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New Year's Non-Resolutions
By John Sammon
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This New Year’s holiday why don’t you do yourself a favor and skip those resolutions that you intend to fulfill, and try to carry out for three weeks, only to abandon. Instead, make non-resolutions that you have no intention of keeping from the start.
In other words, operate like Congress. Over-promise and don’t deliver.
It’s easy. What’s more, you don’t have to suffer regret that you failed to carry out your promise. Instead, you cynically made a pledge that you knew to be a falsehood. You achieved that. A lasting achievement.
Lying to yourself can be pleasurable.
Most resolutions have to do with boring crap anyway, like losing weight. It’s always about personal bad habits and usually about losing weight. For the past ten years you have made the pledge to lose weight, and for exactly thirty six and a half days each new year you make feeble, aggravating efforts to carry it out. Then, you plunk back on the sofa and resume gorging on chocolate ding dongs.
If you never made that weight loss gig stick, what makes you think you will now? We both know you’re weak just like everybody else. Unable to see anything through to completion.
Instead, make that lack of resolve count in your favor. The trick is this. Instead of making a resolution that requires some kind of dramatic achievement (i.e. take twenty pounds off and keep it off). Instead, do that which not only reinforces something you find pleasurably wrong, but is also something that can be achieved easily for the very reason that it is one of your naughty delights.
Anything that’s bad for you or is temptingly wrong…..you’re likely to be good at.
Okay. Here’s an example. I pledge to engage in perverse behavior only sixty five percent of the time over the next two months instead of seventy three percent of the time…over only the next two months. Or, I pledge that, instead of frequenting the fifty five bars that I now frequent. I promise to narrow that down to thirteen bars as my favorites.
Get the picture? These are doable. You can make these. You haven’t given up your wicked pleasures, only reconfigured them. This is how our government operates. They take a statistic like twelve percent unemployment and say instead, “we’ve built employment to almost one hundred percent."
Portray weakness as strength. It’s called spin.
I’m not big on New Years’ Eve as a general rule. Historically, in the past, fat middle aged people in suits and ties who looked like they were about ready to suffer heart attacks from their profligate high consumptive ways and high stress jobs went out to noisy parties where they wore stupid paper hats and made noise with crankable noise makers, little cheap gizmos made in Japan. In other words, they acted like half wits to whom the next year would only bring more financial and personal disasters that anyone moron enough to act this way fully deserves.
In the background, a Guy Lombardo song, the only hit this joker ever had, sickly warbled as a tribute to the mass of hopeless, sodden boozers.
Today’s celebrants are younger and hipper.
They have small parties of maybe seven friends over for cheese and sips of French wine…while watching on television a bunch of cold people in Times Square watching a giant ball descend a building. You’re watching a group of people three thousand miles away who have worse weather than you do, and who are themselves watching something…..a giant ball on a building.
Boy! This is gonna be memorable.
What was it we used to say about natives? You give ‘em beads and narcotics and it makes ‘em happy.
Anyway, after this pseudo fabricated ritual, with your blood alcohol level at two-point-three, you get behind the wheel of a car. What fun!
Since you did the exact same thing last year, this next year should be really special and different. All the signs are there.
I’ll tell you what I do. I tell myself, it’s no different than yesterday…and just go to bed. In the middle of the night I hear far off noisemakers somewhere and car horns and roll over and go back to sleep.
I get the best of the deal.
Copyright 2006 Sammonsays.
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