$20.09

Back when I was a gas station attendant at Johnson's Garage in Sterling, I often had the misfortune of pumping an amount of overpriced gas that would total somewhere between $19.30 and $19.94--the misfortune being that it would invariably incite the payee to comment on how good or bad that particular year had been. I remember $19.75 being regarded consitently as a "good year." The only times that such a comment would be followed up by any evidence, it was often obtusely sexual in content, and with all such things from my employ at Johnson's Garage, I have blocked it from memory. Sadly, I have not been able to get the memory of emptying the beer can barrel purged from the cache...

I imagine that, at some time in the future when our economy continues to suck, I'll go back to working the pumps at some fuel depot in the suburban wasteland of North Raleigh. As I pump precious hydrogen into a plastic fuel cell car for some bugger who got rich fleecing retirement accounts, the price guage will read ¥2009, and I'll think, 2009, huh? What a bummer that year was.

Face it: 2009 was the capstone year in a fairly shitty decade all around (at least for Americans). When we collectively ruminate on our past--passing around a shotglass of "water" leaking out the ass end of a car at the old hydrogen station--and try to determine where things went wrong, we'll all point to the era from the Y2K scare to the economic shitstorm of the late 00's and say... yeppp... 2009... not a good year. (We won't be able to label the whole decade a pile of shit, because we still won't know what to call it. Naughties? Oughties? DoubleOs? How about "the Shitties?").

Despite the dystopia we are sprinting towards, there is some hope in turning over into a new decade; if nothing else, we'll at least know what to call it. And things can't really get worse, right?

Right?