A Long December

by Bex Schwartz

Fun fact! My frosh year of college, which I am calling frosh year because I went to Wesleyan and that is what we called it, I went to a concert in New Haven. Possibly Hartford. More likely New Haven. We went to go see the Counting Crows. Cake was the opening act. In terms of Cake, this was before they had that hit on MTV, and in terms of the Counting Crows, let me just say that “Anna Begins” made me feel things deep in my heart. If you are younger than me, you probably call this sensation “getting the feels” or “feeling some sort of way.” At the time, I just called it the quickening. That particular song gave me the quickening. And so, in 1997, I was really excited to go see the Counting Crows. #SorryNotSorry but whatever.

And so. Cake was in the news recently. That was a bummer. And then I ran into my friend Trace who went to that very same Counting Crows concert with me. That was nice! And then I was thinking about the Counting Crows a whole lot for the first time in possibly over 15 years because, I mean, it’s been a long December. Right?

“It’s been a long December and there’s reason to believe maybe this year will be better than the last.” — Counting Crows

Adam Duritz’s dad worked in the same medical practice as my other friend’s father and they went to the same high school. So we waited outside the stage door and my friend yelled out the name of the school and Adam Duritz ignored us. Then Sara Gilbert showed up (She was attending Yale at the time? I guess?) and she was on (or hosted?) SNL with the Counting Crows and so they had a nice reunion and eventually we gave up because, admittedly, we weren’t even about to recognize the other Counting Crows if they came outside, so, really, why bother.

But, holy smokes it’s been a long December. The longest December of all. Wake me up when December ends. If this year is truly to be considered never better, then I am worried about the future. I mean, I’m always worried about the future because we’re totally going to run out of oil and then water and then there will be terrible wars and someone will use a nuclear weapon and render the entire planet into a dystopian nightmare worse than anything in those YA books we like so much.

Or not really, in theory, but before I started treating my anxiety that is what I thought about all the time. You know how every 9/11 they do that “tribute in light” thing and blast those mega beams of light into the sky? I used to look at those lights and think about how much electricity it took to power those things and then I’d worry that New York would have a blackout and all terror would break out. And then we had a blackout in the summer of, what was it, 2003? And it wasn’t that terrible — I wasn’t trapped in the subway or in an elevator, I just walked home and kept magically running into friends along the way. And the hospitals had generators and planes didn’t crash and people lit fires in trashcans and drank beer on the sidewalks. And then when we lived in the dark after Hurricane Sandy, it was scary but I was still okay. It wasn’t the end of the world, luckily, for me, although I acknowledge that is a uniquely selfish and narcissistic thing to say. I just spent a lot of time listening to my battery powered radio and checking twitter until my phone ran out of energy and then I’d worry about the Rockaways and Staten Island so then I’d drink a bunch of wine and go to sleep.

I stopped worrying about the blackout issue for a little while but then when it would get really hot and everyone started using their air conditioners at the same time, I would sometimes feel that same fear that we might run out of power. And then I would think about what would happen when we completely run out of oil and then water and then it would always be a blackout. As in: the power would never ever come back on. There would be scary things happening everywhere, all the time. Then I realized it was easier to think about that possibility if you just referred to it as “when the zombies come” and that’s when I got a pickaxe.

If you stay awake late at night thinking about your survivalist options if we run out of power or water or when the zombies come, you might feel a certain way. You could also call that a quickening, but that would be a bad sort of quickening. The bad sort of quickenings went away for me once I acknowledged: I am an anxious person and my reality is not always the most rational. And when you live here, it is really easy to be an anxious person because if you let yourself think about it, there’s a lot to worry about. The tunnels under the river could collapse. The tribute in light could wipe out our power grid and then we’d live in the dark. Your elevator could plummet dozens of stories to the ground. Those new touchable maps in subway stations could be crawling with the next pandemic. Welcome to New York. It’s been waiting for you.

