Not that I have any idea how to manage this website, or that you’re actually reading it, but I think it’s the right time to announce that the sidebar to the right, which I stopped adding content to some years ago when President 45’s rhetoric stopped being merely idiotic and became downright incendiary, be retired in favor of something more uplifting.

Pictures of puppies!

OK, no.

I’m going to see if I can find in the inaugural words of our next president, Uncle Joe, an apt haiku to post to this sidebar. Basically, I have no idea how to get rid of this sliver of vertical verbiage. Maybe the refreshed haikus will become “a thing” (as my son tends to say) and the world will finally pay attention to me.

Yeah, probably not.

Whenever my followers are found to be whipped up into a riotous frenzy, smashing windows and stealing letterhead from my enemies and so forth, all eyes immediately turn to me. Like I held a gun to people’s heads and forced them to abscond with that lectern or suggested that they take a leak into a Congressman’s coffee mug. 

Do I know that coffee mugs were repurposed into urinals? Not exactly. But my limited experience with shirtless people wearing fur hats and face paint and carrying spears is that they usually have to relieve themselves mid-riot, and if a Congresperson’s mug is just sitting there unused, well, it might as well be put into action.  

There was a lack of preparation for these riots, with far too few porta-potties mobilized for such a huge crowd such that some rioters missed storming the Capitol because they were in a porta-potty line and didn’t want to lose their places. In 2021, that’s shameful.

Not to create a diversion or anything, but I’m wondering if it might make sense to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to a few professional bowlers this week.

I don’t typically submit a blog post to my team of editors in the wee hours of New Year's Day, unless I want a black eye. Even with no parties to attend, these fixers of my scribblings have by now already toasted farewell to 2020 by donning celebratory lampshades, and are in no mood to try to make sense of the words I’ve splashed haphazardly onto the page for another 36 or so hours.

So let's bypass the editors today and use the opportunity to denigrate the shit year that was 2020 without their interference.

Yeah, OK, 2020 started off just fine. The impeachment of a sitting president may sound inauspicious, but I must admit it lifted my spirits, especially whenever Adam Schiff took the mic. From there it went downhill. The president was found not guilty, continued to ignore or not bother to read intelligence reports, and played down the new virus, which had secretly boarded a plane from China in order to attend a Biogen conference.

The rest of the year is a total blur. Stuck in our homes, unable to give hugs to our friends and family, watching helplessly as our favorite bars and restaurants closed, seeing people lose their jobs, remote school that barely resembled actual school … Ech. The year was a complete disaster before we even started counting all the dead bodies.

The only thing that has kept me from flinging myself off a tall building this year is that no tall buildings are allowing me in. I exaggerate of course. Having the best family anyone could hope to have, a meaningful job, and friends who are masterful optimists with great senses of humor have also kept me mostly sane. Not to mention that I've gotten better at brewing beer.

For 2021, my hope is to retain the family, friends, work, and beer and jettison everything else.

Still in the mid-late portion of the early segment of my life, I consider myself lucky to never have been evicted from a residence. But I seriously worry for many other people these days. In better times, moderately-employed people of all stripes seemed able to keep rooves over their heads, despite the lack of safety nets under their feet, by delivering pizzas, waiting tables, and laundering strangers’ underthings. Then, this damnable coronavirus came along, wrecking it all. Now masked people eagerly willing to serve you and your tipsy friends hazy IPAs until you are too drunk to drive are poised to be thrown into the mean streets during the cold winter months, unless our very brave politicians with their excellent healthcare are willing to do something to help them. Not because the masked folk are unwilling to serve your drunk buddies hazy IPAs, but because there is nowhere for beer drinkers to congregate around kegs safely these days.

As someone who has delivered many a pizza and laundered many a strangers’ underthings in my checkered past, I wonder what it must feel like to find that you can no longer pull yourself up by the bootstraps, try as you might.

I’m not suggesting, as some do, that the burden should rest upon the shoulders of the landlords, who owe mortgage payments to banks. Here in the Parkway region of Boston, lots of “landlords” happen to be ordinary folk who might prefer a single family home but opted for a “three-deckah” to make ends meet. These people are in a bind as well.

Which brings us to our soon-to-be Squatter-in-Chief. Let’s be clear: this is not a person who deserves one iota of your sympathy. That he is likely to be removed from the Weiss Haus by the local Sheriffs is at once hilarious and a little scary. Sorry that you don’t want to leave, but there are many people who don’t want to leave their homes either who have better excuses for staying in their apartments than you have for staying in a mansion.

Some people worry that the president’s refusal to leave the White House will be awkward for America, and to them I say, “Yeah, probably.” But there is a lot of awkward to go around. Alas, with the inauguration’s social distancing rules, we’ll not be able to appreciate the further awkwardness of having a single, vacant chair just behind our President, Joe Biden, where the outgoing president would traditionally sit. Thanks to social distancing, there will be many vacant chairs. But at least we won’t have a man-child making faces, rolling his eyes, and sulking while we peacefully transfer power from one administration to another.