We’re only 4 months in! Don’t give up yet! Maybe later! But not yet!
2022 was a doozy.
A real thought-it-was-a-fart-but-it-turned-out-to-actually-be a-shit kind of year. Just an all-around doozy of a dookie.
Local news was outrageous. World news? Disgraceful! Celebrity news? Don’t get me started! The state of social media? Fetch me a barf bag! Dealing with my neighbors? Call me a medic! Dealing with my family? Call an EXORCIST! That day I was on hold with my bank’s customer service for over an hour, only to be told that I’d been transferred to the wrong department? I may have just smashed my phone against something a million times! Once it dawned on me that I no longer had a functioning phone, and I had only my unchecked tsunami of emotions to blame? Well, that phone could’ve been donated to some ‘Infamous Female Criminals’ museum and put next to a label that said: ‘Here’s the last phone she ever owned before she well and truly snapped.’
Having said that, what I’d most like to do is remind you that 2023 is still awfully fresh! And you know what? It just smells different.
Sure, we told ourselves something similar when 2022 was equally as unspoiled–before it arrived on our doorstep like someone who’d successfully catfished us, and instead of getting the Mattel pink hunk we saw on TikTok we got botulism in a cheap suit.
Sure, we’ve hyped ourselves up in the same way at the beginning of every year and nothing about dragging ourselves around in these accursed ensembles of meat has ever changed in much of a fundamental, enduring fashion.
But 2023 means business! This is the year Dave’s Gourmet partners with us, even though such a development sounds both inexplicable and indefensible! This, my friends, is the year the tides turn!
Shit. Shit. That was the wrong idiom for me to use.
Now you must be thinking about the sea level rising, and how the children you’ve had will be living out the plot of ‘Waterworld’ by the time they’re in their 20s, and how if you’d listened closely enough to the drunken mobs singing Auld Lang Syne on the 31st you could’ve picked up on the ominous scraping of The Grim Reaper’s whetstone against his scythe blade in the background.
…Ok, how about I start over? Let’s forget that last bit and escort our little Doomer Demons back to their cells!
Clink!
Hear that?
That’s the key locking those pesky hope-gobblers away, nice and tight!
Ahem.
Yes, 2022 indeed posed challenges. You weren’t alone if you found yourself dazedly thinking, ‘Huge, bad events that impact the entire globe don’t just happen back to back, do they? It isn’t normal for crises to be continuous like this!’
No one could blame you if you thought, ‘There was a 21-year gap between world wars, right? That was enough of a break for a person born at the end of one to at least be able to get legally lit in some parts of the US by the time the second one was starting!’
All of us, collectively, were the Final Girl near the end of the slasher movie known as 2020–2021. We assumed the bad guy was dead. Right as we were catching our breath, he jumped back to his feet, despite it being unbelievable. Spry as ever, he gave chase again– all the while, shouting ‘You can’t afford gas! You can’t afford eggs! You can’t afford rent! That guy you watch on the internet who seems kinda cool likes to tell little kids that they look like the Cajun Sasquatch, just to see them cry!! Democracy is a Swarovski crystal hedgehog sitting uncomfortably near the edge of a desk!!’
Buuuuut! But but but!! Is rehashing all the hardships my goal? It most certainly is not!
We’re better off without eggs, anyway. They come out of a chicken’s ass! Chickens only have one hole for everything, and that’s gross. And walking beats driving everywhere–. think how good your legs will look after this latest recession! Leaving your 400-sq ft apartment because the rent increase is too much ( even with that second job you got) doesn’t have to be such a big deal, either: crashing on a friend’s couch can be loads of fun! Why view it as a personal failure when you can view it as the months-long slumber party that your 10-year-old self dreamed of? You finally get to have it, at age 35!
Finding the open window whenever a door closes is what matters! Seeing the glass as half-full, even if you need to force yourself to do so with every stupid molecule in your stupid monkey body, is what really matters! I swear to Christ, if those Doomer Demons break out of their confines a single other time to infect me with their pessimism, I’ll bury their asses under the jail of my mind!
Fuckin’ clink!!
I implore you to focus on the array of possibilities that lay ahead! On the fortuity this new year still holds! We’re currently living in the greatest period in human history, regardless of what our five senses keep screaming at us! Society is indeed improving–-it’s just that these improvements are often moderate or fragmentary or happen very gradually, and I’m impatient. That must be it! My wacky expectations are the problem!
A window still counts as open even if it’s only a crack, and that crack is too small to fit through so the best you can do is poke your nose out to suck back a few lung-fulls of blessed air! Change still counts as change, even if it’s frustratingly small and frustratingly assailable or will benefit the rich long before a diluted version ever reaches you!
Our species is not an ouroboros that keeps eating its filthy tail, and the future looks bright!
Bright, and completely shart-free!
