JANUARY
You make a lot of great resolutions. You resolve to eat organic and then find out that it’s expensive, and then you’ll think that even if chickens are called organic there may have been a point they consumed an inorganic piece of corn, grass, or pollen. Then you will buy your own chickens that roam in your backyard sealed in a kind of greenhouse you construct out of clear plastic trash bags. This will make your cat go crazy and scratch out the window screen. You won’t replace it and it flaps in the breeze.
Then you’ll realize that chickens are filthy, mean and loud. The neighbors will report you to the authorities because one of your chickens will peck their dachshund who shouldn’t have snooped around your greenhouse anyway. Then you’ll go to jail for arguing with a police officer. While in a holding cell, you think about how your opinions have steered you wrong in the real world again. Your chickens will die and the dachshund will enjoy an organic feast. The cat will witness this.
What You Will Do
Know you’re not a farmer and give that up. Hold your cat accountable. Settle disputes with neighbors by playing loud music constantly while you’re not home, causing them to break into your house in full view of a running video camera. Blackmail them and use the money to pay the bail bondsman.
FEBRUARY
Most of your resolutions have been abandoned. Sure, you may have lost a few pounds, but by now, you’re back to putting grated cheese on everything and worrying about the Valentine’s card from your mom that will most certainly read “Happy Valentine’s Sweetie, Who’s the Lucky Someone?” to which you callously reply via text message: “no valentine ths yr, nxt yr, promise, thx 4 the card tho” while on your lunch in a fluorescent lighted break room with a dirty microwave.
It should be stated that by now you’ve grown so distraught by your electric bill that you’ve resolved to go without heat for the remainder of the winter. It becomes so cold in your house that Jimmy Fallon talks in slow motion on your dying television–that has, apparently, been destroyed by the temperature–and you consider masturbation as a cost-efficient means of staying warm. You discover the Coleman electric heater is something close to thirty times less efficient than a common electric tealight as you shiver over its ineffectiveness while consuming a bag of taco-flavored Doritoes. Two months in, nothing in your house works properly, and you have no idea how to fix anything.
What You Will Do
Think seriously about settling for someone that doesn’t meet your standards, it will happen anyway, and you won’t meet their standards either. Move everything into the kitchen and use the oven as a space heater. Incinerate most of your oven mitts and dish rags in small to medium kitchen fires.
MARCH
You realize that you miss the same two belt loops everyday. You now recall every giggle you thought was a flirt while you stood at the copier. You curse the closeness of the belt loops, but you continue to wear the same style of pleated chinos because you’re under the impression they go with everything. This causes you to question your appearance.
Since you’ve broken your resolutions, you resolve to spend more time on your wardrobe. You go to flea markets, yard sales, and Goodwill. You get a couple sweaters, a vest, a pair of sea foam green pants, and bright polyester socks. You feel none of this makes you look any better, except maybe the pants.
What You Will Do
Download a fashion app for $2.99 and never use it. Frown at yourself in the mirror on the first day of Spring.
APRIL
You put away your scarves and wonder how you’re going to accessorize. You think about a hat, then a bracelet, then about gauging your ears. You decide on nothing, you’re fine how you are, a regular loaf of store bought bread walking plainly through the rain.
Later on in the month you break your first sweat of the year. It’s pleasurable for about 3 seconds.
What You Will Do
Look up “Perspiration” on Wikipedia. Start thinking about a theme for tattoo sleeves, but worry about the negative effect of prominent body art on your future. Think about what your future holds. Get depressed about the future.
MAY
The heat returns in earnest and an alarming volume of sweat oozes from your pores at night causing the bed to resemble the grease lagoon behind Sonic Drive-Ins.
You resolve to run more, but the only thing that gets you through that concrete mile and a half is the thought of drinking a beer in the shower. You don’t improve your time at all, but your confidence is up 4%.
Due to your new found confidence you resolve to frequent bookstores, coffee shops, and shows by local Indie bands influenced by the Garage Rock sound of the mid-90s. You feel a one minute wave of comfort when entering these places followed by sharp reality–no one there is dateable. You discern that such places, though they were at one time havens for beauty, intellect, and conversation, have now gone sour with youth, still dog paddling in the pool of higher learning. You wonder where everyone your own age goes. You then wonder if you should ask someone or try and find them on your own.
What You Will Do
Buy some running shorts and look at your thighs in the mirror. Attend local art events wearing your sea foam green pants, but you don’t know anyone; you also don’t really know what’s going on. Walk home alone, wondering what kind of chips you’re going to melt cheese over in the microwave. Run into someone you liked in college and invite them out sometime after they comment on your pants.
JUNE
You wash the pants so you can wear them again soon. The phone number gets washed in the pants and you don’t see that person again. You decide to join an online dating service, but are thrown by invasive interview questions centered on your beliefs. You realize all your beliefs are simply a harbor of weird floating opinions and sayings. You leave the questions blank and attribute your lack of dates to this.
All of this loneliness coincides with the realization that someone you dated in high school is engaged to marry. You see pictures of the happy couple on Facebook. You click through the entire album, scowling at the kitschy beach scenes and washed out meadow photos.
What You Will Do
Think about quitting Facebook. You never will.
JULY
You meet your college friends at a vacation rental in the mountains. After weeks of complaining about finances and remaining on the fence about attending, they decide to pay your way only for you to arrive and realize they’ve become much harder to talk to. Some of them are married and talk about mortgages, their new sod, and trying for children. Others have advanced degrees in esoteric studies or exciting lucrative careers, and talk about long workweeks, 401-K’s, company stock options, and airports. You sit quietly smiling, drinking. You try to remember the fading facts of your college studies and apply them to the conversation only to realize your capabilities extend to keeping them mildly interested.
