The Elasticity of Time

Just when you thought you were back to normal— you never left.

Remember how excited you were just two weeks ago tonight? That is, assuming you’re excited about Christmas Eve. Yes, that was just fourteen days ago.

How about just one week ago tonight? New Year’s Eve, party time, baby! Remember how that felt?

I know, I know. Might as well have been a year ago.

It’s said that black holes in space have such powerful gravitational pull that they can bend light. The Christmas/New Year’s holiday season bends time itself. Most people don’t think about these things. I’m not most people. Sometimes I wish I was. 

This isn’t one of them. 

The Yellow Submarine isn’t the only one that got lost in the Sea of Time. It survived with all hands to surface in the Sea of Christmas, so there was a happy ending.

Losing All Kinds of Weight Throughout a Season of Acquisition, Part 1

...and acquiring the best gift of all, in a twist we all see coming a mile away. We’ll start with the literal weight loss and move on the figurative.

I gave myself the mother of all bellyaches on Thanksgiving 2010, and that was before I could even get all the way through the main course. I’d dismissed it as a mere stomach bug then, but it didn’t go away. After a few more meals I realized I could feel the exact part of my intestinal tract when the food reached it. It felt like something sharp twisting as the mass worked its way through. 

As much as I enjoy eating, the anticipation of pain encouraged me to limit my portions. Boasting of my weight loss over the Great Holiday Overindulgence Season was the only pleasure I got from shedding those initial pounds. A visit to the doctor sometime in the midst of all this revealed I had diverticulitis. There was medicine for the inflammation, but it was up to me not to inflame it so much. 

Pain is a powerful motivator. Its bowl-grade coaching brought me down from a Class 2 Obese pork gorgon with 36.5 BMI to a mere high-end Overweight BMI of 28.9. It took 50 lbs (22.6 kg) to get there, and it made a striking visual difference. I felt better, too. I no longer needed the CPAP machine to breathe throughout the night. My cholesterol was fixing itself and I could quit taking the statin blockers. 

My assigned care provider, or whatever we’re calling doctors these days, was a fit lady who was not in the least impressed by my 50-pound weight loss when I came in complaining of a sore knee I got from landing wrong after pull-ups. (I’d torn my ACL.) As she saw it, I had 40 more pounds to go. 

She was correct, but I was happy. I was working out and feeling good. I had a lot more self-control in regards to my eating, that one necessary component to weight loss that most “fat activists” absolutely refuse to learn. I had the smug assurance of one who had leveled up, who had left some people behind. (“Hey, at least I don’t look like them. Ha!”) I didn’t feel it necessary to go the rest of the way.

This state of affairs went on for nearly five years. What did I do throughout that time? I was coming into my 50s, so I wrote my first novels, walked around the neighborhood, watched both children graduate high school and go their ways. The usual stuff. 

It was the day after Christmas 2015 when I got on the scales and saw I was up to 194 lbs on an empty stomach. A feeling of dread came over me. If I were to cross 200 lbs again would I ever return to normal weight? Of course, if I let myself go all the way back up to 200 again....

Portrait of the artist as a 240-lb pork gorgon in a suit, MCing a Toastmasters contest in April 2010.

I was not going back. I was not going to be one of those people who backslid and then accepted that most asinine and false notion that “diets don’t work.” The point of failure is the person on the diet who refuses to put in the non-effort of not eating because it’s too uncomfortable. If so many people fail it’s because weakness is more common than strength, sloth is easier than industry, etc. (I’ve often wondered if we treasure Good for economic reasons, i.e., it’s rarer than platinum.)

It was barely four years ago, and all I remember was that terror- and shame-driven dedication. I’m not sure how I actually started losing weight other than simply not eating. I’d become aware of intermittent fasting, and I know I did test myself to see how long I could exceed the 16-hour mark (20 hours with only coffee and water is my personal best).

When I saw my weight down to 189 lbs I realized I’d never imagined getting down to the 180s. Not even 189. I had been content to camp at 190. I was chagrined to understand my physician’s crossness with me. Having repented my weakness and sloth, I maintained my course.

The lowest I got was 159 lbs, after a 24-hour stomach bug. My wife and I were in a hotel room with four cats awaiting the paperwork to buy our house in the San Luis Valley and I more or less let myself go. It took me a while to drift out of my 160s. I wasn’t weighing myself at all, just happy that my pants fit.

