New Year's resolutions for 2017
1. My relationship with my Creator is in the sewer. It's been a while since I have attended church services regularly -- about 47 years, in fact. With my faith obviously in tatters and my spiritual condition in need of a complete overhaul, I think I need to start weaning myself off of those New Militant Fundamentalist Atheist screeds I enjoy from my Feedly reader, and get right with the Lord.
2. Running has to go. The activity and everything about it -- the clothes, the prancing about, the contrived euphoria -- is apparently just not very manly, according to any number of hirsute gentlemen equipped with oversized bellies driving pickup trucks equipped with oversized tires. I am not going to sacrifice my hard-earned reputation as an alpha male in the eyes of people who matter for the sake of a few extra daily endorphins and a low body-fat percentage. But like a lot of people who no longer do any running or at least anything worth mentioning, I'll keep yacking about it here anyway.
3. I read too much and watch far too little reality television. Most books are just propaganda and bullshit and tools intended to make solecisms like miscegenation and same-sex relationships seem acceptable. If I am watching a reality show, the truth is in the title - I'm seeing *real* people do *real* things, and I can therefore learn valuable social habits from the gifted actors invariably selected for these shows. Mark Twain has been dead for over 100 years and I'm supposed to think the shit he came up with was relevant to modern society, modern thought?
4. I've been told I say in 13,000 words what could easily be expressed in 12,750. I don't necessarily buy this, and feel that I have always tended to err on the side of brevity when explaining myself. So instead of offering up the written equivalent of hydrogen bombs when updating my social media profiles, I plan to work on being more concise and avoiding grandiloquence in all its forms.
5. Go Broncos! Yeah, I've been fighting my ever-stronger need to root for Denver-based professional sports franchises in favor of teams from the Boston area. It's clearly vital that a guy in his forties predicate a generous dollop of his emotional well-being on the outcomes of pro sports contests, so I need to get that lingering urge to pull for shady assemblages like the Patriots and the Red Sox behind me. I've badly misjudged Denver fans, unfairly regarding them as bandwagon fans merely because they completely lose interest when their teams suck and only feign interest when their teams are decent. That's a start, at least.
Okay, at this point you're most likely nodding and saying, "I see what you did there. Up is down and down is up and yada yada yada." And if so, you're correct. But the frightening (albeit at times entertaining) thing is that there are bloggers and others out there whose genuine concept of reality is just that backward. Some of them will probably be featured on this blog before long -- we'll see.