The New Year’s resolution about cutting weight is already out the window.
The Arizona Cardinals are looking for a new coach and general manager.
The Green Bay Packers survived the first round of playoffs and move on.
We survived the Fiscal Cliff (sort of).
The Arizona Legislature gets ready to start its next session on Monday – woo hoo!
The Town Council wants someone to build a giant and successful commercial project downtown.
Now what?
For me, the whole New Year’s thing is growing quite old. We look back at the year that was – “Oh really, I don’t remember that celebrity dying last year” – and we feel the obligatory push to look ahead and make a list of things we want to change and work on.
Ugh.
Of course, I have a good excuse for my bad attitude surrounding this time of year.
It goes back to a New Year’s Eve in the late 1970s. As teens are wanton to do, someone was throwing a barn party in rural Port Washington, Wis., and Sue, my “steady” girlfriend at the time, up and decided to start dancing and making out with some other fellow, a guy a couple of years older no less.
Since he was a farm boy and about twice my size, there really wasn’t much I could do at the time.
“Excuse me kind sir, even though you smell like manure, could you kindly take your giant paws off my girlfriend and hand her over to me right now? I know you could pulverize me with one hand, but don’t you want to cruise into the new year with a new moral attitude and perspective on proper dating relationships and etiquette?”
And today she wants to be my “friend” on Facebook?
Yeah, right!
A giant snow storm was raging outside, and someone had borrowed my car. Cell phones weren’t invented yet. I had no idea when my car would be back – or if it would even return given the deteriorating nature of the country roads and snow drifts already forming.
I was trapped in the party barn with no possibility of escape. Doomed to a miserable New Year’s Eve of misery and smooching by everyone else.
Midnight came and went.
My delicate psyche has been permanently scarred since that chilling episode of teen betrayal and lust.
So decades later I’m supposed to just sweep this hideous mess under the hay and move on with my life, making resolutions to be better, faster, stronger, richer, leaner, younger and smarter?
Thus, dear readers, you can imagine my consternation as the calendar slowly crawls toward New Year’s following Christmas.
For this year, I resolve to stay out of smelly barns for beer parties. I resolve to never lend my vehicle to anyone else during a snowstorm. And I further resolve that if some farm boy ever asks my wife to dance at a barn party, I will kindly punch him in the face.