4th of July 2016 in Manitou Springs, on the high end of normal weight for my height. Once again, I would let myself coast...but hey, I’m looking so much better than I used to, right? This is where we set the trap for ourselves.

Until they didn’t. It was Super Bowl Sunday night when I struggled to go to sleep, but had panic attacks every time I drifted off. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. When I weighed myself I saw that I’d risen back to 180 lbs. It was 10 lbs less that 190 but bad enough to bring back my sleep apnea.

To think I was happy at 190 lbs. Now I was feeling sick creeping up on 180 lbs. In the course of losing so much weight I’d raised my standards in regards to what I would tolerate. Also, I had demonstrated the fallacy of set-point weight.

Like many self-described “activists,” fat activists have a raft of pseudo-science to excuse their sloth and gluttony, one of which is the notion of a set-point weight that we’re all somehow genetically programmed to be at. No matter how much you try to lose weight, you will always fall back to that set-point. There is no escaping your genetic destiny! Indeed, should you dare disobey the dictates of your (grossly bloated and distended) body, you will fall into “disordered eating” and gain even more weight. So don’t try. No, seriously, don’t. It’s dangerous. (They really talk like this.) NO DIET TALK, IT’S TRIGGERING! Accept yourself as you are, a grotesque, malodorous mess of unfettered compulsions, ill-fitting clothes, labored breathing, etc.

Well, check me out, re-setting my set-points. Once it was 240 lbs. Thanks to the encouragement of diverticulitis, my set-point became 190. Thanks to sheer terror of approaching 200 again, it became 180. This “weight-loss journey” (yeah, I know) has covered the entire last decade, and I still have 30 more pounds to go before I hit my sweet spot. And guess what year it is....

If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve completed a journey of your own. And, all the infantile happy talk aside, anything you’ve set as a long-term goal is a journey. I say let’s make it sound more heroic—that part isn’t wrong, if you’re one of the very few, not quite so proud who have vanquished an addiction to food or drugs—and call it a quest. You’re not merely working towards a goal, you seek a prize, a boon.

No matter how heavy you are, whether you’re 240 lbs or more as I started out, wherever you are, I would challenge you to lose no more than ten pounds. Just ten. You’ll notice two things. First, you’ve turned back the age clock and acquired superpowers along the way. You will feel so much better, so much more energetic, not merely healthier but happier. It’s one heck of a drug. Try it.

The second thing is you’ll be content to stay where you are. You will creep back up over time. Count on it. Oops. Guess diets don’t work. Either that, or re-activate your dead program, the one that made you feel so good when you were just ten pounds lighter. 

We know how most people will roll. Nothing to get fussed over. It’s human nature to take the soft option. I’ve done it.

Then I got tired of doing it.

There’s a Bible verse that, whatever your religion—and I count atheism as a religion, too; it’s as obnoxiously evangelical as the worst of ‘em so shut up, already—applies to this. Something about the narrow and rocky path few take versus the wide, smooth one that everyone else does.

I trust you get the point. It’s slow going, but what’s a quest without setbacks and obstacles and all that awful stuff you’ll be laughing about when you’re done?

This morning, after a small breakfast of scrambled eggs and chorizo. Six days and nights without beer (or tobacco!) has made an incredible difference. Only 25.6 to go ‘til goal. I’ll be within the high-end for normal weight for my height in 11.6.

Random Thoughts on the Changing of the Decade

First off, Poindexter, we all know how to count. Yes, technically, all decades end on the year ending in “0.” Culturally, that’s not how most people look at things. For instance, no one considers 1970 to be part of the legendary ‘60s because 70. Don’t just shut up, go away. A Mister Know-It-All who doesn’t know when to shut up doesn’t know squat worth hearing about. We’ve other matters to discuss.

People who argue when decades “really” begin are lucky to get a kiss from their dog when the clock strikes midnight. Of course, it’s all society’s fault and the result of a “systemic” something or other.

I read something somewhere that noted that, for the first time since the ‘90s, we’re living in a decade with a name, namely, the ‘20s. The writer pointed out that the first two decades of the 20th century weren’t named, either. A good  point, but I like to think of the last decade, at least, as the twenty-teens. What, you say it leaves out 2010 through 2012? Call them the twenty-tens and twenty-teens. It’s not nearly as clunky as what people have been calling individual years since Y2K.

