Everything's GREAT.

We all know someone who’s always doing “great!” Work is great! 780 “friends” on FaceBook, great! Sex life is great. Financial outlook, great! How about that great DJ last night! This top and those shoes, so great! Reality television, self-help books, coffee with flavored syrups, Zoloft, text messages, and Lil John’s latest, Crunk Rock, all great! So much great! Great-Great-Great!

Am I missing something? When did EVERYTHING become great?!! I’m on “great” over-load. When did “great” become standard? Am I wrong thinking “hard”, “difficult”, “confusing”, “sad”, or at best “unfair”, the norm? “Great”, I thought, that wonderful moment here and there; “great” that infrequent yet magnificent sparkle that marked a memory or two along life’s short, hard course...that feeling you got when life's tide shifted in your favor, if only for a minute, and made pushing on the ocean just a little bit easier...

Remember? Great is special…

Every time I hear someone tell me they’re doing great I want to ask them, “Really? Are you really great?" If they’re great, what’s better than great? If they tell me they’re doing “good” does that really mean they’re doing badly? What’s worse than bad? Has “bad” become the end of the rope? Hope not.

As for these "I'm great" people, it’s not that their positive attitude is a problem – an affirmative attitude is a decisive weapon in an intolerant world – it’s just that their excessive use of the word “great” is becoming unreasonable and I think we might be getting a little soft. I think feeling “great” all the time helps us rationalize what the Greeks wrote about in detail: Life’s a bitch.
Deal with it.

It’s not that there aren’t great things in this world, there are – strappy heels and thigh-highs, anything by Ed Vedder, and a Jameson at the end of a long day, to name a few – it’s just that there so many not-great things – poverty, Beltway traffic, the WNBA, or anything by Noam Chomsky – that I think we need to rediscover life’s pure equilibrium: not-bad, not-great, hopefully pretty darn good, probably pretty darn tough...some have forgotten this much.

I was having drinks one afternoon with a close friend. He was losing lots of money at work. I was dealing with the standard mess emblematic of my personal life. Conversation about the recent suicide of a friend, the development of cancer in another and the divorce of a third carried out to streaming images of violence in Israel, apocalypse in Darfur, and Wall Street burning before our eyes from the TV above the bar. The situation, for a lot of us the world over at that moment in time it seemed, was pretty grim and we two were dealing with it all as best we could, with honest conversation, genuine fellowship, realistic expectations, and lots and lots of hard alcohol…

There was a girl sitting next to us. She was in her early 20’s. She was all that is California: blonde and tan and tone and blue-eyed and eager. And busy on her phone. She’d type, send, take a sip of her pink confection and flip her sandal on her big toe. Seconds later a reply. She’d read it, laugh, put her drink down, and write back. By now (and without knowing it) we were staring. She looked up, caught our eye and smiled. “Hey guys,” she said. “Hey”, we replied in monotone and dazed unison. “What’s up?” she asked. “Nothing,” we said. “What’s up with you?” I asked. “SO well,” (actually not even answering the question) “everything is just so-so GREAT! How about you two, isn’t everything just so great for you guys?!” she asked with a naïve, rhetorical, and altogether presumptuous casualness that diminished her outward hotness almost immediately. “Yeah,” we said as we looked up towards the images of our world burning live time before us and then at each other and the reality of our own personal disasters and replied, “everything is just great.” But it wasn’t…it was not great…and she didn’t get it. It was all over her head. Or under ours. Or neither, or both…or whatever...

And "great" confusion isn’t just a problem with the local hots at the local bars...everyone gets it wrong. The media missed “great” this week altogether…

The Iraqi national election was great. More than 65% of eligible voters turned out in Ninewa and Saladin Provinces, more than half country-wide; when I stood on an elementary school’s rooftop in Haditha in a nervous security posture in 2005 at the first national election, that number stood at 2% countrywide. Just now we weren’t allowed to drive, fly, or operate at all – this was Iraq’s show. The principle operations nerve center was guarded with a triple duty here on base, and the polls opened. And we held our breath. At the end of the day more than 14,400 Iraqi citizens ran for less than 500 positions and opinions were voiced freely, conferred legitimately, and positions of power exchanged bloodlessly. As the sun set, we all lowered our heads at a dinner of celebratory steak and lobster and admitted, “Hey, they pulled it off, good for them, after all of this…what a great day.”

What a great day indeed…and all after our own new President assumed command after a bloodless exchange of power of our own.

But that day I read more about Iceland and their new Premier’s taste in women (which is actually pretty hot) and the Super Bowl (which is a great win for a great blue collar town) than I did about this historic (and peaceful and unthinkable) day for democracy. Those were the “great” stories of the past few news cycles…and the “not-great” stories called my attention to the Nikkei dropping 120 points (uh huh), Michael Phelps and a hash pipe (surprise) and that a man is selling “867-5309” (which is actually pretty glorious); never mind authentic “not-great” stories like Al Qaeda abductions in Pakistan, our own stimulus in-fighting, or the Jonas Brothers “virgin” testimony on YouTube…to borrow the words of my roommate who walked in on me just yesterday cleaning my rifle while dancing and singing out-loud to the new Pink LP So What: “What the holy-hell is going on here!!!”

Not everything “great” is necessarily “great” – things like the Great Depression, Great White Sharks, and Six Flags Great Adventure were all pretty shitty – which makes me think “great” is all a matter of perspective. The “hot” flipping her sandal was doing “great”! She has no job, takes 9 hours at Mira Costa Community College, a rock-star metabolism, her own “daddy” stimulus package, a reading list that goes as far as “The Secret” and implants that reinforce summer vacation plans and her ego. If you’re the hot and taken care of, why wouldn’t you be great? Now, integrate the perspective of an Aeschylus, Euripides or Aristophanes with say the understanding of a Hemmingway, Nabokov or Fitzgerald, and I’d say we have perspective. A reminder that everything isn’t so great. As it should be...most things stand as both bad and good. Great and awful.

Take the 20th Century. Bundle it up. Get your tissues, a few diet cokes, a pack of Marlboro Lights, and ask yourself, was it a great century?

That hot 20-something sandle-flipper might argue it was the worst of all centuries! Hitler’s Holocaust, Stalin’s Gulag, two (some might argue three) world wars, millions upon millions dead, a global depression, African genocide, Islamism and the rise of her own evil influence; it was indeed a century of great-awful…a century of pushing on the ocean.

But was it not also the century of incredible leaps in science and technology - a century that cured such terrible disease, and gave man's imagination, design? Was it not a century of ground-breaking art, music and film? Was it not a century anchored by woman's suffrage, a Civil Rights movement, and the defeat of Imperialism, Hitlerism, and Stalinism the world over? For the first time we drove and flew, we sailed faster, dove to incredible depths, and sent man to space to climb the face of our own night's white mountain face. And we advanced. We got smarter and healthier, more wealthy.

It was a century of complex and competing self and national desires; it was a century in which the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn hold perhaps most true: it was a time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations. And defend we did. Or so we tried. Though not without error or loss, it was a century of progress. And all at a cost - both great and awful.

All else being equal, it's a wonder still everyone does not share this exact same empty feeling as they look back upon our own history: that we are man alone, pushing on the ocean.

It's a wonder so many people agree: Everything's just great! When the truth is, everything is what it is...