The coming year; the last year in Normal entries

It’s a gray New Year’s Eve day here in the middle of the mitten. I used to write shit about the previous year or the coming year; shooting for profound often missing the target altogether. In related … stuff … I find myself parsing old sayings of late. Full disclosure is that I mumble shit to myself all the time, especially when not feeling well physically or emotionally or both. Why old sayings? Well, negative self-talk does more harm than good, optimistic self-talk starts sounding insincere and I grow suspicious of the reliability of the narrator, me. If I quote other people, dead ones mostly, or conventional wisdom, it’s more of an exercise for my memory and the content is secondary and at least once removed so the positive or negative impact is dampened.

What I find repeating old sayings and conventional wisdom, is new meaning. Not because I have a brilliant mind, but, it’s like shit from AA, you repeat it often enough it’s more like a mantra in a foreign language than wisdom. Just saying, the whole serenity prayer thing is actually pretty fucking A good, it just no longer holds any meaning and smells of stale cigarettes and bad coffee. Just an example, I rarely come up with AA shit. This morning it was ‘The sins of the father are revisited on the son’ (if you want to argue revisited isn’t the right word I won’t put up any resistance). Which is a good example of the other thing I find; meaning changes over the years, even within one’s own lifetime.

You don’t really hear that often anymore at all or when you do it has nothing to do with religion, with actual sin as is defined in theological journals. Often it just refers to debt, sometimes to vice or general environmental conditions leading the son to behave like the father. I … could go on but I don’t feel like it. The real point is I’ve been muttering shit to myself like a mad man. This is not a good state for writing a new year’s thing.

It’s a tricky holiday. Traditionally it involves getting drunk and kissing. Not opposed to either. It’s the driving to a place where others are getting drunk and kissing that always sounds like a car accident or bar fight waiting to happen.

The general consensus in the places I go is that 2016 sucked eggs or balls depending upon your sensitivity to words and/or actual eggs or actual balls. It’s not uncommon to have strong opinions on either and in some languages, both can be the same word given the context. Testicles on the whole being more egg shaped than ball shaped. In other context ball sucking is a positive thing. I have neither an egg nor a ball in that contest. 2016, comparatively, has been sort of center of bell curve for my last decade, at least on a personal level. Even the whole Trump business (for us Americans); He’s more like a barking dog. Dogs don’t bite when they are busy barking, at absolute worst case, it’s how a dog talks shit, and, like people, if they are going to do something they do it instead of talk about it. Often a dog is barking for reasons unknown but obviously not aggressive.

We were raised, us Americans, with the idea that the rest of world waited with bated breath for the outcome of American political races, I’m not sure that’s true anymore. Sure, when we blew up Hiroshima and Nagasaki the rest of the world was probably scared enough to wonder what the fuck we’d do next. I’m sure Russia and China watched the McCarthy hearings closely. But I think the idea that the president of the united states is the most powerful position in the world is no longer a widely-held belief. If I were to give Trump credit, I think the whole business about ‘Starting an arms race’ or whatever it was he said, was a childish attempt, or maybe a wise strategic attempt, to get back that old uncertainty that we could drop a bomb. In either case, it’s just barking. Why? He isn’t in the white house, has no political record of actually doing shit, and, mostly, all personal stuff aside we have checks and balances. I could go into the branches of government, Judicial, legislative, administrative and such, but it’s closer to the truth and easier to say we run our country by clusterfuck. Whether Trump is serious or not has very little to do with his ability to pull off half the crazy shit he talks about, no matter how many “people” agree with him or not.

Even assuming, poorly, that the popular vote was the be all end all, and, that he had gotten it, the popular vote would still end with the vote. Once in office all the various fucks of the clusterfuck have no obligation to get the peoples advice and though they will sometimes act like they do, it has more to do another term at the public trough. Even so, it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission. Clusterfuck. Trump is not King, even countries that still have some form of monarchy, the king isn’t really in charge of anything. Even dictators have to answer to someone, that’s part of the reason the really good ones have their very large armies kill some citizens just to show they can. If they weren’t worried about the citizens there wouldn’t be a reason to keep them in line from time to time.

Sure, there were personal losses and artists whose work I respected dying, but, not enough to drag 2016 over the hump of the bell curve into more shitty than other years. Not for me at any rate. No argument for those who have lost more. I’ve had those types of shitty years and wouldn’t dream of minimalizing anyone else’s.

So, you know, rock on with your bad self, and 2017 already looks like it will be interesting. I know, that can be a curse, but I meant interesting in the most neutral sense.