A pet peeve of mine is how people still say “two-thousand something” when “twenty-something” scans so much better. I’m hoping people will get in the habit of saying the one-syllable shorter “twenty” over the cumbersome “two-thousand” as we get into the twenty-twenties, but I suspect it will take a while yet. People seem really attached to saying “two-thousand.” Saying “Y2K” (why-two-kay), as in, “Y2K-19,” spits out faster, and has some savoir faire to it, but savoir faire left us long before the original Y2K, so whaddya gonna do?

When does the New Year become the Same Old Year? Today? Not for me. I’ll hang onto the feeling until Epiphany. It still seems a bit soon but we’ll cope.

I wish history had been taught the way we’re expected to remember history in the media, namely, by decades and their fashions. It could be noted how fashions were slow to change in the absence of global electronic connectivity, but they shifted enough to account for the differences of the centuries. You could list the centuries and the top ten things they were famous for in terms of improved technology and who was whuppin’ whom, with some fine print towards the bottom for the remaining hundred. Students who could memorize these details would have a far, far better grasp of how things came to be in their world than they would listening to some nattering narcissist going on and on and on for the longest 60-90 minutes of their lives.

By this logic, Miss New Year above will be a wizened crone in a granny gown come next December. Here’s hoping she keeps her hair.

Comparisons with the Roaring Twenties of the 20th century are inevitable, but let’s hope it’s not taken too far. The next decade is the ‘30s and the 20th century ‘30s were not famous for being a time of prosperity and happiness. Let’s make these years our own.

Happy New Year from the Blog

No best-of/worst-of lists. Not yet, anyway. Only gratitude for now.

Twenty-nineteen was a better than average year, even as I failed to finish the so-long-awaited-it’s-forgotten conclusion to my zombie post-apocalypse trilogy. Many changes occurred in my life, largely for the better and putting me on track to be more productive. 

I began going through my 2019 journal today and realized I had a lot of material for blog posts if I put my back into it. I’ll give it my best shot. I have a lot of best-of categories to sort and file, and among them are a few choice single paragraphs on a variety of subjects which can work with minimal adornment. I need to train myself to be more pithy. A short post every day beats a brilliant long-form post every two weeks or more.

I’ve made resolutions, most of them regarding bad habits that need to be left behind in the old year. I’m generally good about honoring my New Year’s promises to myself but I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say I’ve got a really good feeling about this year and here’s hoping you’re the same.

Cold Snaps and Cool Beans

I had to laugh. I couldn’t go to bed last night unless I’d posted something. So I dug through my poetry folder and found a cranky rant from 2006. Boom, up it went. Now I have a post-per-day record of four in a row.

This wasn’t anywhere on my list of resolutions for the new year. I have to see how far I can take this. One way to do it is to treat this as an actual web log, which is where we get the word “blog” in the first place.

In other words, oh, let me tell you about my week.....

It’s a very chill town.

New Year’s Day is a strange holiday, as there’s nothing really going on but people recuperating from the party the night before, and perhaps the Christmas season as a whole. Still, like Christmas itself, it doesn’t occupy a calendar day of the week. It’s outside space-time, at least as far as my foggy reckoning goes, so it feels weird to mention the snowstorm on Monday, which was New Year’s Eve, which brought the severe cold snap on New Year’s Day, and here it is, Friday in another year, and we’re just getting through it.

We learned the hard way that a separate pipe from the city line feeds the kitchen sink, so we were washing our dishes in the bathtub until our son went into the subzero-Fahrenheit crawl space with a heat gun to thaw out the hot water line. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been, given that our gas furnace isn’t working (it turns out it never really has the entire time we’ve been here), but kerosene for the portable heaters is expensive. The wood pellet stove runs nonstop except for the hour and a half during the warmest part of the day (e.g., 22°F/ -5°C today, and quite balmy considering it only got up to 11°F/ -11°C yesterday). 

We’d taken some pride in not running up the credit cards during Christmas. There goes all those savings and more. I’m grateful we had a jump on it, however small.

Always a pretty drive to Del Norte from Monte.

