My New Year’s Resolutions

Where would we be without False Hope?

In 2025 I plan to be a better person (which considering my behavior in 2024 won’t take all that much) and I have four New Year’s Resolutions and here they are.

1. I Won’t Drink Anymore

I also won’t drink any less and that’s a very old joke, but against my wishes I’ve somehow become old myself so it seems totally appropriate.

In reality…

I’m a big fan of the End-Of-The-Workday Cocktail, but most days I start work at 5 AM so end of my workday is about 3 PM which works out great because a cocktail combined with getting comfortable on your couch while watching a mediocre movie on Netflix is a great way to take an afternoon nap – whether you planned to or not – and if you haven’t yet learned this lesson, take my word for it: afternoon naps are awesome.

But even if it’s just one End-Of-The-Workday Cocktail, having a drink at 3 PM might make some people think you’re an alcoholic and one of those people might be you. That being the case, I recently I asked my best friend, who happens to be a doctor, if he would consider me an alcoholic and he said no, he’d consider me: “A steady drinker.”

He was mixing a pitcher of Manhattans at the time.

Defining yourself as a “steady drinker” seems like slicing your baloney extremely thin so I said: “You don’t think I’m an alcoholic because you drink just as much as I do.”

The obvious lesson here is if you think you might have a drinking problem, change doctors and get one who drinks at least as much if not more than you do and then your drinking problem will magically go away and he and/or she will consider you “normal” and quite possibly offer you a Manhattan.

Bottom line: If your doctor is Foster Brooks, he definitely won’t think you drink too much and if you don’t know who Foster Brooks was, here you go:

2. Get More Exercise

Yeaaah…maaaaybe.

But here’s a story that argues against that.

Kansas City Royals left fielder Alex Gordon was famous for being a workout fanatic and never eating unhealthy food (he wouldn’t eat desserts and hadn’t had a bite of pizza since he was a kid) and even ballplayers who were in shape (compared to the rest of us) would marvel at Alex and when he had his shirt off (a common occurrence in a baseball clubhouse) Alex had so little body fat you could not only see his six-pack abs you could see veins in his stomach.

The first time I noticed that I thought: “We have veins in our stomachs?”

I’m guessing I do, but they’re somewhere under the protective layer of lard I’ve accumulated over the decades and it would require a search and rescue team, a pack of bloodhounds and a thoracic surgeon to find them.

Anyway…

One day a shirtless Alex Gordon walks by me and Chris Getz (former Royals second baseman, current White Sox GM) and Chris says: “You know…if we started eating right and working out, in 10 years we still won’t look like that.”

To which I responded: “Then why would we even try?”

3. Eat Better

Probably not going to happen.

You get overly old and there are so many things you can no longer enjoy, like getting up off a sofa after your afternoon nap without hearing a variety of joints pop or sleeping eight straight hours without waking up to use the bathroom three times or morning erections you could use to split wood, but one of the few things that just keeps getting better and better is the enjoyment of a good meal.

So don’t take that away from me.

And speaking of the very few advantages that come with getting older…

If you get old enough you’re playing with house money so now would be a good time to start bad habits like smoking or drinking or eating whatever the hell you like because you’re going to die of something else long before those bad habits kill you.

So feel free to put bacon on absolutely everything and I recently saw a Bloody Mary served with a strip of bacon to be used as a swizzle stick which seems like a genius idea that should be patented and when my actual doctor (the one that doesn’t serve me Manhattans) was offering suggestions about my future diet and said:

“Salads are good.”

I responded:

“If you put enough bacon on them.”

So whatever you’re eating, bacon that fucker up and nine times out of eight it’ll improve your meal and the beginning of this sentence reminds me of my final New Year’s Resolution…

4. Stop Cussing So Goddamn Much

I occasionally use profanity, assuming by “occasionally” you mean whenever I’m awake and I’m going to blame this bad habit on:

A. George Carlin

B. Editorial Writers

C. Baseball

First up, George Carlin:

I was lucky enough to see George Carlin perform his “Seven Dirty Words” bit live a couple times and he made a compelling argument that getting upset by a series of sounds was a silly reaction forced on us by an uptight society with a very large stick up its ass. George argued that plenty of words considered profane were useful and contributed to clear, direct communication, but some people were so rigid they not only got upset at certain sounds, they also got upset at acceptable sounds made in the wrong order.