“Welcome to New York. It’s been waiting for you.” — Taylor Swift

Just kidding! That is the worst song on the Taylor Swift album of 2014 which is called 1989! But you know what does not suck? Most of the rest of that Taylor Swift album, other than maybe “This Love” because it feels Maroon-5ish. The rest of the songs are fucking awesome. Once I listened to “Clean” for the entire train ride between Philadelphia and New York. It’s been a long December and there’s reason to believe maybe this year we listened to more Taylor Swift than we possibly thought we would. Taylor Swift’s songs made me feel something. They made me feel like it’s been too long since I’ve gotten the feels. There haven’t been any quickenings in a long time because I let myself turn into a work robot and work robots don’t have emotions. Beep beep boop.

So I realized if I want to feel some sort of way, I have to let myself have emotions again. This epiphany coincided with the fact that everything sort of got all sorts of bad this December. The sort of bad that even a pickaxe can’t prevent. Suddenly, December was just dreadful. And then there I was, thinking about the Counting Crows. Such a long December. The longest of all time.

“But the girl in car in the parking lot says “Man you should try to take a shot
can’t you see my walls are crumbling?” Then she looks up at the building and says she’s thinking of jumping. She says she’s tired of life. She must be tired of something.” –“Round Here”, Counting Crows.

The first time I encountered death, it was when a girl a few years older than I was in high school passed away. My mom and I went to the wake because we lived in a very small town and in very small towns, everyone goes to the wake because you all know each other. It was very, very sad. My mom and I got into the car and “Round Here” by the Counting Crows was on the radio. The song was very good and very intense and my mom and I sat in the car together and cried. I didn’t know the girl very well but I went to her senior prom and she was part of the same group of friends I was with. After the prom, we went to the diner because we lived in New Jersey. I ordered coffee and stirred a Sweet & Low packet into it because I was fifteen and we were all sorts of messed up about fat and calories back then. That girl’s date said, “That will gave you cancer.” His date was very sick. I nodded slowly and kept stirring.

The other week, while the rest of the world was crumbling and there were helicopters overhead every night and everything on the news was more and more impossible to believe, a friend of mine was dying in Brooklyn. She was seven and she was not tired of life at all. She was very strong and very brave and wiser than most of us could ever hope to be. The night she passed away, I came home and listened to that Counting Crows song because I was thinking about the wake I went to with my mom. And I wished I could talk to my mom.

I spent a lot of time in Brooklyn with my friend and her father, who is also my friend. One night we went out for whiskey because that is sometimes a thing you might do when someone you love is very sick. I ran into another friend whom I hadn’t seen in a very long time. She told me that our mutual friend, a friend with whom I was once very close, had passed away several years before. I am a neurotic narcissist and I blamed myself because I was the one who let the friendship dissolve, a very long time ago. And then she died and I didn’t even know. I wanted to talk to my mom about that but she is dead so instead I called my dad and we talked it out and at the end of the conversation my dad said, “I am so happy that you can call me and talk to me about these things.” Because things can change. We can talk about our emotions and not be work robots. Maybe. Slowly. In baby steps. Maybe we can have feelings again.

“It’s been a long December and there’s reason to believe maybe this year will be better than the last.” — Counting Crows

Let’s imagine that Adam Duritz is singing about this particular year. Maybe December 2014 will be better than we remember December 2013. Remember how cold it was last year? And there was so much snow. (I think?) Maybe next year will be even worse and we will remember this December as being the best. Never better.

And yet I am an optimist and I believe it can only get better. Even better. Better than this. I don’t have the solutions to everything that has sucked so hard this December. I’m not entirely sure I have the emotional capacity to process everything. Two women flew here from Singapore so I could marry them because here in New York, everyone is considered equal. Sometimes after midnight I might go out to buy a seltzer, because I feel safe doing so. I feel like a lot of my favorite people are doing things to make themselves happier. Never better? I don’t know. All I know is that I have a pickaxe. And I believe that we can fix things, if we are brave enough to talk about it, even when it makes us anxious. Bring it on, 2015. Bring it the fuck on.

Never Better, a collection of essays from writers we love, is The Awl’s goodbye to 2014.