Y2K

On my most fearful days, the days where the gap between my instincts and my self-confidence is the widest and apparently the most insurmountable, I wake up thinking I know nothing of importance. If I have the energy I analyze what I mean. I mean that I can’t figure out how to do anything practical that will have a practical result. I mean I can start a project but never find my way near the finish line. That’s everything seems like a finish line, the end of a race during which I get winded early and fail, fail, fail to achieve and rest from the achievement. And there are few expressions I hate to hear more than “Everyone feels that way.” Because tied into the fear is absolute certainty that there is no one who feels “that way” but me. In fact, the only thing that makes me feel better, gets me going and reminds me how smart my little boy was, is hearing how stupid everyone else can be. Do you remember Y2K? The entire world was, like Gigi, trembling on the brink. Mankind had produced a computer-generated Armageddon, a quicksand of global financial destruction. Everywhere you turned, everywhere you went, people were talking to strangers, connecting to each other, girding for the coming of the inevitable end. I sat in a friend's house on Martha’s Vineyard with happy people sipping champagne and chatting idly. Quietly, over several hours, we watched the world on TV as one city after another across the globe exploded not into economic smithereens but in glorious celebration, a tribute not to failure or fear or insufficiency or any of my little worries, but to the farcical heartbreaking brilliant catastrophic glory that was the 20^th century and to the delirium that we humans had turned another corner in spite of everything.