These Are the Good Old Days (Seriously)

Before this whole pandemic struck, a curious thought would periodically enter my mind. I would be out with my family on a lovely Summer afternoon or deeply immersed in my work here and I would think, “These are the good times. I’m going to look back at this twenty or thirty or even ten years from now and feel an incredible sense of nostalgia and longing .” 

This was not a one-time epiphany or realization. Instead, it was something I experienced with some regularity. 

This struck me at the time as a curious, even counter-intuitive thought because even before COVID-19 changed everything, mostly for the agonizingly worse, life was, in many ways, decidedly less than ideal. 

My online therapist doesn’t like it when I use the word “struggle” because words have power and if you think of your life as an unending struggle, then that is what it is going to feel like. She prefers it when I use the word “challenge” and even before COVID-19 made everything exponentially harder my life was full of challenges. 

Twenty-three years into my career as a professional pop culture writer I’m barely in the business in many ways. I’m obscenely lucky to have this website, and a podcast I believe in, and two new books out that I love, one of which is paying many of the bills these days (that’d be The Weird Accordion to Al) because otherwise my only regular work would be my two columns for the exceedingly kind folks at TCM Backlot, The Fractured Mirror and First and Last. 

At one point earlier this year I had literally less than zero dollars in savings and checking and zero dollars of available credit and over thirty grand in credit card debt. My wife is a wonderful preschool teacher, which is a terrific way to work yourself to the point of exhaustion for very little money. 

We live paycheck to paycheck in industries where making a decent living is difficult, if not impossible. My depressed father lives in a nursing home in Morton Grove and I can’t afford to visit him anywhere near as often as I would like. The President of the United Stated is a racist, sexist monster who has whipped his followers into a frenzy of xenophobic hatred. 

Even before COVID-19, it sure could feel like the world was crumbling under our feet yet I still felt lucky and blessed for a very good reason: I am lucky. I am blessed. I am fucking grateful for all that I had and all that I continue to have. I was grateful that I have two sons I could not conceivably love more, who are an unending source of pride and purpose and emotional satisfaction. 

I have a wife that loves and supports and understands me and a father who is still alive, as is my dog Ghostface. I have this website that sustains me emotionally as well as creatively and financially, with a loyal group of readers who fill the comment sections with smart and empathetic and kind commentary, in sharp contrast to how the internet and comment sections usually work. 

I have a career that I’m proud of. I don’t just write columns or blog posts: I write books that you can hold in your hands and lend to your friends and read and re-read whenever the mood strikes. I have patrons who believe in me so much that they personally finance this website and my career when there are literally millions, if not billions of other ways they could spend their hard-earned money. 

I’m not exactly flushed with money these days but thanks to the healthy sales of The Weird Accordion to Al I have managed to pay down some of my credit card debt, to the point where it no longer feels impossible and overwhelming. 

I’m not young but I’m not old either. For all of my Depression, Anxiety and Insomnia, I have my health and a work ethic that makes creating a joy and not a struggle. 

Hell, even now, with the world spinning madly out of control, I still feel blessed. I still have my family and my work and my readers and my dog and a host of wonderful things the pandemic has not taken away. 

Honestly, I have no idea how bad things will get, or what the world will look like a year from now so, at the risk of being excessively appreciative, these are still the good times, even if it doesn’t always feel that way. 

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