Craig continues his annual tradition.


Author’s Note: While still in its early years, this column has become something of an annual tradition.

If you’d like to read last year’s column, you can find it here: For Auld Lang Syne, 2020. For the original version, written after 2018, you can find it here: For Auld Lang Syne.

Thank you for reading. Here’s to many more.

Best of luck to you and yours in 2022.


Listen, we’ve all been there.

We’ve all taken a casual walk down the street to go to the corner bar for happy hour, rode our bikes home from work, or have been driving the kids to one after school activity or another and had a gun battle break out in the middle of the street on a beautiful, late summer afternoon. We’ve all taken a moment out of our busy days to stop at the bank or the grocery store, gone on a date to see a new flick or new show, or stopped in a drive-thru to get the kids a quick bite and had a hail of bullets land all around us and, thankfully, not in us. We’ve all been foreign exchange students leaving our apartment, we’ve all enjoyed a cocktail with friends on a patio or a rooftop, worked thankless retail positions as clothing store associates, or cruised the lake front blasting the Aliotta Haynes & Jeremiah song only to find ourselves caught in a traumatic, violent event that forces us to confront our deepest existential dread and face our fears of the eternal void by people who do not give one, single, God damn about the innocent infants, toddlers, kids, teens, mothers, fathers, and grandparents their bullets strike let alone give a single, God damn about the cause and effect of what all that violence has on the rest of the city’s reputation and prospects.

And worse? Those on high and in charge of prosecuting these violent situations and removing the violent criminals off the streets seemed to care even less.

We’ve all been there, right?

Wait…none of that happens where you’re from?

Oh.

Golly…

Really?

Are you sure?

Despite those making the decisions regarding lockdowns and the entirely arbitrary nonsense gussied up and disguised as mitigations trying their hardest to hog all the spotlight, this year, it was the violent who took center stage. The violence that was on everyone’s mind.

But that doesn’t quite do the issue justice, does it?

This year, it went to another level.

This year, some of those on high seemed to indicate that not only do they not care about the loss of your hard earned property nor care about your ability to earn the type of family wealth they and theirs enjoy but, this year, they no longer seemed to care for your very life itself. Your liberty and your ability to pursue your happiness and prosperity has always played second fiddle and been little more than a hurdle or hiccup to their ideological goals but, this year, your very life seemed to become little more than a casualty of political gamesmanship.

As the excuses pile up and the blame gets shuffled every which way but up, that’s the only conclusion that eventually shakes out.

They continue to wonder where the criticism comes from. Pretend to be gobsmacked while all those scenarios I outlined in the second paragraph above all happened this year in this city. And there were many, many more on the list from which I could have chosen.

In fact, as of me pushing post an hour before midnight, HeyJackass.com (the best site in Chicago for crime statistics) has their official 2021 tally at 841 homicides. They count 425 children 17 or under were shot and killed or wounded. As of this post there were 1,646 carjackings with only 96 arrests, a 5.8% clearance rate.

All figures we haven’t seen in this city in nearly three decades.

I know no one wants you to know this but, regardless of your political leanings, you’re allowed to acknowledge that the violence in this city is out of control. Despite your political leanings or personal ideology, you’re allowed to understand and admit the violence that now seems to seep into and pervade every aspect of your daily life is actively holding you and your region back. You’re allowed to be upset that the reputation of your home is being besmirched and trampled upon and dragged through the mud by your elected officials and their poor decision making. You’re allowed to admit mistakes. It doesn’t mean you’re wrong on everything or always will be wrong on everything.

Believe it or not, the numbers of truly violent offenders are small. Statistically speaking. Millions go about their business every day without becoming a statistic.

I suppose, that’s part of the reason the problem is so maddening.

A relatively small group of violent offenders holds the rest of the city hostage to their every whims and wishes and city leadership continues to bury their heads in the sand in the hope it will just…go away. No, I’m not talking about the CTU, though I understand your confusion.

