once more away from the breach, dear friends

I started this post, a pre-appraisal of this year of our wisely absent Lord, 2025, on the night of Dec. 31 of the previous one. It’s something I’ve undertaken in some fashion most New Year’s, for more than a decade now. But this time, I just stopped, right in the middle of it. I couldn’t finish. If perhaps you don’t know why, then good for you. Your meds are clearly exceptional. Your life as a media hermit, uncanny. Your ability at self-delusion, next-level.

But just in case you really have no idea what I’m getting at here:

We had this election last November, see. A guy of such staggeringly low caliber, who should inspire in any sentient being a loathing reserved for top-tier atrocities like genocide, famine, cancer and Two Broke Girls reruns, won the top seat in the world’s leadership corps. And he did so even after endlessly threatening to do all manner of ruinous things to his own country, which his own history suggested he absolutely would do, if given half the chance.

And then, what? We nonetheless gave this sprawling flesh slag, this slug-bodied human schmeckel, so very much more than that. Because not only did he win, he did so for the second time, after the staggering harm he wrought from 2017-20, following his first go-round securing the United States Presidency.

I still can’t. I just can’t.

Anyway, the file “new year” found a nice spot on my computer desktop.

I started out thinking I’d get right back to it, to wrap it up in at most a day or two, once I’d clawed my way out from under the dispiriting realizations pinning me down that night. That is, after I perhaps had dredged up a little optimism, some modicum of hope, from, well, hell if I know where.

But instead, there this sad “new year” languished, ever untouched, like some digital briar sticking in my throat, mixed-metaphorically speaking, each time I glanced over to the right.

In mid-May, my birthday made its usual unwelcome visit, another pre-pronouncement of another year to come, as my body has thus far steered clear of any sudden capitulations to clogged-artery or bleeding-brain drama. I ain’t young, goddammit. These things happen.

So for now, it seems, once more around the sun …

An event that nonetheless offered me another prime opportunity to evaluate what was to come.

And … nope!

I’ve repeatedly asked myself why I should keep pretending something of merit would come to me with this orphaned piece. So wouldn’t it then be wisest to just cut my losses and deep-six the poor almost-thing, since the other obvious option was to give in to the ill-advisedness of shoving the fucker out there as is, to put it out of my misery, and to let it fend for what little it actually is?

So if you’re reading this now, welcome to my copping out.

Which is kind of an odd introduction to saying, hey, let’s talk a little bit more here about hope.

Hope of late is what you get, said someone deservedly not famous, might’ve been me, when you wash down a couple of ghost peppers with a mouthful of cold whatever, attempting to bypass setting your damn-fool face on fire. Hope, oh hope, sweetest hope, blind hope – as in you’d better now hope your as-yet-unwitting ass is pretty soon pretty near your toilet, before your wretched new reality arrives. Or that perhaps you die before you get there.

Because life itself is about to go … everywhere, all at once. And in not in some happy Hollywood hotdog-fingers sort of way.

Hope. At the very least, nab some floor cleaner, if you can, y’know, just in case, as you clench yourself forward, sweating your panicked body’s own tears of regret, to the porcelain host of your own horrified guts’ literal abandon.

Hope. Go, team, go!

Now, halfway through this abysmal year, it seems I’ve written more about my not being able to finish the original post than I did in composing the post itself. So I’m gonna chalk up my rambling to my actually having finished this whole thing in some way after all. Because take your shitty little victories anywhere you can, I suppose.

Still, it’s fair of you to ask why. Why did I succumb to posting this jumbled effort, forcing you, the gentle reader, to have to decide whether to ignore it, which by now you’re probably truly wishing that you had?

Sorry. It’s just that sometimes, even I need proof I’m giving it a shot.

See I am honestly trying, goddammit. I am. To cope. To pretend, as much as I’m still able, that we are not actually where we are, where the ruling political party, even now making regular anti-voting inroads toward becoming our indefinitely continuing party in power, isn’t openly siphoning away the very blood of this country, on its stated course to then burn the empty husk of us to the ground.

Add to this my own lifelong struggles with, let’s call it, “mood,” and some days the only way I can let myself think about this year at all is to simply hide from it. And do I succeed? I never succeed.

Hope. A one, and a two, and a … whee!

Oh, and before I let this get by me:

Happy new year.

Because why not? Why the fuck not?

Dec. 31, 2024

This is where I should say that I am reserving judgment on 2025, to give it a chance to actually introduce itself, for better or for worse. I should say that. I’m not saying that.

I sat up tonight, as I do with every dawning new year, waiting, as ever, for something that never came, some warm-and-fuzzy personal revelation, some simple clarity, perhaps, something anyway, by which to frame this annual ceremonial changing of the guard. Something, that is, beyond that sufficiently animate, presumably still-warm corpse Ryan Seacrest waxing bland over the perpetually anticlimactic ceremony of the big ball drop, of the sky essentially falling on yesterday, a metaphor on this particular New Year’s that I’m certain none of us who are still paying any attention particularly wants.

In any case, if you’re going for big-boy bollocks, maybe start by finding an emcee who, if his pants dropped, wouldn’t likely resemble the diabolical Smoothie from the Christopher Meloni/Patton Oswalt weirdfest Happy. (Go ahead, go look it up. I’ll wait. I’m not really getting anywhere here, in any case.)

I don’t do that New Year’s televised garbage, by the way. I haven’t in … well, I never have, not on purpose, that I can remember. Not even as a kid.

This year, as I instead hunkered down in our barely lit family room, bolstered by some reasonable Italian red against the outside chill of every description, amid slumbering, snuffling dogs, and with gas logs a-flickering beneath strands of tiny colored lights and Christmas stockings still hung from the mantel with care, and all to the soundtrack of some sublime post-bop jazz, Coltrane, Miles, Mingus, like that, those final ravages of gravity on Old Man 2024’s own naughty bits were to be lost on me. Learn to keep your pants on, dude, you’re fast dying anyway. And nobody, truth be told, wants to see that.

Once the clock had rolled over into the New Now, and the dogs had calmed back down from the inevitable popping-off of yahoo celebration outside, I cued up some old Monty Python, including Michael Palin’s incomparable Spanish Inquisition bit. I watched that particular episode twice. It seemed only right.

Cuz that shit’s damn funny, even after all these years, and maybe especially now, because, well, laugh at the horror, y’know? Place your reeling head right there in the lion’s gaping maw. And just check out those chompers, will ya? Now, see how much you trust tomorrow to come. Then if you can somehow still raise a chuckle, good on ya, pilgrim. Muchos kudos. You are a champion.

Because this particular dawning new year, so abjectly significant, deserves no tacky party-favor glasses or the pale specter of Celtic-elf Anderson Cooper getting his cutsey drunk on in the company of pointedly outre pal Andy Cohen, all while commenting on pop culture throwing up all over itself in and around Times Square.

This next year, we may wind up as endangered as is damn near every non-human living thing now. So I likewise don’t feel the retro Rockin’ Eve fumbled irony of Alanis Morissette or the time-capsuled zaddy antics of Lenny Kravitz are really needed, thanks just the same.

So there goes my own reserved judgement, out with the old, including even the promise of continuing democracy. Life as we know it, you see, may soon enough be on fucking fire.

Best notify my next of kin, to baldly misquote Bob Dylan and Rick Danko, this world shall explode.