Volume 47: A cataloged first-person account of 2021 CE

Measurement of time in terms of days, months and years is a manmade metric, a means of identifying intangible benchmarks relative to and relevant only to the existence of the human species. These arbitrary milestones have long since become living universal fixtures in the lives of the descendants of those who invented them. The ceremonial marking of beginnings, seasons, life passages and endings is something truly unique to man and womankind. The existentialists and anyone else abiding on this rock spinning through space understand and possess an awareness of their frightfully short existence amid the vastness of the Cosmos. Knowing this, it has become an annual ritual for Yours Truly to spend the waning hours the month of December in serene reflection on all that has happened in the year gone by, not only in my life but that of my fellow life travelers. Regardless if they are close by, far away, high profile or as average and ordinary as a humble keeper of records, Father Time has aged everyone by another of those arbitrary metrics called years. Indeed, it is not so much years to our life that make our existence what it is as much as it is life to our years. Maintaining a daily record of happenings, occurrences and events provides a way of making those fleeting experiences tangible in hindsight.

As most regular readers are aware, this blog is largely the outgrowth of the Daily Personal Journal of Yours Truly. Indeed, my first-person account of my day-to-day life and times began on a cold New Year’s Day in 1975. With the exception of the two months I spent in Navy boot camp in early 1978, it has been maintained on a daily or every other day basis ever since. Friends and associates with whom I have shared excerpts all concur that in terms of who did what, where, with whom and when that it is all very credible. Whenever there is an entry that involves the writer’s opinion, viewpoint or moral or character judgement, and there are many, it is fair game for open scrutiny. If someone ever desires to publish any portion of this voluminous tome after I rejoin the Cosmos, I think it only fair to do so with a disclaimer that all contents contained herein are personal viewpoints and opinions of the writer. At that point any controversy it may generate will not be my problem. It is hard for me to imagine that that Yours Truly, who in the larger scheme of things is just a bystander along the most Conservative stretch of the Mother Road, could write anything worthy of debate let alone controversy? I mean this daily writing exercise that has become such a part of my life that it defines who and what I am, is by all accounts a benign and harmless record that started out being kept in spiral notebooks and blank Nothing Books for most of the first decade of its existence.

Keeping a record of events and occurrences, as a rule, makes it easy to remember anniversary dates noteworthy enough to blog about. 2021 has been a year of several anniversaries, many of things that happened way before I began the practice of journaling. This past year there are RRS posts about two policies resulting from either federal legislation or high court decisions that were landmark changes of the way we as a people did business, both of which happened in my youth. It was duly noted that it has only been fifty years that 18-year-olds have had the vote with The 26th Amendment at 50 and it has also only been fifty years that Tulsa Public Schools have been officially desegregated. Of course, not all historic commemorations are flattering. The American legacy of an Oklahoma atrocity commemorates the worst incident of bloodletting by Americans on Americans in the history of the Republic that happened right here in my own hometown. The fallout from that one is still raining down a century later.

All that has transpired in 2021 will be remembered as having done so before the backdrop of the pandemic of Covid-19 and its variants. With the rollout of the vaccine series and with enough people getting them, the fear factor it asserted since March 11th, 2020 has been substantially deflated. Even still, as 2021 ends the USA fatality numbers attributed to the initial virus and variants has surpassed 823,000 lives.

The Daily Personal Journal of Yours Truly typically chronicles the mundane grind of a quiet, normal life with an occasional departure from sanity, my own and the World’s. As a bystander who takes quiet note every day, the World has made a few moves back toward sanity this past year. After receiving my second Covid vaccine in April, it was comforting to see so many of the businesses enter the summer months with no-masks policies and allowing for indoor gatherings. This however became a significant contributor to the Delta variant epidemic in late summer and early autumn. Probably the worst departure from sanity was the perpetuation of the myth that the 2020 Presidential Election was somehow stolen. By far the blackest day of the year was the assault on the democratic process carried out by an angry and unruly grievance-driven mob on January 6th.

Here is an excerpt from that day’s entry, January 6th, (47-006):

…The most awful news since 9/11 was that as the joint session of Congress met to count the Electoral Votes, the National Capitol was stormed by a bunch of Trump-backing rioters. Some were armed. All the Congresspeople sought safety. It was an authentic shit show of monumental proportion. It sucked all the air out of every media market. The National Guard was activated and crowd thinned out this evening………….These events of today upset a lot of people. Two more weeks and we will have a new administration. The awfulness of today will be lingering a long time. Mark my words.

Entry #47-365 will be the final admission to the 2021 CE written on this New Year’s Eve. Journaling is a practice so imprinted on my daily routine I cannot even think of my life without it. Rest assured, it will continue come tomorrow. For tonight though let us fondly remember the good times we had in the year gone by and leave the bad times where they need to be left. Let us never forget those who left us in 2021 and let the love of those we still have with us keep us going forward. In a few hours another year of this wonderful existence we call life will be in the books. Let kindness be our guide in its memory.