Every Year
Every year around this time I feel like I should try to make sense of the year just past, maybe as some kind of set-up to making plans or promises about the year to come. I scroll back through social media and the podcast and I look at what’s happened. I look at the professional feedback we get and the listeners’ comments. The data spikes and most-downloaded content. The quarterly freakouts by loudmouthed goofballs and the Thank You cards from people we were able to help.
Some years I find myself somehow even more grateful for the people I love and the people I choose to surround myself with professionally. Some years I’m just grateful for the lessons learned, even if the people let me down.
2021 was a slog. I lost a lost of people in my personal life, some of whom were very important to me. The job was mostly good, a little great, and rough behind the scenes in a couple spots.
Life had its high points, too…but, overall, I have no enthusiasm for a repeat of the past year’s pacing.
I have some idea of what 2022 holds. KMJ will turn 100. I’ll be 43. I envision trips to Home Depot and summer nights by the pool. Winners will call the mid-terms things like “mandate” and “bellwether” and “a preview of ’24.” Losers will say the opposite. The unspoken truth is that – barring an adverse external event – it won’t really change anything.
Fattened ticks like Pelosi, Feinstein, and McConnell will continue to feed off productive Americans and weaker politicians.
Grifters like Rashida Tlaib, Scott Wiener, and Lauren Boebert will keep riling up low-information voters while accomplishing nothing.
Dems will flounder in the mistaken belief that Trump is no longer relevant to U.S. politics, while Republicans will mostly misunderstand how Trump’s relevance actually works.
Or I could be full of shit. Maybe JFK Jr. will show up and restore DJT to the Oval Office after all.
As life would have it, I spent this weekend making a couple Home Depot runs. God Bless the YouTubers who make plumbing tutorials. What I don’t know could fill volumes, but with a little curiosity and time to experiment I accomplished in 4 hours what would have taken an experienced plumber 30 minutes…but I spent $18 (plus the cost of some stubby wrenches better suited to tight spaces) versus the $100+ hiring someone experienced would have cost.
That, to me at least, is a win. And the next time I need to repair or replace a faucet with compression fittings it’ll go WAY quicker.
I wish I had been patient or humble enough to apply that attitude to my work life when I was in my 20s. I’m pretty happy with where I am, but there’s still some curiosity about what’s next, and I suspect ‘what’s next’ would have been a wider field had I learned “go slow, it’s faster” a decade or so earlier.
This time of year always feels like the start of a long march, a trudge of some kind. But I think that if we’re going to make more of ’22 we’re going to have to chip some teeth. Leaning into the new year….
Blah, blah, blah. Next comes the “time is just a social construct” people who both underestimate the power of collective experience and secretly hope that whistling past the graveyard works even if you’re already in your little social media hole. Cleverness borrowed isn’t the same thing as original thought, but these chumps will tell you that dorksplaining everything is just like actual thought. They apparently seek to reduce our collective starting gun to another lump of fodder for distracted, irrelevant arguments made by the palest producers of nothing.
Observe the threshold. Make use of it. It’s Monday and the Infotainment Machine is already gearing up. They want you to waste energy on outrage over MTG’s self-imposed suspension-cum-publicity stunt. Never mind that the Chinese Communist Government is collecting staggering amounts of data about YOU, Jeff Bezos dressed like the lovechild of a Cuban rapper and the interior decorator of the Overlook Hotel.
Yeah, it’s fun to chew the fat. And we will. But never forget that there’s a difference between passing the time with friends and burying your head in the sand.
Man, did I wake up cranky?
Today’s the first broadcast day of the New Year. I can tell it’s going to be a good one. I have no idea what the rest of Talk Radio will be doing. And it doesn’t matter. All the syndicated stuff will either be literal repeats or the usual daily regurgitations of what the guy before them said.
You have noticed it, right? Since Limbaugh passed the national Talk Radio scene has become hollow. I always thought Rush was being cheeky when he called himself “the intellectual engine of the conservative movement” but it turns out he really was waving the baton. Mark Levin is the obvious exception, hence the push to expand his footprint on Fox News, but most of these people are rudderless.
Enough. I need to pick through the flotsam of the fourth estate. I also need breakfast.
Maybe that’s why I’m so pissy?
You know where to find me. Until then…stay weird.
Happy New Year.