New Year's Eve 2015

On the internet, I stumbled onto a list of ten overlooked films on Netflix, most of them little independents that didn’t cost much to make and didn’t make any waves when they were released. We decided to watch Short Term 12 and were happy we did. It was a quiet, quietly told story about a California shelter for “underprivileged” (a term hated by those it refers to), often abused children. Grace (Brie Larson) is one of the counselors there, mid-twenties but with an unusual empathy for most of her charges. She is living with a co-worker, Mason (John Gallagher jr.), and discovers she’s pregnant, but isn’t sure if she wants to keep the baby or not. Her past is revealed in her relationship with a new charge, Jayden (Kaitlyn Dever), a young girl who’s been abused by her father. I remember not long ago seeing a similar film called The Road Within, but this one was about ten times better. Critics loved it. We loved it. You should see it and love it also.

What will we be doing to celebrate this night? Probably much as the parents in Zits do, head for bed at the "geezer midnight." To borrow from an old Sinatra standard, “At the End of a Love Affair,” I sing, “So I drink a little too much, and I think a little too much, and my voice is too loud when I’m out in a crowd, but what else can you do, at the end of another year?” Yes, we’re at the end of another year. 2015 is coming to its final, frigid close, with an uncertain, hopeful future next year. 2015, weird weather all over the country, all over the world. Weird politics (What could be weirder than Donald Trump as aspiring presidential candidate?). Weird terrorists and terrorist acts. Weird technological advances (or retreats?) with a skyful of drones, with highways about to be full of driverless autos, with an Internet getting ever deeper and darker and a Cloud getting ever more expansive, with a world climate that is changing with polar ice caps melting and oceans rising (Are we the cause of this climate change or is it part of an earthly cycle?). But time and world problems will go on and we’ll all find some way to fix them.

After this last blog for 2015, I’ll run them all off with my Clikbook printer into the last volume of my annual journals and blogs. This one will make twenty-two such volumes for my kids to one day find and exclaim, “Whu . . . whu . . . what in the world is all this?” Twenty-two volumes of about 200 pages each, about 250 words per page, all together about 1,100,000 words. That’s a lot of words. And when I die, they’ll be like 1,100,000 snowflakes floating on the wind, landing on a deserted field somewhere, melting and disappearing in the afternoon sun. I guess that would be fitting. I’ve had fun writing them and I hope a few people have had fun reading them. Happy New Year, readers, wherever you are.