Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve, the final night of 2018.

Is it just me, or did the past 12 months feel more like 72? A lot of stuff happened in 2018. A lot.

There was the brouhaha over kids eating Tide Pods. A false alarm scared everyone in Hawaii into thinking they were about to be nuked — welcome back to the Cold War. Not long after that, Kilauea erupted. Then Hurricane Florence hit the Carolinas hard.

Around the world, a bridge collapsed in Italy, killing 43 people, many of them motorists who were just unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ireland legalized abortion and Canada legalized recreational pot. Saudi Arabia decided to let women drive. The National Museum of Brazil in Rio was destroyed by a fire, along with 90-something percent of its collections. And the “yellow vest” movement in France is being called the worst civil unrest in that country since the infamous protests of 1968.

2018 was the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, once thought to be the “war to end all wars.” It was also the year the northern white rhinoceros became functionally extinct (there are still a few left, but they’re all female, so…)

A Chinese scientist claimed to have altered the DNA of human babies, provoking much controversy and protest. A subway station in lower Manhattan reopened for the first time since being wrecked in the 9/11 attacks 17 years ago. A journalist for the Washington Post was murdered by the Saudis inside their consulate in Istanbul. And the Camp Fire in California destroyed 18,000 buildings and killed 88 people.

The Avengers: Infinity War broke our hearts and Solo: A Star Wars Story was deemed enough of a box-office failure that Disney has cancelled any further “standalone” SW films (despite Solo being, in my humble opinion, the best, most purely fun SW film since 1983).

Bill Cosby was convicted of rape. Enough said about that.

There was an average of one deadly mass shooting incident in the U.S. per month, including the one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida (17 killed), another at Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas (10 killed), a shooting at a Maryland newspaper office (five killed there), and the 11 worshipers killed at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Former president George H.W. Bush died, as did Stephen Hawking, Aretha Franklin, Burt Reynolds, Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz, and the travel writer and TV presenter Anthony Bourdain. Meanwhile, Britain’s Prince Harry married a biracial, divorced American actress, and… everybody was pretty cool with it, so there’s some progress for you.

NASA declared the Kepler space telescope dead after nearly a decade in space, during which it discovered nearly 2,700 planets orbiting other stars. In other space news, the Mars InSight probe successfully landed on the red planet, Voyager 2 entered interstellar space, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX successfully tested the Falcon Heavy rocket by sending a red Tesla roadster with a mannequin at the wheel into deep space.

I won’t even mention the barking chaos that is the Trump administration.

***

Also in 2018, Anne and I met my main man Rick Springfield at an album launch party in Los Angeles, and we spent a week in the New Orleans, something that’s been on my bucket list for decades. We attended two instances of FanX, the convention previously known as Salt Lake Comic Con, as well as numerous concerts and other events. In between the fun stuff, my job at the ad agency seemed to keep me busier than ever. And a year-long construction project finally wrapped up, transforming the two-lane road in front of our house into a seven-lane highway. Yay for progress.

I turned 49 in September. And then in October my Mustang got rear-ended during what had been a pleasant Sunday afternoon drive. It’s repairable, but it’s still dry-docked three months later — long story. I miss it.

But you know, in spite of all the things that were happening in 2018, one thing that most assuredly was not happening was this blog. I averaged only two entries a month during the past year, and many of those were just poems or quotations that I reposted from other sources. Not much original content, mostly just book reviews, Friday Evening Videos and a handful of my patented celebrity obituaries. (And doesn’t it just figure that the best of this year’s obits, the one I wrote for the aforementioned Anthony Bourdain, was vaporized by a server failure? Why do those damned hiccups always take my favorite pieces?)

I had such grand ambitions for this blog, once upon a far more innocent time. I wanted it to be something along the lines of John Scalzi’s Whatever or James Lileks’ Bleat, a daily long-form essay that would be insightful and entertaining, good writing that was worthy of whatever talent I might actually have, something that actually meant something. And maybe I did hit that mark from time to time — I like to think I did — but that was long ago. In the immortal words of every Hollywood producer who ever held a writer’s ambitions in the palm of his hand, “What have you done lately?” As much as it pains me to say it… not much. Not much.

Much of the day-to-day chitchatty stuff I used to do around here has been supplanted by social media, and as for longer thinkpieces… who has time to think anymore? It’s hard to explain to someone who doesn’t work in my industry just how draining it really is, and if I try, it just sounds like I’m making excuses. “Well, make the time,” people say. Believe me, I’ve tried. Maybe someone who’s wired differently from myself can do it. I haven’t been able to.

Not that it matters. Blogging is pretty much over, isn’t it? It certainly feels like it. I’ve poured so much energy into this thing over the years, thinking my words were becoming immortal, that it was making some kind of difference… the reality is I was just pissing into the wind, one more voice among the millions contributing to a cacophony… and then the cacophony went elsewhere. My words still live here, as long as the server stays up, but nobody is going back and looking at them. And just lately I’ve been thinking about how I could’ve better spent all that time and creative mojo on other things… the novels I used to imagine myself writing, perhaps. As the song says, “Regrets, I have a few.”

All of which sounds like I’m gearing up to sign off for good, doesn’t it? Well… I’ll be honest, the thought has occurred to me. End of one year, start of a new one, good time to clear out the metaphorical closets, right? But… I’m not there yet. Not quite. I’ve been the proprietor of Simple Tricks and Nonsense for a very long time, and it’s hard to imagine not being that any more. I just don’t know how to improve the situation any. I’d like to get back on track, get my rate of posting up to at least once a week again. Of course, I’d also like to write some fiction again… try to reconnect with the ambitious young dreamer I used to be. And I don’t know how to do that either…

It’s about to be a new year, though, right? A fresh beginning, endless possibilities… at least, that’s the story we like to tell.