Somehow I’ve managed to get some writing in. The notes I’d written to myself throughout my last bender on New Year’s Eve have been incorporated into the appropriate chapters of The Wrong Kind of Dead. These are future chapters, by the way. This isn’t retrofitting. I’m filling in the end of this book.

I note with some amusement that the Christmas season technically isn’t over until tomorrow. At least we found a way to prolong it. Once all this mess is fixed, I’ll be more than ready to tuck into the year. Which, in a way, I already am.

No alcohol, no tobacco, and a blogpost per day. The first week of 2019 hasn’t been a total wash.

Keeping the glowing heart of the season alight.

Borne Back Ceaselessly into the Past

1999 was 20 years ago. That’s enough for most people.

Sometime during these first few days of January 2019 will be the 50th anniversary of the end of Star Trek. I don’t know why I remember such things, but it does tie in with the holidays in a coincidental way. The first frames of anything Star Trek were shot immediately after Thanksgiving weekend 1964, namely, “The Cage” pilot. On the 9th of this month, it will be one-half century since the last frames of the episode “Turnabout Intruder” were shot, just after the 1968 holiday season. 

Nineteen sixty-nine marked a lot of passages. Star Trek‘s last episode, and then The Beatles. Many consider the last day of the group sometime in 1970, but the first and greatest worldwide supergroup were finished before the fall of that year. On 22 August 1969, six days after wrapping up recording on Abbey Road, they gathered for one last photo shoot on the grounds of John Lennon’s mansion. Everyone looked tired and a little cranky, just going through the motions. You can tell that George, especially, didn’t want to be there.

It seems hard to believe they wouldn’t have gotten together at least once in the next eleven years until John Lennon’s death, but all four were never in the same room again after 22 August 1969. Abbey Road was released on 26 September, and no one knew their favorite band was finished for all time one month ago already.

The Woodstock music festival had happened earlier in August 1969, and while many consider it the high water mark of music festivals in the seriously musically radicalized 1960s, there’s a funny thing about high water marks: you don’t get any higher. I half-wonder if anyone is going to attempt an anniversary festival like the one in 1999 that became known as “Rapestock” and featured such deep acts as Limp Bizkit. I’m surprised I haven’t heard of something like that going on already.

I think back on much of the music and entertainment I like from the 1960s, and it fascinates me how everything went from black-and-white and short hair at the start of the decade to lurid color and respectable normie guys wearing their hair over their ears. (I’m old enough to remember when this was a big deal. Also, wearing denim jeans in school.) The last year of that decade is turning 50. Well, well.

Fifty years ago when I was growing up was the 1910s and 1920s. And with that thought, I’ve got nothing left but the Fitzgerald quote I titled this post with: “So we beat on, boats against the current....”

Season’s End Blues, 2019 Edition

The party’s over. Time to get to work.

After a long night’s revels watching the snow fall as my Christmas mix played one last time, I awoke at around 9:30 a.m. to find that my wife had already completed the mammoth task of taking down the decorations and was two-thirds of the way down with dismantling our artificial tree. As always, I felt melancholy seeing everything gone. I’d said my drunken goodbyes to it all last night as I loaded the wood pellet stove that one last time before bed, so there’s that.

This would take me all week for mooning over the ornaments and when we got them, etc. My wife dismantles and packs away everything in a morning.

For that matter, I said my drunken goodbye to drunken goodbyes. My weekly ragers are now something I used to do but don’t anymore, because don’t get me started. I’ll still have my ale with my dinner when my wife and I go out to eat, but even that will be only twice a month in 2019. This is the year those life-sucking credit card bills go away.

Last year’s entanglement with tobacco use must end once and for all. I have to start taking care of myself. 

I’ve actually made serious resolutions for the year that I’ve written down and posted on my wall. One of them, a refutation of my tendency to wallow in sadness, got its first workout today. I looked at the ornaments through the plastic box where they were stacked and wondered How many more? How many more years will we be here to put these up? And there’s Otis, our eldest cat, on the pillow we put out for him in front of the wood pellet stove. He’s 17 years old. Was this already his last Christmas? 

All this, and the usual difficulty adjusting to the hard shock of transitioning from the three-month long festive season of football and candy and parties and gifts to the dull and unremarked days of January and February. I have plenty to keep me occupied, though. I have a book to finish, weight to lose, and I need to get out of the office and spend more quality time with my family. It sounds basic enough, but the basics are exactly what I need to get back in touch with.

