One of Larry David’s iron laws is that you cannot wish someone “Happy New Year” after January 7th, so I will not do that.

And besides, how happy has the start of 2025 really been?

Los Angeles is in flames, to the cheers and gloating of conservatives. Much of the former Confederacy was blanketed by a snowstorm that crippled air travel. Norovirus is spreading. Our Vichyite media and social media overlords are preemptively genuflecting to the Palm Beach imperial oaf-in-waiting, who may soon drag us into 19th century wars of conquest with Canada, Panama, and fucking Greenland. Greenland! Genocide rages unabated. Russia isn’t defeated in Ukraine. Parasitic tech oligarchs are relentlessly pushing useless Earth-destroying AI at every turn. The various reactionary ghouls, vindictive fascist dipshits, and scheming right-wing eunuchs that haunt our daily lives continue to freely run amok. A cabal of semi-literate brain-damaged winos, crooks, and perverts will soon inhabit the White House.

Where I live in Michigan is covered in several inches of filthy snow and slush that’s reminiscent of Gatsby’s Valley of Ashes. Also, I have a head cold and the evil Baltimore Ravens won a playoff game.

This is not an auspicious beginning to the century’s quarter mark. I’m struggling to find Camus’ invincible summer within me. These Twenties are not roaring. Rage-inducing, perhaps, but not roaring.

Still, this year could still redeem itself. Trump could painfully die of a heart attack or a stroke mid-swing on a golf course. And the empress dowager of homophobia, Anita Bryant is dead, joined in hell by grotesque French far-right freak Jean-Marie Le Pen. That’s addition by subtraction, my friends, and we must take our victories where we can get them.

My feeble efforts to find optimism also include anticipation of another season each of “The White Lotus” and “The Righteous Gemstones” soon on HBO. I’m going to see Welsh rockers Stereophonics play live and hear David Sedaris speak in a few months. My surgically repaired left shoulder is largely healed. My beloved Ohio State Buckeyes, despite a mystifying loss to a mediocre Michigan team, stand poised to win their third national championship this century. These are good things, at least for me, while Rome burns and our sleazy imbecilic Nero boasts that people tearfully tell him that he’s history’s greatest fiddler.

I was fortunate to spend a useful week at a Key West Literary Seminar writing workshop last week and got a photo with author John Irving.

I’m halfway through Irving’s classic “The Hotel New Hampshire” and it was on my return flight to Detroit (delayed nearly two days) that I read about the Berry family’s airliner tragedy en route to Vienna. Karma’s timing is impeccable. Those of you who know me personally are aware that I loathe flying because I was once in a terrible landing in a blizzard at an airbase in Ohio. I require Valium or other mind-easing substances to fly. That said, despite the unfortunate timing of that chapter, the novel is excellent. The flight was smooth.

See? That’s a positive amid a negative(s).

The workshop provided some useful tips and helped me better understand the nuances of how plot and story are structured. Such literary architectural secrets have evaded me in my first attempt at a novel, so the week was well spent despite my head cold and despite my beloved Key West being unseasonably chilly. Complaining about time in paradise is tacky, I know. I got one night in the fabled louche Chart Room Bar where so many giants of fiction drank themselves into stupors.

Whatever happens with America and the world, it’s my singular life goal in 2025 to finalize the first draft of my book by my birthday in June. I’m privileged to have a support system that will allow that to happen. That’s the spark keeping me going as the republic crumbles around us, especially since the story is a near-future satire about the eventual defeat of Trumpism and MAGA everywhere except recalcitrant Florida.

The actuarial tables are undefeated, so Trump will be dead in coming years, and this book is my final word on an especially tragic and stupid era of American history. It’s also a testament to my optimism that we will emerge as a better people and place from this fever dream of ignorance and hate and environmental catastrophe. It’s my hope that compassion and empathy and science and justice triumph as night gives way to dawn.

Now I just have to write the fucking thing.

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