Anticipating it was one thing. Weeks of hearing the numbing bleat of pols and policy wonks, the yammering of pitchmen, had worn the edge off the approaching day, blunting it into just one more contrivance of the calendar.
Yet the first time you find yourself writing it down, 2000, or typing it out, 1/01/00, even the most sensible being must hesitate a little at crossing that threshold, artificial as it is.
A single midnight's transit is all it took, and there they are, clean, pure zeros all lined up--a slate wiped mystically clean and ready for rewriting the human story.
Something about being human compels reinvention: maybe the mere hiccup of cosmic time it took us to evolve from chattering creatures at the veldt's edge into the lords of this spinning blue dot. Maybe the hurtling speed of the Now, when a single human life span can reach from the dozen seconds of the Wright brothers' first wobbly flight to a man chipping golf balls on the moon. Perhaps the yearnings of genetic mapping, the wish to stitch and splice ourselves to the highest specifications.
The nation premised itself on reinvention, and no place reinvents more ardently than California. The state re-Mixmaster created the people who created the computers, the movies, the cyclotron, the freeways, aerospace, no-fault divorce, self-esteem, navel-gazing.
"Eureka" is the state motto--"I have found it." It leaves it to us to decide what "it" is. Nine decades ago, a British diplomat visiting this big and empty and eager state asked what would become of it when 50 million people lived here, when "the real question will not be about making more wealth or having more people, but whether the people will then be happier or better than they have been hitherto."
As the calendar page stands at triple 0, we are far closer to that 50 million than we are to knowing the answer to his question.
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One after the next, throughout the 1970s, four spacecraft raced across the solar system and caromed off into the galaxy. The first pair were named Pioneer, the second pair, Voyager.
Aboard both Pioneers were encoded data fixing planet Earth in the solar system, the solar system in the galaxy, mathematical language, and drawings of the human male and female--carefully vague on genital details, lest NASA be accused of sending smut into space.