Meanwhile, there’s tonight, New Year’s night, and it’s nothing special. Tomorrow will be nothing special. It’s not even a New Year anymore. Just January.

Happy New Year, anyway. 

Just let me have a few more of these, Lord, it’s all I ask.

Identity Crises of the Living Dead

Yes, “crises,” as in plural.

It’s occurred to me more than once that this blog, with its numerous photos of cats and mountains and trees and flowers and stuff, would appear to the casual observer to be someone’s grandma’s on-again, off-again hobby. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’d be flattered by the comparison. I often wonder how many of those old-school grandmas who love flowers and cats and pretty sunsets are still out there in this day and age. I raise a cup of hot chamomile to them, wherever they are.

And I’ll drink it out of a pink mug, in my Big Pink house, just to make you mad. We love you, Grandma, wherever you are.

After my days’s adventures among the living dead with an angry protagonist I like to come home to a little wholesomeness, that’s all. Unlike a lot of people who write in the genre I don’t like living in Horror World 24/7. I don’t denigrate those who dress their houses in black lace and skulls; it just ain’t me, babe. 

Will photos of local squalor make this blog seem more sophisticated? Well, then, let’s squalor ‘til you holler! Gotcher pot o’ gold right here, ha-ha, get it? I’m feeling smarter already!

Although I’m not scrapping any categories, I’ll make a point of presenting most of my turbo-wholesome Nice People Stuff on my Facebook page. Most of the nice, normal-type people I know are on my Friends list there. 

I’ll still run the occasional photo essay from time to time but I need to punch things up here. People would never know what a wonderfully ghastly zombie horror writer I am at first glance of the page. Nor would they know at the 22nd glance. So I’ll dial back the cats and mountains and trees and flowers and stuff to the every-once-in-a-while.

If you lived here, you’d be home by now.

I realize some are wondering why I don’t write more about writing. I am writing, aren’t I? Why don’t I write about that?

Put simply, and more abruptly than I’d like, I’ve noticed I’m less inclined to write about writing when I’m writing. I add quickly that there is a rather comical point behind this, namely, that my best successes are when I’m at my most chaotic. There are methods to the various madnesses, but stuff like Comma Massacre Day (one day last month I went through all 240 pages of The Wrong Kind of Dead and, well, massacred masses of commas), and abandoning a chapter in the middle to go back and read the entire novel from the beginning, cutting sentences, axing paragraphs, dropping entire pages in the manuscript in the process...these aren’t things I feel I could responsibly recommend to anyone. 

Worse, I’m not even sure I could sell this as entertainment. (Woo-hoo, look at me, I’m so random!) That said, I suppose I’d better give it a shot. I’ve got a few ideas for posts.

Not original, but apropos.

Of course, I can always run excerpts from my latest work in progress, whether it’s the last novel in my zombie post-apocalypse series or from the book of poems I want to follow that with. There’s other stuff I’ve been working on, too.

The main thing I’ve been working on is the nerve for online confrontation. If I am to ever get going with these podcasts I’ve been talking about for the last three years, I need to come up with a final decision on the metaphorical hills I’m willing to metaphorically die on. 

Soon. (No, really!)

That’s precisely what’s been holding me back on everything. I’m not that fussed about anything to argue with people about it. After years of stewing over this, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is absolutely no way I’m not going to get mixed up in something, no matter how hard I try.

So maybe I shouldn’t try so hard. Maybe I should take a stand on things. There was a time I used to enjoy wandering into comments sections and kicking rhetorical backsides. Perhaps that I don’t enjoy it anymore should give me a more mature perspective.

It should be fun to find out.

The Nigh-Insuperable Challenges of an Ordinary Season

The last of the lights come down today.

That was it. It’s gone. The last holiday of the Holiday Season that everyone says “Happy Holidays” for. With no entertaining nor entertainment required, New Year’s Day is a slightly less awkward holiday than Christmas. Indeed, I think the holiday exists primarily as a day of recovery from the night’s revels before. One might say it’s for recovering from the entire season, but I imagine Christmas feels like last year for many long before this point.

Once New Year’s Day is done, that’s it. That festive final third of the year that began with Labor Day/Back to School is over. Nothing to look forward to from here but for the warm weather to return.