Those that do happen to be arrested are often let out by a State’s Attorney’s Office and District Court whose reputation(s) are taken down notch by notch, day by day, as more and more violent offenders roam the streets unpunished. Offices led by people who seem to care far less for law and order and the ability of all of its residents to prosper than they do about the utopian ideologies they were told about by even more aloof wannabe intellectuals than they are who spent more time farting on their friend’s couches than they ever did actually leading any type of society.

It could be dealt with. If only the leadership in this city wanted. If only they had the courage and the temerity to lead.

Like it or not, reputation precedes all of us. Be it as an individual, as a family, or as a community.

Your city leadership is making a mockery of you. It is embarrassing you. And it is a shame.

If I can toot my own horn for a brief moment, one of my favorite things I wrote this year came after the Adam Toledo incident. In reference to the real epidemic affecting American society, the all-consuming victimization.



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This used to be a tough town. This used to be a city of broad shoulders. This used to be a city that works. This city used to be untouchable.

Does it resemble that these days?

Everywhere one turns is another victim. Like the political and cultural equivalent of middle-aged housewives hyperventilating in an overplayed out meme from the Oprah Winfrey Show.

Victim. Victim. Victim.

There are only victims here. And they expect the children to stop killing each other when they have no one willing to stand up and behave like the adults they’re supposed to be?


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I stand by those lines tonight.

I suppose, when I think about it and try to distill this year’s message, what I’d like to remind you of this New Year’s is you are not crazy. This is not normal. This is not fine.

Despite what some seem to be trying to convince you to believe, you are not crazy. This is not normal. This is not fine. Not in your neighborhood or mine.

This city is better than this. So I tell you a third time, you are not crazy. This is not normal. This is not fine.

But you know that, don’t you?

Lost in the political cacophony of this last year, this is still a beautiful city with world class culture. The Chicagoland area is still a wonderful place to raise a family. And I will always believe, with the will and fortitude to do what needs to be done, the city compares with the best of ‘em.

See, despite my frustration and anger that often comes through and certainly has come through in my writing this year, the truth is, way, way deep down, I’m an eternal optimist. And, despite all of it, on New Year’s, my mind is forever hopeful.

I can’t help it.

There is magic here. I know there is. I’ve seen it. The Great American city would not rise from this place if there weren’t.

I ask you to remember the magic tonight, and work to make it so again. Together.

And if you don’t believe me, I ask you to believe in an old folk song. A poem with a simple sentiment, that’s sad and sweet and complete.

I ask you to sing along.

Without going into the long history of the impossible to not know song, Auld Lang Syne is a Scots-language poem written in 1788 by the Bard of Ayrshire, the Ploughman Poet, the Soul of Scotland, Robert Burns and set to the melody of a traditional folk song. Parts of the poem and its sentiment, of course, existed long before the young Rabbie “borrowed” and added his own lyrics that he would later turn in to James Johnson at the Scots Musical Museum but, for the most part, we have him to thank for the song sung in the present. After it was published, it quickly became a favorite of Scots and customary to sing at Hogmanay (also known as New Year’s) and soon spread to the English, the Welsh, and the Irish, who all subsequently brought the tradition with them as they emigrated around the world.


Rabbie Burns
Robert Burns? More like Sweet Sideburns, bro...

Each New Year, after largely forgetting about it for 364 days, I’m struck by how much I like the old traditional. Each year, I wonder why it’s not heard more often in American life and why I don’t force it to make more appearances in my personal life (I do remember we sang it in the Boy Scouts at the end of some of the big events).

And why not? A song can be sung at any time. There’s no requirement that a cultural cornerstone is to be only celebrated at a particular moment even if the particular moment is the cause celebre for the cultural cornerstone.

No, I don’t have a favorite version. I enjoy hearing a crowd sing it together. I’m comforted by Julie Andrews’ soprano as it pirouettes through the years. I could sit quietly next to a fire with a glass of whiskey and drift off to Dougie MacLean’s soft timbre as YouTube’s interminable algorithm takes over.

I suppose, due to its proximity, Auld Lang Syne has been unfairly maligned. A casualty of contiguity. Lumped together with the Christmas songs and tossed in the half-ripped cardboard boxes held together by duct tape bought during the Reagan administration on top of the cheap plastic ornaments and the lights that will be wrapped and tied perfectly but, when they’re pulled back out of the attic next year, are guaranteed to be twisted into a knot that would impress a Phrygian.

