New Year's Dissolution

I picked the wrong year to stop sniffing glue

Jan 08, 2025

I wanted to kick off 2025 with a little hope.

I don’t really do resolutions—sure, I’ve been doing Dry January for a few years, primarily to lose weight, and I try to drink more water than usual (if only to have something to drink besides beer) but I’ve never been one to announce year-long goals, or to make a vision board, or to manifest things. The fact is, as a tired old man with too much on my plate, I don’t have a lot of bandwidth for making major changes these days. At this point, I pretty much am who I am. (Sorry honey!)

But I do believe in a little bit of a reset, especially after the debauchery of the holidays. Hence Dry January.

Unfortunately, external events are conspiring to not only make Dry January even more challenging but to also make feeling hopeful nearly impossible.

I mean, the incoming president just announced his intention to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, for some idiotic reason (cough*racism*cough), and this is after he expressed his desire to buy Greenland and annex Canada. I’m not entirely sure how any of this helps lower the cost of living for the millions of people who voted for that (or pretended to vote for it) but whatever. It’s simply hard to feel good about things when his orange face and shitty ideas are constantly looming in the background.

No matter what Trump says (and almost all of it is idiotic and/or alarming), his constant presence in the news and on TV and all over social media and in our daily lives is anathema to hope. It’s just yet another reminder that we are living in the worst possible timeline—and will be for the foreseeable future. So 2025 isn’t exactly off to a roaring start.

I haven’t even mentioned my teenager, whose high-school misadventures and ADHD issues are conspiring to make parenting in 2025 more stressful than usual (more on this coming soon), my stupid Dolphins, the fact that WICKED might somehow win Best Picture (calm down, it’s fine; who cares what wins Best Picture anyway?), how utterly cold it’s been lately, and various other parenting and personal tribulations. And we’re only a week in!

If we’re being honest, the resolutions we make are hard to stick to under the best circumstances, and these are hardly the best of circumstances. I can’t speak for you, but the little bit of extra effort I make every January—to drink more water, to drink less beer, to go to the gym more consistently, to read more books—is likely to mostly evaporate by spring, if it lasts that long. And when it’s gone, both my teenager’s high school career and the MAGA takeover will still be going strong (unless and until it—or the country—implodes entirely).

Still, making big plans is fun, even if tying them to an arbitrary turn of the calendar doesn’t make all that much sense, and I still believe in a place called hope, I’m just not seeing many signs of it right now. (Especially when just the term “2025” is linked to this.) January is not a lot of fun.

At least I can start drinking again in a few weeks!