be killing a lot more people for a long time. Unlike meth, they're killing a lot of people who had no intention of dying, and being prescribed by people who had no intention of killing people. There are other ways of dealing with pain, one of which being not chaining people to computers for hours and hours and making them work more for less money. Code Monkey like Tab.
4. Robust. Well, the second syllable in nearly all cases applies. The whole word, hardly ever.
3. Slider. Encapulates the sad and fruitless, literally, quest for authenticity we're trapped in around here. Evidence of how foodie snobism and every other elitist fancy, from roots music to trucker caps, fetishizes something basically OK in moderation and occasionally spectacular and puts it thru the hipster machine. Little hamburgers started out real and reviled, from the Little Tavern yet, then got super expensive and gussied up, and now the menu at Applebees (which I just researched) actually has an entire category for sliders. Beat out Asiago, chipotle, panko...it's all good, until it's all too much. Plus: It's what happening now!
2. Subprime. And it's where it's at now!
1. Cocksucker. I'll never forgive the gods for not granting me a last season of Deadwood. But it also applies in so many other wonderful ways.
PS: This is not a good time to make New Year's resolutions. Mercury retrograde and between two eclipses. Wait til after Jan. 15--the new moon is like a super new start.
PPS: Oh and please god please don't bring up that "decade REALLY starts in blah blah" shit, you're boring and living in an Idiocracy, what do you expect.
3 comments:
In defense of #8, it's important in predictive systems and in some statistical analysis. You should really be more terrified of unknown unknowns. Did you ever see the DR poetry site?
you forgot ciabotta bread. Good God, it's worse than sliders. It's all so damn fake. And then when really good stuff gets sucked into the maw, you feel miserable. For someone fainting, you're goddamn feisty. I found an old dance partner of ours and great friend of yours online tonight and blurted out something stupid to her. It's time to get together again. get well, whatever ails ya.
JS
@dallas: No, but I remember the Glenn Beck poetry project: here. A known unknowing, and once you know, there's no unknowing it. @js: i'm feeling much better, really, don't throw me on the cart! & y'all come to the poetry reading jan. 22 if you can stand the cold air off the bay--it's open mic.
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