But Auld Lang Syne is not a Christmas song. A Christmas standard is far more specific and linked to seasonal or religious prerequisites. That’s why we look down on the neighbor who keeps the Christmas lights on the house a bit too long.


July Christmas
For Christ's sake, Gary. It's July...

I also suppose that part of Auld Lang Syne’s magic rests somewhere in its power to induce nostalgia and bring long-hidden memories from the depths to the surface. Sure, given the right context and depending on individual memory, a Christmas song can provide a proper pang of nostalgia but so can any number of melodies or popular music. But I would challenge anyone to name me a singular Christmas song that can evoke the same universal visceral reaction that Auld Lang Syne delivers.

And Auld Lang Syne is not a New Year’s song even if it’s THE New Year’s song. What I mean by that is it wasn’t written for the occasion or the season as most Christmas songs have been. Over the last couple of centuries, the music has become almost a holy hymn to a moment lost in a twilight of time where, like the day, the year is not yet gone and not yet come. It just so happens to have the je ne sais quoi, the seemingly quintessential combination of the sad and the sweet that blends so well with that ethereal moment where the clock strikes and the calendar turns. A mysterious quality that makes it a perfect accompaniment for the moment, where it serves almost as a bookend in a rotunda library. To the ouroboros, the point where the teeth bites the tail.

It’s a song with a unique ability to be heard as a somber song of reflection while, at the same time, it can be heard as a song of hope for the future. And it’s a subtle nod to the latter that it’s actually the first song you hear in the New Year, not the last you hear in the old. A song of goodbye, a call of forge on, a peak where the explorer can rest and gather himself and take in his surroundings. To not only look back upon the path he’s traveled, but look forward to the unknown landscape ahead. Or perhaps better said, a craggy platform in the mountaineer’s eternal climb, where he pauses to look down before once again turning his face toward Heaven and his next foothold.

Maybe it’s just me? Overwhelmed by the aforementioned moment of nostalgia for yet another piece of life left, another breadcrumb tossed on the floor of the forest, another length of Ariadne’s thread drawn in the dark.

And how would I know any alternative? I’ve only lived life with Auld Lang Syne as part of the soundtrack. All I’ve known came after Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians cemented the tradition firmly in the modern American commercial spectacle that New Year’s Eve has become.

It’s possible. I doubt it, but it’s possible.

I do admit I’m a sucker for nostalgia. I can’t help it. A victim, maybe, although that doesn’t sound like the right word. As I view it, a person could be confused into thinking nostalgia to be a fine drug. It sounds like a prescription you’d see advertised during daytime television.


Nostalgia
Side effects of Nostalgia™ are uncommon but may include headache, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, vaginal ejaculations, dysentery, cardiac arrhythmia, thoughts of suicide, mild heart explosions, varicose veins, darkened stool, darkened soul, death, lycanthropy, trucanthropy, more vomiting, arteriosclerosis, hemorrhoids, diabetes, atheism, religious fanatacism, narcissism, Machiavellianism, Marxioencephalitis, paranoia, loss of virginity, mild discomfort, entropy, vampirism, gender impermanence, hysteria, spontaneous dentalhydroplosion, sugar high, even more vomiting, your mom, and mild rash. Ask your doctor if Nostalgia™ is right for you.

But nostalgia isn’t the drug. The drug is life, lived. Man, alive.

A person doesn’t get nostalgic during bliss. That’d be silly. Nostalgia is the withdrawal from the drug. Withdrawal from life experienced.

Like a drug withdrawal, nostalgia is a dirty little trick but a good one. A trick to get you to crave what’s not there. To want it. Need it. To be so overcome by the lack of it that you demand more and ignore all rhyme, reason, and sense to get more. Nostalgia is the longing to return…the pang…the hunger of the soul…to return to the something that caused the heart to beat a little harder, the laugh to be a little louder and last a little longer, the mind to focus a little sharper. A yearn to return to the freedom to feel life grab hold of you and let it take you and show all its gifts and possibilities. For if you could just get back to that…time…that place…those moments, it would fill the absence in the present and make it all better.

