Welcome to the new year, in fact welcome to the second month of the new year. A month who's name I simply can not spell correctly. If I were to be on a million dollar game show, and the question between me and the million dollars was spell this month correctly, I would just walk off the set. It is a mental block, and one that I am not ashamed to admit. We all know that new year's is supposed to be a time for new beginnings. I am going to lose weight, I am going to get a job I love (it's called work for a reason), I am going to find Jesus, and all those other lies we tell ourselves as the calendar turns from one year to the next. Since I am the most well-adjusted motherfucker I know, and since the idea of improving myself seems well neigh impossible, I never make New Year's resolutions, after all how can I improve upon perfection?
Of course, that is bollocks. I am fat, lazy, stupid, drink too much, have not one ounce of pity in my entire body, and have about 500 other flaws that could be listed if I felt like making myself cry. Which, at least at the moment, I don't. Needless to say, but I will say it anyway, there is a lot of room for improvement in the creature known as me. Of course picking some random date like the first of the year to begin those long over due improvements is just as random as picking Bastille Day, at least Bastille Day has some real meaning to me. However, this year I decided, against my better judgment, to go ahead and make exactly ONE resolution. Truth be told, I had actually planned to make the resolution about a month before the new year, but decided to give myself one more month of this particular vice.
And it is a vice, this thing that I have resolved to give up, a vice that I share with quite a large number of people, but also one that is still uniquely my own. It is a personal vice, a vice that each person who has it makes their own. The quirks of our individual personalities make this vice unique to the person that has it, and a lot of people have it. A lot of people I know have it, and myself and those people have spent large quantities of our time pursuing this vice together. Talking about the vice, pondering why we have the vice, accepting that we are always going to have the vice, and planning our next opportunity to indulge in the vice. It is just that all encompassing. A vice so prevalent that the absence of it is an occasion that is to be remarked upon.
It is a vice that has been celebrated since the beginning of time, I know I am old enough to remember the beginning of time. A fellow sufferer (who shall remain unnamed) said about this vice that it was the reason that poetry was created. Not a bad assessment, and he was in a position to know, being afflicted with the soul of a poet, and the looks of a butcher. Millions of trees have lost their lives to make the paper upon which reams of nonsense have been written, celebrating this vice. It is just one of those vices that people can not seem to do without. And it is this vice, this activity that encompassed a great deal of my misspent youth, and wasted middle age, that I have resolved to give up.
It was not an easy decision to make, and I struggled with the making, but it is time to give up this vice. To leave it to the fellow sufferers to pursue. I wish them luck, they will need it. The timing of my giving up this vice just happened to coincide with the beginning of a new year, I could have, and should have, given this vice up back on some random day in October. However, I didn't and here I am today proclaiming, a month too late, my new years resolution to give up this vice. Lucky for me, I possess so many other vices that I do not run the risk of suddenly becoming a 'good' or 'normal' person. And I am quite sure that some long neglected vice, a vice that has been on the 'B' team of my vices, is more than willing to step into the breach that the vice I gave up previously occupied.
Giving up this vice, back when I made the decision to actually do it, did have a more positive approach. I had resolved that the time that I spent pursuing this vice, an inordinate amount I admit, would be spent pursuing something that would actually improve me as a person. It wasn't going to be anything earth shattering like become a nice person, or acting like I love my mother, but I had planned to at least try some small improvement upon the disaster that is me. However, one thing seems to have thrown a spanner in the works, and for once it isn't exactly my fault. The time spent on the vice I am giving up, was to be my own. My own to use how I saw fit, and I had hopes that it would be time well spent. But, as with most of the things in my life, I realized that the idea of having that time to burn (so to speak) was an illusion. Life, that thing that happens while we are busy making other plans, stepped in, and reclaimed my 'vice time' for its own.
The thing that is or will soon take over 'vice time' is an obligation that I swore an oath (a long time ago) to do, and in spite of my best efforts, which admittedly are piss poor as usual, it will soon take away the time I had allotted to improve upon myself. In many ways, important way, this makes me rather militant. Wisdom comes late if at all, and the idea of giving up this vice to become the more of the man I (and I am the important bit) want to be was something that I looked forward to. And I don't get to look forward to a whole lot of things. The fact that it has been 'stolen' from me without so much as a 'by your leave' leaves a quite bitter taste in my mouth. There is exactly fuck all I can do about it, and as to the bitter taste, well it is Valentine's Day, and there is candy to be had. Happy VD, a mob like you deserves it.
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