“I’ma push old father 2009 down on the front lawn as the reaper makes
for him, and sit on his legs to make sure that skinny sumbeeyotch with
the scythe actually gets the job done. Then I’ma cut off his head and
his right hand and take out his heart and bury him face down at a
crossroads with a stake through his heart. Then I’m gonna re-route a
stream to pass over his gravesite so he’s always beneath running water.
I want to encase this decade’s final resting place in cement, inside
which I’ll put a nuclear waste container. I want to invent universally
understood pictographs to ensure that nobody ever, ever, ever opens
that vault too. I want 2009 to be dubbed “the year we don’t speak of”
for all time, like that Egyptian pharaoh that everybody got so mad at
that they went in after they’d killed him and hacked up any statue
bearing his likeness and chiseled out any mention of his name ANYWHERE.
That. I am that level of OVER IT about 2009.”
It won’t ever top 1999 (gaaaaaah) or 2007 (eeeghgghhghh) in terms of suck for Mr. A and me personally, but 2009 was an epic disaster for just about everyone else I know. I said to a friend shortly before Christmas that I felt like some kind of harbinger of doom, that everyone around me had some sort of personal apocalypse going on. Deaths, divorces, illnesses, breakups, layoffs … this is the kind of year you want to put in a box and sit on until it’s smothered and starved, and then bury the box to make sure it’s dead.
I hope, I hope, I hope for 2010, but I don’t have any resolutions. I have plans, projects that have been in the works for months that I want to see come to fruition this year: a new book, big plans for the ferret shelter, fixing up my house because we’ve been deferring maintenance for years and THE CEILING IS FALLING DOWN, maybe a retirement ceremony for the Saturn of Love should she make it through one more winter for us. But these aren’t resolutions. The only resolution I have is to give 2009 a good hard kick if I see it stirring, knock it out cold again.
What about you? Any resolutions or plans?
A.
Plans? Yeah, I’ve got some plans. Pour gasoline (at two fucking sixty a gallon, again, still, forever) over the corpse of 2009, burn it up, piss on the ashes when the fire goes out. I’m 41, and this has easily been the shittiest decade I’ve ever lived through. In another 40 years, my grandkids will ask me about it the way my parents talked to their grandparents about the 1930s.
Yep, that’s putting it mildly.
butbutbut this was the best year this stupid decade had!
I’m just focused on getting through the last few hours of the year. It was a truly crappy year, and the past two weeks were the worst. I’m finishing off the year with the worst case of laryngitis I’ve everhad, under doctor’s orders to stay away from everyone.
2010 had better be better, or somebody’s gonna get a talking to. I’m looking at you, supreme beings…
FSM, Ceiling Cat and all the gods, have we ever had as good a January as 2009, followed by a suckier year?
I personally can’t wait for it to die, but I’ve said that for almost every year since 2000. This decade has blown so far.
Good riddance to 2009 and the entire decade of suck…
Happy New Year and new decade to all you good folks of First Draft! Thanks for being here and making a little island of sanity in our truly crazy world.
SP
ps – leinie… how’s your kid doing?
Went to a little celebration at the burn center at a hospital on Friday. I live in a third world portion of a second world country. They were giving me a certificate for having donated 50 presents for their patients for Xmas. The chief doctor put the arm on me for some morphine. They were out and had two patients (one with 95 per cent burns and one with less) that needed morphine NOW. I forked out enough to buy up all of the morphine in the city and enough to send to the capital to get a three month supply and pay for a doctor to courier it. The doctor gently put the arm on me for a $14000 treatment machine that they thought would be useful for treatment of the burn patients.
New years resolution, make sure the morphine supply is high. Make sure I put enough into the machine to get it in and get it up. Get an american blogger down here to get health care. I’m strapped now because I’m paying for a bloggers living expenses while she is getting chemo therapy in a civilized country, the other blogger is not paying attention to her symptoms, I want an intelligent radiologist to examine her pancreas, I’m scared to death that is what she has. I can only stretch the money so far.
The worst burned died Xmas morning. The other died that afternoon. They DID not die in pain. I have to win some of the small battles to keep me going. If a resident in the capital had not volunteered to courier the morphine for 19 hours on the bus and then return on the bus for 19 hours, the children would have died in pain. I gave him every penny I could lay my hands on when he caught the bus north. It was definitely not enough but we are all on this mudball together.
A, I was so sorry to read about your grandmother, she sounds a hell of a lady. Thanks for posting that tribute.
I know the decade doesn’t technically end til next year, bur damn can’t we just bury it prematurely? Please? Do the whole stake through the heart/silver bullet/ drawn and quartered and hung until dead, dismembered and entrails burned on the decade already?
My best to all the first drafters, posters and commenters.
Let’s find a reason, sometime between State of the Union and election night returns to take the crack van for a ride.
A, I can’t wait to hear about the new book, I hope it’s finally a novel!
Happy New Years all!
D.