Well, you know those grandiose plans you make toward the end of the year, swearing that this time, you’ll get everything done and you’ll be able to celebrate the new year in peace? Yeah. Where to begin?
Firstly, you may note that for all of the promises to keep going with the Post-Nuclear Family Gift Suggestions, the world intruded. Specifically, the latest stomach virus came through. The nicest thing that could be said about this is that at least when Stephen King wrote the novel The Stand, he had the decency to make his killer virus a respiratory flu. If it had been the stomach bug that went around last week, his editor would have read about twenty pages in, attempted to beat him to death with a pool cue, and then gone after his agent with a bowling trophy. The moans of misery, the hallucinations, the house looking as if Hunter S. Thompson had camped out in the living room for a month…when friends asked afterward what happened and I simply said “We call it…’The Aristocrats‘!”, they understood.
(A very disturbing point that came up when discussing this was how many people mistake the documentary The Aristocrats for the Disney animated film The Aristocats when getting a copy for their kids via NetFlix. Truthfully, I’m not surprised: nearly 30 years ago, when Don Johnson’s star was on the rise with Miami Vice, I was told over and over by Johnson groupies about how badly they wanted to see his first starring role in the adaptation of Harlan Ellison’s “A Boy and His Dog.” To an individual, they were certain that this was a Disney film, too, based on the title.)
Anyway, the flu is banished, the house is relatively clean (the bathroom is literally clean enough to eat in, and that’s after a week of it looking like a location set for Apocalypse Now, and then disaster struck again. Thumb drive insanity with the new Web site update, with no possibility of getting it fixed on a holiday week. At this point, it’s time to call it quits, because it ain’t getting any better between now and midnight.
And so I wish all of you a good year in 2014, because we deserve at least one good one in a string of duds. If you’re in Dallas over this week, use the weekend as an opportunity to view the Chinese Lantern Festival in Fair Park before it goes; if not, have fun wherever you are. Me, I’m planning on hunting down Old Man 2013 and giving him quite the sendoff. If I time it just right, I might need a new left boot to replace the one I left with him, too.
Happy new year to you, the Czarina, and the furry children.