But, and there’s always a ‘but,’ just as with any drug and any withdrawal, when we’re lost in this nostalgia and we look back with this indescribable fondness for the perceived better, we forget, intentionally or unintentionally, conscious or unconscious, the moments that weren’t ideal or didn’t go as planned. We forget what we went through to get the drug in the first place. The time, sacrificed. The money, wasted. The relationships, strained. The difficult and the treacherous can be so easy to forget and who wants to remember that…stuff? As Doug Larson, the long-time journalist from Door County, Wisconsin said, “Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.”

Further, how many times can we really return to an old experience? Like under control of a drug, once the body is used to a certain amount, the addict needs more in order to get the next level high.

So is nostalgia something that’s there to drive us to the bigger and the better, again and again, that ultimately leads to our destruction? Or is it a part of our comeuppance?

But that, too, seems so black and white, does it not? It can’t be something so simple.

Do we dismiss nostalgia as foolish? That its only purpose is negative and to hold us back or cause us harm?

Do we only look forward? None of us can go back, after all. Impossible. And even if, theoretically, we could, there’s no guarantee that changes to events of the past would return us to our present self with just those unsightly little bits missing, swept under the rug. In fact, the ultimate conclusion is most certainly the opposite. That any little change made would create an avalanche of difference until our present self and life would be unrecognizable and incomprehensible.

Of course, we’re too smart for that. It’s never that simple.

One of the reasons I’m a willing sucker for nostalgia and try to allow myself to feel it is it’s a reminder of just how much life I once felt flow through me. A reminder of how many laughs I once held inside. When I focus on it hard enough it allows me to remember, most importantly, how so many more there are to come.

These days, whenever I find myself looking back on a particular memory I try to pause and think a little harder about the lost moments that came just before the images, thoughts, feelings, and sensations I actually remember. As I’ve grown, it’s these subtle lost memories that have become some of my new favorites to try and recapture. To try and return myself to the center. A nostalgia addict attempting to get as sober as possible. That’s a bit melodramatic but all I mean by it is, selfishly, I’m trying to learn to appreciate smaller and smaller amounts of the drug of life.

I’m rarely able to recall these lost moments, of course. The moments lost would have been the memories I actually remember if I could recall them but, for me, it’s become something akin to a prayer. I admit, I can’t even rightly explain why this has become something I do other than it’s an attempt to acknowledge the lost moments that drifted away from me. That evaporated or went entropic from my mind.

Maybe, in a way, it’s me trying to remember the friends I’ve allowed to do the same? To be more mindful of and thankful for the strange feeling of serendipity when the highway buddy best friend you’ll never know, who seems to totally and completely understand the speed you want to travel and your passing strategy and cruises with you for mile after mile on a long road trip, takes the exit ramp and they’re gone forever. To better recognize the spirit in the person I sat next to at a corner bar once who I never even knew their name but they told me a funny story and they told it in a charming way that had a noteworthy and unique ending line that became part of my own vocabulary and idiosyncracies and how that small little piece of that barfly became a part of my own story and I wonder how many people have taken a peculiarity or oddity or eccentricity of mine and made it a part of their lives and I think about how these good things can be as contagious as bad viruses.

I don’t know. Auld acquaintances, and all that. I’m beginning to ramble.

Never once in the lost moments before my greatest memories have I known what was truly coming next. Never once as the dawn broke have I known what the day would bring and never once as it expired have I known what would wait for me on the other side. Never once. The best moments in my life have been unexpected…

But no matter how hard I try to reach through the mist of my poor memory to only grab hold of the good, the bad are there, too. The worst moments in my life have also come unexpected…and the most honest I can be with myself is to realize and confront the reality that there are more of the bad coming all the same as the good.

Knowing this, it’s the little calm moments in the eternal before where I try to focus and prepare myself to react to the inevitable storms. Too many forget the calms before the storms.