At least the days are getting longer, 43 seconds to one minute at a time. Oh, yeah, I’m keeping track.

January and February are a long stretch of gray, frigid nothing, with only the much-resented Valentine’s Day to mark the calendar. After that it’s, what, St. Patrick’s Day? Easter at least announces the warm weather. Still, it doesn’t seem like U.S. popular culture is feeling its oats until Memorial Day Weekend, when summer unofficially begins.

It’s easy to make those proclamations and resolutions when the season and the days feel bigger than they do now. And it’s easy to see how they fall away in the charmless, colorless days of the long winter that follows.

This is exactly the point of it all. If character is what you are in the dark, or when you think no one is looking, then...well, there’s a similar theme I’m reaching for. Again, there is nothing special about this part of the year. It’s just you and the general pointlessness of existence that was eclipsed by four months of football, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Until yesterday.

This is the season in which we separate the doers from the talkers. The serious operators from the validation seekers.

No lights, no decorations, no songs. No excuses, either. Darn it.

I have to choose a side, too. Every day. Some days will be  easier than others, which is funny, because they’ll all look the same from here until the end of February. 

It’s the lights inside of us that color these days. If we could only get those Christmas lights back up where and when they really count....

A Toast to What’s Next

Two months ago already.

The season started for us two days after Halloween when I learned my good friend and brother of another mother Steven was in the hospital, his organs failing. It’s just as well I didn’t make it to the memorial service because we all fell sick with an intestinal flu that knocked us out for most of Thanksgiving week.

I was going to write at length about this. If you’re a fan of my zombie novels, Steven was the one who forced me to lay a solid narrative foundation in terms of the pseudo-science and humanizing Derek Grace in the very first chapter by having him talk to the cab driver. (Grace still came off as prickly, but at least you knew who you were dealing with, and what motivated him.) 

The tagline to the release of the remastered Bleeding Kansas and Grace Among the Dead (“rewrites” seems too quaint for that project) along with the release to the final chapter, The Wrong Kind of Dead is “Robert Heinlein and Harlan Ellison walk into a bar with their portable typewriters to bang out the Ultimate Zombie Post-Apocalypse Adventure.” It’s a great tagline that reflects the approach I’ve set from the beginning, but it doesn’t precisely describe Steven and me. Steven was a huge fan of Heinlein, but wasn’t all that rational all the time. As for me, and just for starters, I wouldn’t be ordering club sodas in that bar like the famously tee-totaling Ellison. It’s close enough for a decent thumbnail image, though, and all anyone outside our rarefied circle needs to know.

My Ellison shelf. Not all I own, but the essentials are here.

The Long November of 2017 seems like 20 years ago already. The lessons have been long since taken. Christmas was enriched by the reminder that any time is plenty old enough to die, and if others aren’t here, you still are, so it behooves you to make something of it. It was a great time with all the family under our roof. So the time will come when there’s an empty chair at the table. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

I think of that line from Ecclesiastes, It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart. There’s no arguing this except to say I’ve done my mourning. I’ve taken all I can stand to heart. Let’s get something to eat.

So what’s ahead? What am I toasting?

Silent evening, shortly before sundown on Christmas Eve in Monte Vista, Colorado. “All anguish, pain, and sadness/Leave your heart, and may your road be clear.”

I toast the month I hope to make my first podcasts. I’ve been talking about this for years. Now it’s time to begin singing for my supper, as I’m too old and weird to work a regular job. I’m also too close to finishing The Wrong Kind of Dead. As always, I can’t predict when I’ll finish it, but at this point I’m confident I can say, “Before summer.” Well before, if I stay on track. Steven will get his dedication page, and I will be done with a series I started writing in 2011, and should have finished two and a half years ago already.

I’ll be taking things a week at a time, and I pledge to be careful not to let the days get away from me. I wish myself, and by extension, you, Dear Reader, not so much a Happy New Year, but a positive and focused one. If I can just get these few things done, the happiness will follow.

Thanks to each and every one of you who has read and enjoyed this blog. Oh, and that person you’re close to, but haven’t spoken with in so long because, well, everyone’s busy? This is the time to check in. This week. Do it.

That kid on the lower right looks like he’s rockin’ the right attitude. Happy 2018.