A new year, a new attitude is how I like to approach it. We close the book on the year that has passed and make our resolutions for the one ahead. I do it every time, without fail.
2020 reaffirmed that we can’t truly predict the year ahead. How many of us on New Year’s Eve 2019 foresaw a pandemic looming? Certainly, I did not.
My hope is that our new normal has enough of the old normal in it that we still recognize daily life. Reassuring, almost heartwarming things like forgetting to take the recycling out the road, and suffering with our mistake for two weeks, at the end of which we find ourselves hip deep in a bin, stomping like a Sicilian during grape harvest. No one is interested in the fruits of those labours.
I hope we will still be able to wander into the kitchen and not have the first damn clue why our feet took us there. Or better still, when a late winter storm knocks out the power, we still find ourselves, to a person, clicking on the light switch and feeling momentary surprise that we remain in the dark. Let’s hope that there are still neighbours who change the lightbulbs in the shop during that outage, not putting two and two together that there is no electricity at that moment. That will be a real morale booster (and is a true story).
I feel that we can depend on good ol’ Hollywood to rehash and repackage as they’ve been doing for ages, mercilessly flogging long dead horses; there is little doubt that we can count on their well-honed sense of ‘Cha-Ching’. In fact, it was announced that there is another Indiana Jones movie slated for 2022, and at time of release Harrison Ford will be 80 years old. One presumes the film will be called “Indiana Jones and the Enlarged Prostate”. Nevertheless, I will go just to remind myself of the good old days of expensive popcorn and long attention spans.
I guess we’ll eventually find some sense of balance, given all these likely repeating motifs. It might feel like a modern re-recording of a beloved, vintage Motown hit, but we’ll still recognize the melody and hum along, even as we grumble about how we liked the original version better.
Vince R Ditrich © 2020 :: All Rights Reserved :: Random Note Generator :: “A One Man Magazine” :: www.randomnotegenerator.com
Coming Soon :: The Liquor Vicar :: A novel by Vince Ditrich :: Dundurn Press – Toronto
Available Aug 17, 2021 in Canada :: Sep 14 in USA :: Aug 17 in UK.
Random Note Generator 