It's the third day of 2006, and the first decade of the first century of the second millennium that matters is officially on the wane. If you're like me, you've spent the past few days trying to figure out what that means. But you're not like me, are you? You're foolish and intellectually lazy, thoughtless and shallow, and above all horny for me. That's why you come here. So allow me to do your thinking for you. You not what they say: Don't fix what still barely works, even if it is the new year.

Six years ago we threaded the needle, or that's what we were told. Y2K had lingered ominously, threatening everything from corrupting our calendar programs to collapsing the world economy. Sure, it seems ridiculous in our wizened retrospective, hardened as we are by terrorism, war, oil, the impending demise of Whatevs.org, and what we now recognize is our painfully undramatic slide toward Armageddon. But fear of the new millennium was very real then, especially among the gullible. To wit: I worked with a man who liquidated his assets, and converted them to gold bars prior to the new year. What he planned to do with gold bars in the wake of the apocalypse, I'm not sure. I always thought a better choice would be gas or soup or something.

In an interesting side note, years later I saw him interviewed on CNN. Apparently his kidneys had failed and he was donated a pre-owned one by another of my former coworkers.

But back to the subject at hand -- our progress, or alarming lack of it, since calendars turned to 2000. Now I realize this topic is too large to cover in a single post on which I plan to spend no more than 20 minutes. So rather than discussing the many ways in which I feel we've shit the bed thus far in the millennium, I'm going to share with you that which caused me to come to this conclusion in the first place: the Leonard Cohen song "Famous Blue Raincoat."

Steeped as we are in technology, no one has yet penned a song that approaches the brilliance of "Famous Blue Raincoat." Drowning though we are in the kind of utterly depressing turns of events that you'd think would be rocket fuel to the poets and artists of our time, blasting us all to the nether reaches of folk song awesomeness, nobody's even coming close to "Famous Blue Raincoat." Seriously. Not even close. And most days, it seems like nobody's even trying.

The White Stripes? It's a new year, so let's get honest, people.

Analogcabin @ 10:57 AM
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