Happy New Year everyone! I’m looking forward to
2016 and I have to tell you that I won't miss 2015. It wasn’t a great year and it certainly wasn’t a boring year. It was a year filled
with enough national, international and even personal events to keep things
interesting.
It was a year I won’t soon forget; I was a securely employed
middle class longhaired married guy enjoying waterfront living in Florida a
year ago when we celebrated the New Year. Since then I’ve been laid off, experienced marital discord, moved
back to Nevada, got a part time job, got a haircut, got a full time job, experienced extreme marital discord, traveled overseas, moved to Reno, drove a U-Haul
truck from Florida to Nevada, traveled abroad again, visited my grandkids, watched Blazing Saddles (again) and
bought a really cool new suitcase.
This morning I’m celebrating the New Year from a small
apartment in downtown Florence Italy having survived an Italian New Year's Eve and several
glasses of something the Italians call Grappa. Grappa is a strong Italian
liqueur that seems to specifically target inhibition cells that keep me from giggling like a little girl. Enough said about that.
While I traveled the long strange road that was 2015 for me,
the rest of the world was having a pretty interesting year as well. Last
January some whacko in Ogden, UT tried to hold up a sushi restaurant with a
pellet gun only to be thwarted by a chef wielding his razor sharp sushi knife.
This is noteworthy for several reasons; first, who knew they had sushi
restaurants in Utah? Next, how many guys in the whole world can claim that they
have flipped an egg into their hat with a spatula and stopped an armed robbery
with a ginsu knife? I’m pretty sure that makes him an instant legend among Utah
sushi chefs.
In February marijuana officially became legal in Alaska;
prior to that marijuana use was pretty much ignored in Alaska because the cops
were all for anything that kept guys mellow in a frozen wilderness with damned
few women … well, damned few actually recognizable as women.
Marijuana use also became legal in Washington, D.C. in
February but that pretty much had no impact. Those nut-jobs in Congress have
been smoking some serious shit for a long time now. Smoking a little weed might
actually be useful for that band of idiots.
In June the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of same sex
marriage making it legal in all 50 states. People who wanted to marry other
people of the same sex met this decision with positive enthusiasm. Strangely,
the decision was met with equal but negative enthusiasm from people who had no
desire to marry someone of the same sex. Color me confused.
In July NASA’s New Horizon spacecraft passed close to Pluto
and sent back detailed photos proving once and for all that Pluto is neither a
planet nor a cartoon dog. So, again, color me confused … what the hell is
Pluto?
In August former President and all around swell guy Jimmy
Carter announced that he had cancer that had spread to several areas of his
body, including his brain. He continued to work on Habitat for Humanity while
undergoing chemo then, in December President Carter announced that he was
cancer free and in total remission proving once and for all that good things
happen to good people.
I only had throat cancer and I laid around and whined
throughout my treatment, say what you will about President Carter but that is
one tough peanut farmer!
In September a University of Michigan study revealed that
more college students smoke marijuana regularly than habitually smoke
cigarettes. Well there’s a news flash! You can smoke weed almost anywhere on a
college campus but you pretty much have to be in the middle of an empty 40 acre
field to be allowed to smoke cigarettes these days. Do you know how hard it is
to find empty 40 acre fields anywhere near the University of Michigan?
Oh, and Donald Trump decided to run for President and people
took him seriously, I’m going to need some more Grappa to figure that one out.
Like I said, 2015 was a whacky year!
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