What You Will Do
Purchase 5 large watermelons and toss them off a high balcony. Everyone laughs by a fire you build around the shattered fruit bits and, despite your feelings of inadequacy, you sense they envy your general carelessness and lack of responsibilities.
AUGUST
August reminds you of college and around this time every year you think of going back to school, but you don’t know what to study. Something practical this time you think—management, nurse’s assistant, x-ray technician, or any one of those degrees they advertise on television. You go back to your old college website. You look at community colleges in the area. You research online universities and discover the University of Phoenix costs more than purchasing an actual Phoenix while attending a certain private university in Boston; but you’d never move to Boston, your scarf would only blend in.
What You Will Do
Think out of nowhere about walking the whole Appalachian Trail. Besides school or going to Europe, disappearing into nature is the third of only three options. You think of a few trail names, read a free online book chapter by some hiker, and then decide you’d just get sick, hurt, and attacked by at least one animal along the way.
You’d like to think you’re not fabricating excuses that prevent you from making a large change in your life. You’d like to think that you’re the kind of unencumbered person that can experience such high risk moves. But as you contemplate your past life decisions you discover certain narrative arcs that center on low risk, boring decisions. At the end of the month, there are four months left in the year, and you decide that reversing this will be your number one resolution. In January.
SEPTEMBER
You remember that the The Hobbit movie is coming out in a few months and get real excited. You think about a plot for your own fantasy novel. You write it down on the back of a few fast food receipts you find in the bottom of your satchel. After doing this you look at your satchel and decide it’s time to remove all the buttons supporting bands you liked in college. You throw them in the little coffee shop trash can on the counter beside the cinnamon and nutmeg where you see that person you liked in college, whom you saw back in May, stirring their coffee. You’re glad you began work on your novel.
What You Will Do
Apologize for losing their number months back, and tell them you’re currently working on a novel. Use this lie to actually begin work on a novel. Go out with that person and find out they can handle more alcohol than you; since you lose that contest, you try to impress them by ordering the octopus. They top you by tipping back a roll filled with only fish roe and a raw robin egg. You look up salmonella with your Wikipedia app. You have a great time.
OCTOBER
Giddy, you remove your scarves from the closet. More than anything you think you look great in scarves—what’s more, it’s the first time you can combine your scarves with your sea foam green pants. You prance around the house wearing only a scarf and the pants; your good time is interupted when you remember the windows are open and the dachshund next door, that shrill beast, is barking at you.
You buy an organic pumpkin and immediately regret spending the two extra dollars because all you’re going to do is carve something clever and throw away everything else. You try to legitimize your poor purchase by toasting the seeds. They will sit in a ziplock bag in the closet until next October.
The person you liked in college comes over. You carve the pumpkin together. Your pumpkin art comments on the act of pumpkin carving. You both laugh; you embrace.
What You Will Do
Name the pumpkin “Meta Pumpkin” and create an album on Facebook. Think about changing your relationship status. Watch the pumpkin rot in the heat of October. Turn your light on to welcome trick or treaters. No one comes.
NOVEMBER
You vote for Obama, then you throw the pumpkin in the woods out back and prepare yourself for your family. You’ve seen them two days at a time sporadically throughout the year, but when true family time occurs, you sit and ponder your responses to condescending remarks like, “So where are you working?” and “What’s the future looking like, hon? Any chance you can start paying your own insurance?”
What You Will Do
Hold your tongue when older family members say things that are offensive. When asked your opinion about gay marriage or the results of the presidential election you stuff your face with the organic ham your mom bought especially for you. You think about what you can do to ignore these questions once the meal is over. You decide on beer and football. It works. You smile at the welcome diversion.
DECEMBER
You turn off your hot water heater and take cold showers for the month just to afford another plane ticket back home. You frown at the traffic on the road, and even more at the crowds of people in stores buying presents for their dog. As if it weren’t enough, you feel all of the effort is for a few lackluster days around a burning Yule log with your family. You receive a bunch of Barnes and Noble and iTunes gift cards. For some reason you find yourself more drawn to your father than in years past. You drink together and talk about when he was your age. You realize you’ve never heard him talk this way. You discover he had a similar experience. You ask him how he knew it was time to start following through.
What You Will Do
Think so hard about a present for the person you liked back in college that it precludes making any sort of purchase and you’re stuck constructing something so elaborate at the last minute that they catch you and tell you thanks for the effort. Smile at the gift they give. Take a walk with them wearing your scarf and your sea foam green pants. Act like you’re smoking in the chilly air. Begin making resolutions that all involve this new person. Count down in your cold home together. Shout something witty in the final seconds. Run for the fire extinguisher to eliminate the large kitchen fire caused by leaving something, you don’t know what, in front of the life giving oven.
Epic win.
February ‘WHAT YOU WILL DO’=pure magic.
Sounds a little like the current version of my life. Except I never miss belt loops, never wear sea foam green anything and I can afford a warmer apartment. Otherwise, , pretty much the same.
Can’t say I wasn’t warned.
“…the only thing that gets you through that concrete mile and a half is the thought of drinking a beer in the shower.” Sheer… fucking… genius. Really enjoyed this. I was walking right along with it, smiling, having a few laughs, and then, out of nowhere… BOOM… I was feeling something too. Well done, Edge.
This reads like some genius wrote it. After Chris Moreland posted something about it I found myself looking it up and then realized that it takes some real talent to pull something like this off. I’m Leaving You The Show is brilliant. Great job, guys. Now I’m going back to work.
Amazing. I can’t wait for the next “Life Manifesto” from ILY!