REMARKS: MY 1979, 1989 NOTES MAKE ME STOP AND THINK

I have this disturbing habit of writing stuff down and saving it. Often it is a very useful trait. At other times it can be a bemusing or even frustrating habit.

On or near Dec. 31, 1979, I sat down at my aforementioned Underwood 319 manual typewriter and pecked out a little essay, looking back at the seventies -- the only decade I had lived through, start to finish. I looked at goals and dreams and where I was, halfway through my junior year in high school.

Somewhere along the lined that piece of paper has disappeared -- probably buried within the mounds of school papers, old newspapers and other junk I keep intending to sort through and pitch the majority of. It survived long enough for me to reflect upon it a decade later, though, Dec. 31, 1989. Sitting in the Daily Dunklin Democrat office in Kennett (where I was sports editor), I reflected back on the decade of the 1980s and where I had come since that last New Year's Eve treatise. I bemoaned the fact that I was still single and that my Christian walk had not made much progress and that my financial condition wasn't where I wanted.

I set out several goals for the end of 1999. Again, I haven't come too far in meeting them. No wife (or prospects), no fiction published, no $10,000 in savings. I did meet one short-term goal, in getting a home computer.

Thinking of a decade from now is downright horrifying. Is it possible I could actually be 46 by then? I just hope I begin meeting some of these goals, somewhere along the line.

The year 2000 was a vague sort of thought growing up in the seventies. I remember calculating my age and thinking "Gee, I'll be 37 when the year 2000 comes." Somehow I don't think I really believe I'd be alive -- or at least mentally alert enough to appreciate the new millennium -- at such an advanced age. Of course I may have been right -- my mental alertness certainly HAS fallen off in recent years!

The little wisenheimers who keep whining about this NOT being a new millennium or new century or new decade are getting on my nerves. I don't particularly care about the millennium ... but if we follow this argument to its logical end, then 1900 was not part of the 20th century -- hence NOT part of the 1900s. By the same token, 1960 was NOT part of the 1960s. It's about as irritating as the overpaid corporate lawyers defending long-lost copyrights. If I tell you I'm going to throw a disk at you, you'll probably ask me if it's IBM or Mac-compatible. Of course I'm not supposed to tell you it's a Frisbee; that would not be PCC (Politically Copyright Correct)! And is "facial tissue" toilet paper of Keen-ex? I have to stop and think each time.

One of the most aggravating reminders of this came from the Missouri State High School Activities Association, who in recent years have reminded us that our high school teams do NOT make to the Final Four. "Final Four," you see, is a copyrighted property of the NCAA; high school teams make it to the "MSHSAA championships" instead.

Pa-leeease!

Sometimes I'm tempted to hurl a plastic disc at the first sanitary engineer I see parked in a challenged parking space, or carefully pick up an adjustable wrench with a piece of facial tissue and whap someone in the bone-encased brain container out of frustration.

This should be a special New Years for myself and a number of others. I will be accompanying the Bethany Baptist youth group to Youth Link 2000 at the Trans World Dome next week. The two-day, three-night event will be linked between several world-wide locations, via satellite. It will be an awesome way to bring in the new year, decade, century and millennium (Will the pencil heads at least concede that Jan. 1, 2000 is the beginning of the new YEAR?)!