Friends, we are 360 odd days from New Year’s Day 2022 and, I am sad to report, I still do not have six pack abs. To be honest, that always felt like more of a 2023 kind of resolution. New Year’s Day has always been a weird holiday for me - it’s a day to write down a list of things that will make me feel guilty in about a month and a half. That’s the emotional equivalent of making me eat a quart of Bluebell Ice Cream while I am forced to look at a picture of myself in a swimsuit taken the summer I graduated from high school. I cannot think of a single resolution I have actually kept in my life. So, I figured why not go big? My New Year’s resolutions this year are to conquer the mystery of human flight, become bulletproof and fight crime in a tight suit that will show off my newly gained six pack abs. I mean, all of that is just as likely to happen as for me to make it through, I don’t know, maybe three days of intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting sounds like something a rogue nation does to political prisoners, not something to be bragged about in an Instagram Story.
I think we are all owed a pass on the stress that comes with New Year’s this year, because WE HAVE HAD A WEEK in beautiful, crime-free Iuka. I know Santa is supposed to fly down from the North Pole with presents for all the good little girls and boys, but this year I think Saint Nick forgot the toys and just brought the North Pole with him. One night over the weekend it was zero degrees outside. You read that right - there were no degrees outside! Not a single one! It was so cold the sewer line at the Clark house froze. We were having to go to the bathroom outside while trying to not make eye contact with the neighborhood dogs. When the power company started the rolling blackouts, we were a household with no power or (essentially) running water. Basically, we were a consumption outbreak away from having a Victorian Christmas so authentic they’d have to call off next year’s Dickens Christmas. We finally abandoned the homestead and moved in with my parents which was extra humbling since I turned 44 the day after Christmas. It was a bleak birthday, sliding into your mid-forties back in your childhood bedroom, without even so much as six pack abs to show for your life. I have to say my parents have been troopers about the situation - especially since my oldest got a Playstation 5 which has been set up since the 25th in their den which must have cratered the ratings for all the various versions of NCIS.
So, it’s up to New Year’s to salvage this holiday season. I plan on watching whatever college football players that haven’t opted out of their bowl game, eating whatever leftovers haven’t molded over and making sure my children stay just quiet enough not to cause my father to have a nervous breakdown. I don’t know if I’ll be so hard up that I will eat the traditional “good luck” New Year’s meal of hog jowl and black eyed peas. Personally, I think that’s considered good luck only because if you have to eat hog jowl your luck can only go up from there.
Come to think of it, it sounds like the perfect meal for me this 2022 holiday season.