Some might dismiss New Year's resolutions as overblown, impossible to keep and rapidly abandoned, but that's exactly why I love them. If I had to, say, eat more green vegetables for the rest of my life, I might before too long start eyeing razor blades in a comparative-shopping-for-my-impending-suicide kind of way. (Note: those Gillette Venus razors don't work at all, suicidally speaking, though they do leave your wrists bikini-line-smooth.) On the other hand, if I know that my last bunch of broccoli, slathered in enough cheese sauce to render the broccoli flavor vestigial (broccoli: the second-worst tasting crap in the world), will hit the table on oh let's say January 31st, after which I can live free of the fear of funky-tasting dendritic plant-bits contaminating my meals of bacon-wrapped bacon, well, sir or madam, that's a win all around. Except possibly for the broccoli farmers, and to them I say: Why, broccoli farmers, why?
Broccoli aside (where it belongs), New Year's resolutions also allow us to feel that we can and will become better people, but in the future, when becoming better people doesn't stress and annoy us so much by forcing us to deprive ourselves in the present of all the horrible things we love. Sure, you say, I'm going to cut down on my drinking, smoking and whoring. Just, you know...later. But definitely sometime in the indefinite future. Let's drink to that! And also smoke and whore to that. I make my best resolutions that way.
So, in that spirit and in an effort to temporarily edify and embitter you, my many readers (like most primitive people -- and I am a primitive people -- I know only the numbers "1", "2" and "many"), I'd like to share the resolutions I plan to make this coming New Year:
- Eat healthier. Apparently oranges are not supposed to be green and furry. (The name is kind of a context clue.) I'll give up my cheese-fries hat when you pry it from my dead cold cheese-and-grease-slathered fingers, though.
- Engage in fewer liquor-fueled shooting sprees. Well, a few fewer. Now that there's a Wal-Mart in my neighborhood, I could well break this resolution before I even sweep up the last shards of broken glass and bleach out the last bloodstains following my New Year's Eve party. I mean, cheap booze and guns in the same store! How am I supposed to resist that kind of temptation?
- Be more devil-may-care in my day-to-day life. Be less so in my handling of explosives.
- Patent soup underwear.
- Stop praying that Newt Gingrich wins the Republican nomination, even though Newt's waddle for the presidency would more or less write all my posts for me until November and would represent, for a humor writer, the equivalent of winning a combination of the PowerBall and daily handjobs for a year. (What can I tell you? My local massage parlor runs a lot of promotional sweepstakes.) The nation's well-being is far more important to me than my own. (It's totally not.)
- Realize at long last: cheesecake is not a fruit.
- Date women whose pictures do not appear in the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-IV next to the relevant psychological disorders.
- Learn to predict the future. (I had no idea I'd write that.) (Dammit!)
- From now on, get high only on life. And by "life" I mean, of course, that bubbling purple mass of household chemicals that I threw together in my basement. I mean, it looks like it's alive.
We could all help each other by strengthening one another when we're tempted to break our resolutions. And then shortly after that we could all go out drinking, smoking and whoring. That should happen by Epiphany (hey, I just realized that!) or Martin Luther King Day at the latest.