Ugh.
I mean, right?
This is no year for retrospectives; who really wants that crap recap?
But here we are. Most of us, anyway.
If you’re reading this, you made it. (That, or the afterlife is very strange.)
No awards, no medals, no pats on the back; just, “Off you go. Have a 2021.”
I don’t believe — and I doubt you do, either — that the simple rolling over of a numeral is going to make much difference to the quagmire of murk within which we find ourselves emerged.
2021 will be better, or the same, or worse, as it unfolds, and we will take it as it comes, same as 2020, same as 2019, same as every other year we’ve ever longed to see the back of, which, lately, has been most of them.
Hell, 2016 was so awful I personally started a see-you-off feature called Whisky Wind-down.
Turns out, I rather liked that feature, so I brought it back in 2017.
And I would have again, in 2018, were I not on a long hiatus.
When the hiatus finally ended, in late 2019, I made sure to revive the feature, at least partially.
2020, well, 2020 has been quite the year for drinking whisky, too. Just not so much for writing about it, I’m afraid. Frankly, I’ve been struggling to write much of anything.
I know, I know. You’ve heard that before. Story of my life. Write. Fall into funk. Hiatus. Return. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Forever, it seems.
This year, though. Jeez.
As I think I’ve said before, I don’t much buy into anthropomorphizing years.
While I do quite see the appeal of having something to yell at for <waves vaguely at everything> so many of life’s problems aren’t / can’t / won’t be defined neatly by tossing out the old calendar and putting up a new one.
We should be so lucky.
I guess that’s why I’ve never been much for New Year’s resolutions, and it’s why I don’t buy into New Year’s Day eating/acting superstitions, even if I do like an excuse to eat black-eyed peas and forego doing laundry.
But this period of time between Christmas Day and the end of the year has long been one in which I ponder and reflect and (often) fall into a funk, showing, I guess, that whatever I may think, on some level I am susceptible to the significance of a changing calendar after all.
Ugh.
I guess that’s why I find myself writing now, 11ish hours of 2020 left.
Part of me wants to feel a difference once those hours have expired, wants to successfully resolve something for next year, wants … something better than this, anyway.
The rest … the rest just feels like apologizing for again falling short of expectations, even if only my own.
Anyway, here we are at the end of 2020.
At the very least, I’m glad to still be around, and I hope you are, too.
lastgreypoet 