New Year, New World, New You?

Readers from "before times," when this was an actual health and fitness blog, may recall that I've already written many posts about New Year's Resolutions.

There's a search bar if you're curious, and if you were to type in New Years Resolutions, many, many posts would come up, full of advice and complaints. Mostly it's the obvious stuff: Keep promises realistic, and expectations low. Aim for baby steps. Celebrate small victories. Try hard, but expect repeated failures, and focus more on getting back on track and not giving up than on perfection.

We know this stuff. And yet the failure rate for resolutions remains pretty darn high. So the heck with that, let's not talk about making promises to ourselves that we may not keep!

Instead, let's talk about hopes and dreams and intentions for the coming year in a totally hypothetical way. No pressure. After all, the beginning of a new year is a good time for reflection, for fresh starts, and maybe even big dreams. And if thinking big leads you to want to do something little in order to get there... bonus!

But before we get to that... a special request.

So I recently found out that the little doohickey at the top of the sidebar that was supposed to encourage email sign-ups? It didn't actually work.

But now there is a much better, user-friendly email subscription/newsletter link. Please sign up! Your email will stay totally private, and you can always unsubscribe later if you get tired of my ramblings.

That way when a new post is out, you will not have to swing by the sad little Facebook page to find out about it. You can read new posts in your email. Or, having been duly alerted, come back here to read it and leave a comment and make my cranky old heart sing.

One thing you WON'T have to worry about is getting a whole slew of Just Cranky blog posts. One or two a month is probably max, and you know me... I will likely stop posting again, and then in 2035 you will suddenly discover that I've yet again resurrected the blog, which will appear as a hologram in the artificially intelligent lenses surgically implanted into your eyeballs.

There may at some point be an announcement about my novel, Niccolo Would Like a Word, hitting virtual bookshelves in a few weeks or maybe months. But I won't be a pest about it.

Or, if the sidebar thing isn't easy to find, how about right here? C'mon, get Cranky!

Okay, enough harrassment. Are you ready to think about your hopes and dreams for 2026? I'll share some of mine, and I'd love it if anyone were to share some of theirs. And then we can come back in a year and celebrate the good stuff or laugh our asses off at our naivete.

My Hopes for 2026

 

1. That the people of the United States come to their senses! November will be a big test. I won't say any more, because I figure there are other forums for politics, and sometimes we all just need a break. But it feels too huge to leave it out.

2. All the Other Related Things: less war and greed and poverty and violence and suffering and oppression and bigotry and ignorance; more generosity, compassion, celebration, art, nature, diplomacy, and scientific advances.

3. That I get my stupid parathyroid problem sorted out.  So yeah, now on to the personal stuff. There is a relatively new drug called Yorvipath available to treat hypoparathyroidism, and there are more possibly coming down the pipeline, but these drugs are insanely expensive to develop and manufacture. So unless you are a billionaire, there are many bureaucratic hurdles to getting access to them. My usual approach to dealing life's hurdles? It's to moan and groan and curse and give up at the first sign that I might not easily leap over them. So this will be a bit of a challenge. 

4. That my wife and I finally decide where we live. Valencia, Spain? Provincetown, Massachusetts? San Diego? The San Francisco Bay Area?

We're going on almost two decades of splitting our lives between two or more places, and damn it, we seriously should have bought stock in Airbnb. For the most part, this vagabond life has been wonderful! But for various reasons it has now become less wonderful, and it feels like maybe time to make a decision and settle down somewhere. (Observant blog readers may detect some foreshadowing, but no final decision has been implemented).

5. That I find a few people who want to read my novels. Kinda pathetic, huh? The good news is that I really like writing fiction, and we now live in an era where anyone can publish their work, however good or shitty it may be. There's Niccolo Would Like a Word, coming out soon. I will tell you all about it before long, and beg you to read it.

But there's also an old novel I wrote back when an institutional publisher seemed essential. Now that it's the Wild West out there in bookland, I'd love to dust it off, edit it quite viciously, update it, and resurrect it. Plus I'm working on a new one, which is still very much in preliminary stages, but which looks like it will be fun to write. 

The bad news is that people don't read as much as they used to, and there are a bazillion other writers out there who want people to read their quite possibly shitty novels. I probably have a slightly better chance of finding the unicorn pictured above than potential readers... but even a couple dozen would be nice.

6. That YOU, the person reading this right now, will have a truly wonderful 2026. Weirdly enough, this is totally sincere. I'm really grateful to the handful of people who've been so supportive as to come here, when no one reads blogs anymore--let alone a blog that can't figure out what it's about, or even what it's called. Practically everyone I know has had a tough 2025. While I hope you didn't, if 2025 did indeed suck, I hope 2026 is not only much better, but surprisingly pleasant and hopeful for you and your friends/families/pets/communities. They say joy is a form of resistance, so let's find more of that! Even if the world decides to take its time getting its shit together again.

And I know it's a pain in the ass to comment, but I would just love to know about any hopes, intentions, plans, predictions, or yes, resolutions you may have for 2026. Or any thoughts about 2025. (Note: swearing IS allowed on this blog).

Anyway, Happy New Year!