House of Burgess

I had a slice of pizza halfway in my mouth when I figured out how I was going to deal with 2009.
It occurred to me last week when I was back home in Indiana. I was having dinner with my friend Christine at a restaurant that had opened in my absence.
“You know why I can’t get anything done?” she asked me as I began to tackle the first slice of the personal-sized pie. “I start out with a list of all the things I have to do and then by the time I get to the end of my day I’ve done all these other things that I didn’t expect to so I don’t even want to look at things like the dishes.”
This is a feeling I know all too well.
“I know, right?” I said after swallowing. “I always know it’s bad when I start counting things like going to the bathroom on the list of accomplishments I can tick off during the course of a day.”
I think this conversation is a microcosm of how I thought about 2008 before it started.
I wasn’t under any illusions that it would be an easy year exactly, but I did have some vague idea that completing the large goals I had set out for myself would come to pass just as a matter of course.
That, as you might guess, did not happen.
Just getting through the day, the week, the month, the year was all I could do to keep my head above water, let alone strive to complete the hazy idea of the lofty goals I had dancing around the corners of my mind.
As a result, I’m approaching 2009 in a whole new way: through the eyes of currently incarcerated rapper Mystikal.
Mystikal, otherwise known as Gulf War veteran Michael Tyler, toiled for a few years in the early 1990’s on southern rap label No Limit before breaking out with his monster 2001 hit “Shake Ya Ass.”
The song was not only was featured to hilarious effect in the movie “About a Boy” but had my high school in an uproar because the administration would only allow the playing of the edited version at prom (entitled “Shake It Fast.”) I think some impromptu petitions were circulated among the student population. (Viva la democracy!)
I was instantly hooked on the song and forced my friend Dustin to include it on the very first burned CD of illegally downloaded music I ever owned.
Sadly, though, it all came crashing down for Mystikal not three years later.
On January 16, 2004, Mystikal was sentenced to six years in prison after pleading guilty to forcing his hairstylist to perform sex acts. He also admitted to extortion.
“The rapper and two bodyguards forced the woman to perform oral sex, have sex with them, and accused her of stealing $80,000 in checks,” according to the CNN story from the time. “Mystikal initially denied the assault, but confessed after a videotape of the crime was found at his home.”
I bring this up not say that I parallel my life to someone who committed a terrible crime and then lied about it, but to say that the predicament I feel that not only myself, but my entire country, find ourselves in are the results of crimes of complacency.
We, like the pre-arrest Mystikal, had everything going for us at the end of the 1990’s. The world was ours. Then we let ourselves get sloppy: we did nothing about the unregulated credit default swap market, we went to war with a sovereign country that had never attacked us and dragged our feet on an ever-worsening environmental disaster.
And then, we got caught for it. The bill came due. The cops found the tape. And that’s what I think we’ve all been doing in 2008: making payments on all the careless, carefree things we did in the years prior. (I know I have.)
For me, 2009 is about outrunning the daily grind and not just keeping up.
For my part, I’ve been so busy looking backwards trying to put out the many small fires in my life that I forget where I’m supposed to be going in the first place.
We’ll be released from the prison of truthiness that is the Bush White House in less than a month. Mystikal will have to wait another year until he’s released from his less metaphorical jail. Personally, I’m looking forward in 2009 to breaking free of the self-imposed habits that have allowed me to lately only move sideways thusfar.
In the meantime, I think we can all take a less from Mystikal’s hit “Bouncin’ Back (Bumpin’ Me Against the Wall)”: “So if you ain’t ready you better get ready/I know I do it better when I’m being opposed/Ah stick ya chest out, keep your chin up/’Cause sometimes you gotta get knocked down to get up.”