As George pointed out:

“You can prick your finger, but you can’t finger your prick.”

When the Carlin concerts were over I noticed the people who had attended were much more relaxed about profanity and as they left the premises were saying things like, “That’s one funny sonofabitch” (the weed everybody was smoking might have contributed to the relaxed atmosphere) but I’m guessing most of those people reverted to Socially Acceptable Uptight Speech Patterns by the time they went back to work on Monday.

I didn’t.

Maybe because the workplace I returned to on Monday was infested with editorial writers who had a hard time composing a direct sentence and would write like it was still the 17^th Century, they were giving a speech in the House of Lords between pinches of snuff while using words like: balderdash, poppycock, flapdoodle, hogwash, bunk, hokum, drivel, humbug, hooey, moonshine, bosh, malarkey, horsefeathers and twaddle.

Instead of the word they really meant: bullshit.

BTW: To find those synonyms for “bullshit” I went online and looked at Thesaurus.com and they also declined to use the word “bullshit” and used “BS” instead and one of their “strong matches” for “bullshit” was “applesauce.”

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

Imagine you’re the manager of the New York Yankees and Aaron Judge just got strike three called on a pitch a foot outside and you go to the home plate umpire and say:

“Bob, that last call was applesauce.”

Bob would bust a gut laughing.

Now here’s former Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver showing Bob Uecker the correct way to argue with an umpire:

Which is a really convenient example because we’ve worked our way into a baseball, a sport that’s famous for profanity and one of my favorite baseball words is “horseshit” because it’s versatile and can be used as noun or an adjective as in:

“Bob, that was a horseshit call and by the way, you’re horseshit, too.”

Baseball is the only world I’ve ever encountered where they use profanity to make things sound worse than they actually are (we usually do the opposite — use socially acceptable words to cover up what we’re talking about) and I’ll demonstrate with this example of baseball profanity that describes a poor pitching performance:

“Man, Larry really shit the bed last night.”

In baseball “shitting the bed” is a poor pitching performance, “cock fastball” describes a pitch down the middle that passes the batter crotch high and “pissing on a pitch” is hitting a line drive and if you don’t like these profane terms I’d suggest writing a letter to the Commissioner of Baseball who will probably read your letter, toss it in the trash while saying:

“That complaint was horseshit.”

I also blame baseball for my vocabulary because in 2010 I had to start writing about it every day and originally wrote way too much like those overly-delicate editorial writers and one night tried to think of another word for pitcher and came up with:

“Moundsman.”

Which, even though it’s in the dictionary, is a bullshit word never actually used in baseball and even if they did use it, they’d say something like:

“Our horseshit moundsman really shit the bed last night when he threw that cock fastball and their first baseman pissed on it.”

So that night I decided to stop trying to “write” and start telling stories as if I ran into you in a bar after a ballgame and you wanted to know what happened that night and if it was natural to use profanity in telling a story I’d also use it when writing a story because vocabulary and speech patterns are part of a personality and getting your personality down on paper (or whatever the hell this medium is) is how you produce something original.

You may not like it – many people don’t – but for better or worse, it’s me and if don’t like me using profanity while writing you really don’t want to meet me in person.

Today’s Lesson

When I start writing one of these essays I rarely know what I’ll write next or where I’m going to wind up and looking back on what I’ve written so far it’s pretty clear I don’t actually plan on keeping any of my New Year’s Resolutions, which oddly enough might help you keep one of yours, because if one of your New Year’s Resolutions is to stop procrastinating, I can help you with that:

Give up right now.

You’ll sleep better tonight.

Happy New Year, everybody.