Ten years ago, I was preparing to join my brother Jim and his partner Joe to ring in the new millenium in Los Angeles...a big city where we laughingly thought we'd last at least a few days should the dreaded Y2K hysteria actually come true.
My, my. Ten years later, it seems as though the hysteria was simply drawn out like a giant piece of taffy, stretching across a decade of anxiety, war, bubbles and recession.
TIME Magazine has "stolen" my term, which I began using with friends in Denver about a year ago: This is a lost decade.
We began with a contested election decided by the Supreme Court, but we all seemed to collectively shrug it off, feeling that whomever had won in '00, he would be a one-term president because of the inevitable downturn following the tech bubble.
September 11 changed it all. We had an unprecedented terrorist attack, followed by wars that absolutely no one would have predicted in December of 1999.
Add the housing/real estate bubble, and now the worst recession of our lifetimes, and I think many of us are gasping for air, impatient for the calendar to turn to 2010 so we can all say "well, at least that's over."
And yet...even in the midst of this decade of bad news, fear, and the only RIF I've ever endured...this decade will always be remembered as the decade of my absolute best job ever: My gig at RockResorts with incredible people like Linda McGill, Ed Mace and David Dudar. I may very well spend the remainder of my career searching for a way to capture that magic again.
It goes to show you: There are always things to be thankful for. As crappy as the past ten years have been collectively for the country, I look around and see all of my brothers and sisters and their families happy and healthy, and although it's not my first choice of cities in which to live, I do have a job that is very close to RockResorts model.
An old Joe Walsh song includes the lyric "I can't complain...but sometimes I still do." I recall that lyric especially now as the media helps us throw out this decade. I should complain less; we probably all should.
But, oh how I am looking forward to the "Teens!"
