Goodbye & Good Riddance
London middle of the day post mudlarking report 01/01/2024
Like any rube, I love New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, the way I like fortune cookies and coin-op machines that test, by means of my grip, my love quotient: hot stuff, cold fish. I like what tells me, a curmudgeon, to be hopeful about the future.
I haven’t gone for a swim since December 21st, the day me and mine left for holiday travels, though I have doddered down to the Thames with one of my kids, who is a dedicated (and licensed) mudlarker, finding the historic garbage that washes up on the foreshore.
It’s 2024. 2023 was not a great year for me and mine, nor for the world. Not without joy and happiness, but also not without—I don’t even want to talk about it. Hoo boy. I won’t miss this year. Excelsior, for fuck’s sake.
Perhaps I’ve never kept a resolution but I love to make them. I have incised many upon my heart for 2024. I don’t need to make any new swimming resolutions, as that is an intention I have kept for more than three years now.
Isn't it great to know that what once was a resolution (your swimming, if I read right) is now just YOUR LIFE and requires no internal or external command?
This is me with working out. I have not, for the last two years, had to RESOLVE to go to the gym. I am now a PERSON WHO GOES TO THE GYM, someone that, not *actually* so very long ago, I never thought I could be. Thank you so much for sharing your insights and observations with us in 2023 and of course I look forward to more. May 2024 reveal itself to contain the hope we had reason to worry we lost.
Resolutions happily incised in sand, waiting for tide to take them where they seem to go with the socks and bad hair ideas. Cheers.