So New Years is almost here and according to the blogs, websites, magazines and newspapers I’ve been reading, yes I actually still read newspapers, this upcoming stellar reset is extra special. Why? Because it’ll be two years and counting to the supposedly Mayan predicted cosmological onslaught which will rend our tiny blue world asunder in a maelstrom of fire, flood, famine, chaos and geomagnetic reversal. Okay that last one actually sounds pretty badass. No I am not hopping on the bullshit 2012 bandwagon, I am of course talking about the end of yet another decade. The ten years following the previously predicted end of the world. Oh Y2K, you promised me anarchy in the streets but all you delivered was N’Sync and Britney Spears. Let’s hop in the way back machine and take a little trip.

The Year 2000:

Ten years ago I was a thirteen year old kid in Halifax just about to go into high school. I was socially awkward, loud, sober, overweight, clumsy and laughably incompetent around the opposite sex. It’s ten years on and I’m just clumsy and laughably incompetent with women. Progress! 2000 was the year in which I made my first acquaintence with Sweet Lady Liquor. A passionate union which I’m happy to say remains as strong today as it was when we first met. It was a whirlwind time of angst, hormones, skate board shoes and post-grunge rock. I had some laughs, some drinks and few thoughts of the future.

The Year 2005:

And so the wayback machine takes us a half a decade into the future. In the interim there has been one massive terrorist attack, two new wars have begun and Halifax has had the shit kicked out of it by a hurricane. January 1st 2005 finds our hero in dire straits and stuck in Calgary. Having spent most of that Christmas holidays in and out of hospital, I would spend the next five months effectively bed ridden with E. Coli or Salmonella poisoning. An illness that would force me to drop out of my first year in Carleton University. This would mark the beginning of a very trying and occasionally dark period in my life. Good times.

January 1st 2010:

So now the wayback machine arrives at the end of another decade. Our hero has earned himself a degree, made some life progress and dug himself into a hole of debt fifty thousand dollars deep. Our wayward Haligonian now finds himself in a ratty one bedroom apartment in Vancouver, six thousand kilometers from where his journey started.