Don’t get me wrong, I certainly remember all the storms, just as much any other person, but it’s the acknowledgment, however muted, of my naivete and ignorance, where the outcome and possibilities were endless. And it makes me hopeful to know there are more new experiences coming, no matter how small, and, further down the line, an experience that is guaranteed to make me feel nostalgic anew. New experiences that may not end well and that may not end as anything significant at all, but where I rest in awe in the anticipation of what they could become. In awe before the inescapable unknowns and the undiscovered unforgettables. And that new nostalgia will be the direct result of life, lived.

There’s a quote I use way too often from Owen Wilson’s character in the completely ridiculous and over-the-top fantastic Michael Bay popcorn movie, Armageddon. As he’s getting strapped into the rocket, another character asks how he’s feeling and he replies, “I’m great! I got that excited/scared feeling. Like 98% excited, 2% scared. Or maybe it’s more…it could be…it could be 98% scared, 2% excited but that’s what makes it so intense. It’s so – confused! I can’t really figure it out…”

If we focus hard enough, every single moment of our lives could be described that way.


Wow - Owen Wilson
An excerpt from my next book, tentatively titled, WOW: The Life and Times of the Prophet Owen Wilson.

As a pretty good writer pointed out, all the world’s a stage. We have our exits and our entrances and, in our time, each of us will play many parts, but the stage stays the same and, if we’re being honest, so do the stories. But that doesn’t mean our time on the stage is worth any less than any other’s and, I think, it’s an acknowledgment from Burns’ lyrics that it’s the opposite. That we should be honored to share the stage with these acquaintances. And further, to walk the same floors and trace the steps of these same lines that wind back through the ages to the beginning. The long thread through the dark. The realization that we’re all still just sitting around the eternal campfire telling each other stories and making each other laugh or cry or wonder to keep warm and make it through another night just like all those that came before. That maybe this day too, in some far off future, will be a long, long ago to sing for.

Yes, even the year 2021. And yes, even if it was a poor copy of 2020.

We’ve all faced yet another challenging year of our own making. Of that, there is no doubt. But, just as I promise now every year, 2022 is here. Which, if we’re being honest, may not be any good either. But 2023 is coming. And so is 2024. And so on.

You get the idea.

Ultimately, this all adds up to the individual’s realization they’re more than mere individual. That while they’re an individual they’re not just an individual and that they’re part of a family. That they’re not just an individual who’s part of a family but that they’re also a part of a community. That the Trinity outside reflects the Trinity inside.

I’m not saying anything new, of course. This can generally be summed up and easier understood with, “it’s the little things,” but there’s no fun in brevity. And, sometimes, we need to wade through the superfluous redundancies and get lost on the way in order to find where we needed to go.

What matters, and always has, is the time spent together. Whether we’ve lived together directly as in a marriage or simply lived on this world at the same time, just as we all have a home we all have a place in the long line before and the long line beyond. This is our time. And it is our solemn duty to make our time the best we can.

We’re all old acquaintances, whether we know each other or not. Whether we shared a common time or not.

Which finally brings me back to the tradition of Auld Lang Syne.

We need these little traditional reference points to bind us and keep the knot strong. For if it is the little things that make us, us, if we have no little things that join us together through time, we don’t have an us at all. If there be nothing to remind us of the lights of the stage or the fire we’re forever around together, always, the nights will be cold and dark.

Burns’ lyrics never declare whether the days long since were “good,” nor do they denounce them as “bad.” Sure, once upon a time they picked the daisies fine, but that was a long time ago and a lot has happened in the in-between. Sure, once upon a time we shared a river all day, but now we are a sea apart. No, we can’t go back but no matter. We shared that time. So raise a glass, friend.

Burns implores us to, just for a moment, let it all go and raise a glass to something as sad and sweet as memory itself. And, more than that, someone shared life with us once whether we knew them well or never knew them at all. We may never be here again but we’re worth a cheer because we are.

As I mentioned at the beginning, now that this is done, I’ll likely forget about Auld Lang Syne again until a few seconds before midnight when the sudden moment of nostalgic clarity washes over me as it feels as if the whole world begins singing in tune to a simple song we all know despite never having practiced together or even never having met the people next to us. Try to remember, I’ll be singing along.

And I hope you sing with the world. For the world sings for you.

For old time’s sake.