Many Remainders

Wow, such a long time without a blog post. September?! I should be posting at least once a week, like in the old days, but at this point the blog as a medium is almost anachronistic. I still prefer it over lengthy Facebook posts for ease of archival reference purposes.

It's all Liam's fault I don't take the time to treat this blog properly.

Really, it was just one thing after another that kept me from it. My mindset shifts so frequently that I can't find the time to capture each phase in a blog post before something new happens. Every few days, I'm in a completely different place mentally, it seems. Before I can post to recap my thoughts for the week, I have moved on to a different project I'm juggling.

Let me catch up. But, this long after the fact, I might as well be painfully succinct.

October... Well, I didn't get to relish it that much. The weather was absurdly hot until almost December, and activity-wise, I did almost nothing. The house repairs went back to square one, so I couldn't host a Halloween party. One by one, the people I was going to go with to House of Torment backed out. And Halloween itself, I worked a festival with most of the rest of the crew. By the time I picked up Liam and went home, it was midnight, and therefore November. 2017 is going to have to make up for this in spades next Halloween.

A few days before Halloween, though, I received a Mystery Package. A handwritten letter, a creepy journal, and a medallion. All together, they told a pretty cool story. It was one of those little-known services online where you anonymously send a package to "delight and befuddle" the recipient. It was the saving grace of October. I'd love to go on, and I meant to make an entire post about it, but I was swamped with work at the time. I did manage to photograph every page of the journal and make a Facebook album out of it, for all to read. You can find it there.

While missing out on the Halloween fun, it also dawned on my that not only was I missing out on so much in general, I was also impossibly behind on my 2016 goals. It started to sink in that 2016 was, if not a failure, then a dud of a start on these objectives. So, I licked my wounds and started to plan ahead. I began to ever so gingerly place all those eggs in the one basket that is 2017.

Yes, while you all were celebrating Halloween, I was getting the jump on a reflective and introspective New Year's Eve. Secretly, the last two entire months have been basically one long New Year's Eve for me personally.

In November, I started playing Chrono Trigger. It always reminds me of Thanksgiving (and Christmas) breaks from high school and college. Breath of Fire shares this associative honor as well. For both of those games, I always review the strategy guides, skim the walkthroughs on YouTube, and listen to the soundtracks, for an annual nostalgia refresher. I don't know when or why, but that became a Thanksgiving tradition for me.

My brief Christmas spirit, before it fizzled out and never came back, happened early.

And then Election Day happened, and America chose to cut its nose off to spite its face. I went into a dark state for days, and actually became physically ill from it. Fuck Donald Trump. I have volumes to say about why. I could have an entire blog just for that, but I don't have time now. We elected a tangerine-coated colon polyp, a buffoon, an idiot narcissist with the temperament of a toddler and absolutely no understanding of policy. Fucking piece of shit Donald Trump. I feel free saying this and so much more; If you supported him, "Grab them by the pussy," then you never, EVER get to pretend that something *I* said was offensive.

So anyway, the Christmas blues and stress came on in full force. I had a few posts to encapsulate that, but once again, the moment is past, so I am being succinct.

We went to my parents' house for a family Christmas, where I intended to blog about everything, but I couldn't get the Internet to work on my laptop. I am at my sister's house now, where I spent last night's festivities.

I have been increasingly annoyed by the trendy, bandwagon doom-and-gloom about 2016. It was all the power of suggestion, spearheaded by comedians early in the year. It started to irritate my how so many people on Facebook, people who clearly, visibly had a far better year than I did, were constantly bemoaning the supposed awfulness of 2016 just because a few celebrities died. You had an album released, you bought a nice house, you drank a lot of expensive Scotch, you traveled far and wide, shut the fuck up. You found things to be dour about because you were told to do so. Was your 2016 really that bad personally?

I guess it bothers me because my 2015 was so thoroughly, legitimately, objectively horrific. Although 2016 was difficult, it was a spa day by comparison. For me, 2016 was what I made it out to be from the get-go: a year of reflection, introspection, and a combination of looking back on past chapters to salvage them and looking forward to the next few years to catch up on the things I wish I'd done. I spent most of the year taking stock of my own life.

I had initially declared 2016 to be the "Year of Many Victories." Well, it didn't turn out to be that, exactly. There were a few (the "War of Perception" comes to mind). But, mostly--and I knew this from the beginning--I bit off more than I could chew. I hardly finished anything I set out to do, and so I see 2017 as an extension of 2016. In a good way. Time to roll up my sleeves and get serious about progress.

I am hesitant to dub 2017 the "Year of" anything in particular. I would say "The Year of the Bard," implying glory on all fronts, but that might best be saved for 2018. I will have to think about that.

I have a spreadsheet with columns for every "Mode" (as previously blogged about) that I created at the beginning of 2016 and reviewed daily. All my inspiration, all my goals, all my resolutions, all my projects, all my hobbies... laid out in lists. That master list never got trimmed down, and so it is the new 2017 document. I am nothing if not mentally organized, at least. Productivity comes next. I have a lot going on inside my head.

So, I haven't made any New Year's resolutions per se. Today, to start the new year, rather than having specific resolutions, I just feel a vague, general sense of refreshment, ready to kick some ass.

In all sincerity, I want to say, Happy New Year! Make it a good one. Make it.