2010 in retrospect.

Oh, that torturous dichotomy between the visceral and surreal, that vast chasm where music and dreams lie, where the impalpable drowns into pitiful thought.

What happened this year? An earthquake demolished the entire country of Haiti and the United States took one step closer to choosing a psychotic woman to run for president. David Soyer died. Jacob Lateiner died. Spain won the World Cup. Health care still blows big sweaty balls, and tax-cuts for the wealthy were extended by another two years.

Oh, the predictability of monotony, “the obsessions are wistful, even morbid. I grow self-pitying, alas.”

What else? Hotel room upon hotel room of squalid nothingness. Played over 70 concerts this year. Bank account healthy; mind in disarray. Hotel treadmills start to formulate emblematic meaning, running in the middle of nowhere, towards nothing, and going nowhere. South Korea is becoming a second home; decision to do mid-west tour resulted in sacrifice. Worth it?

500 years after the era of Renaissance poetry, and men still moan about unrequited love.

Allen Ginsberg howls into the night, seeing the best minds of his generation “who faded out in vast sordid movies, where shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams and stumbled to unemployment offices.”

Jay won New York Phil, Mikey moved into town and the future is full of hope. Friends and family fill me with endless love, the undying and unconditional love. The love that looks beyond the fence into your yard covered with dog shit. That was gay.

In 2005, Rorem wrote that “Tomorrow will be like today. The men will get up and go to work again. Those green needles at the top of the 80-foot pine will be wafted by that high wind as they are wafted now. The wisteria smell at dusk will be inebriating. The sun will rise once more, as the television sends out more pictures of a hopeless war. Everything will be like today.”

Happy New Year .