December | 2016 | Figuring. Shit. Out.

Warning: The following post is even more potty-mouthed and -minded than usual, and I say that as the woman who writes for a blog called “Figuring Shit Out.” I’m not sure whether this ranks as more or less fecally fixated than my post about digging literal crap out of a hole in the basement, but either way, I want you to be prepared.

Some years are such lovely and charming visitors, and I’m sooooo sorry to see them go. Some years I’m like, “Yo hot stuff, why such a hurry to leave? Sit back and stay a while, mrrrroww.” Other years I barely notice the boring old thing has arrived before it’s gone. And still other years, fed up to the point of wide-eyed, wild-haired, fang-baring, nostril-flaring exasperation, I spit in its face and howl: GET THE EFF OUT OF MY HOUSE, YOU GIANT POOPY ASS.

As it happens, about a month ago I wrote a really, truly, phantasmagorically terrible year-end poem on this very rectal-specific, annus-as-anus theme. I did. I even read it aloud at a party. The whoooole thing. Yep. And most importantly, people kept talking to me afterward! Would you like me to quote said fanny-poem at length right here? You wouldn’t? Well, tough. My blog, babycakes. My. Blog.

I titled it “The Ass of Time.” No, I’m not kidding. It begins:

Twelve months ago — a little less — we watched the last year pass
A new one loomed as clean and bright as yonder baby’s ass. . .

What do you think so far? Isn’t that a lovely image? New Year = infant tuckus? No? I beg to diffah.

And so we leapt into the fray, our broadswords sharp and shiny,
Inspired by the infant year and its resplendent heiny.
We bravely trundled forward, hope aglow in our hearts —
We kept the faith in that baby, waving off the stench of its farts.

Okay, so I badly screwed up the meter on that one. Give me a pass. I told you it was terrible.

The year and its butt had other ideas — in November we gave up the faith —
Those gastrointestines had the last say, and took a big crap on the eighth.

In all seriousness, of which I am at times capable of feigning, I am at peace with the year about to leave us. For personal as well as political reasons, it wasn’t always easy. But it’s over! Over over over over over. No going back. No warping the space-time continuum to undo what was done and do what was undone. Minutes and weeks and months only progress in the one measly direction, THANKEE GOD. If they didn’t, and we had the capacity to rewind to some precise retro-moment and tinker away at the past, we’d be stuck in yesterday and blind to tomorrow. We would never ever ever come back, and if we did, the present would be nothing but a perpetually tweaked disappointment.

Besides, 2016 had plenty of upsides. Yes! Upsides! I count them on my fingers and toes and many tiny arm hairs. Top o’ the list: My three blessed offspring. My large, loving family. All the old friends who stood by me; all the new friends I met through gypsy jazz; all the jams I attended, all the solos I attempted, all the music that swirled and swung and plucked and scratched around me.

All the laughs I shared with coworkers under dim fluorescent light. All the sci-fi I watched with my son (“Stranger Things”!), cuddling our two crazy kittens. All the books I read that changed me: Svetlana Alexievich’s “Voices from Chernobyl,” John Hersey’s “Hiroshima.” All the trips I took. All the walks I walked in my chummy neighborhood. All the chit-chat I swapped at Stewart’s with guys named Al and Al.

All the meals around warm, happy tables with so many family members in so many places, so many of them who entered my life long after I was born.

And you know what? The time itself was a gift. Time always is. The time that passed means that I sucked in air and expelled it for another 12 months, and that’s a good thing. So I look back at the departing giant butt of 2016 and feel an awe at living, just living, nothing more than living, and at the chance to love that comes with being alive. Isn’t that all we have? The year gave me plentiful occasions to live and to love, and if — on some days, fighting some pain — I screwed up at one or both, it wasn’t for lack of trying. At least I didn’t shrink from the life or the love. At least I didn’t cede the trying, or the day.

On that note, as we bid the big backside adieu, I leave you with the last two stanzas of my craptacular bit of comic verse in rhyming iambic tetrameter. May it not ruin your mood, or your year.

So years will come, and years will go, but one thing’s sure to say:
A shitty year now nears its close, its end (two days) away.
A new one waits ahead of us, its tush sits on the horizon,
We tweet and text our gloom and dread, our overages aiding Verizon.

And all we have, in months ahead that pile into years
Is laughter, tunes and poesy to stave off snot and tears.
The fundament will soon depart, the year’s behind behind us.
This year’s ass is leaving soon. But next year’s sure will find us.

Happy 2017, y’all!

I’ve been thinking a lot about words. Of course I always am, but lately I’ve been thinking about how devalued words are these days, how ignored and slighted and spat-upon. And I’ve decided that it’s a problem of acute market disequilibrium.

See, I took (and almost failed) exactly one economics course in college, and I remember exactly one significant concept: supply and demand! Yes! I learned that! The more stuff there is around to sell, THE LESS PEOPLE ARE WILLING TO PAY FOR IT. And if you really start to flood the market with the stuff? They’ll be willing to pay even less. They will laugh in your face at its wretched undesirability. They will decide to buy little piles of beaver dung wrapped up as party favors instead. In other words, THEY WILL TOTALLY STOP GIVING A SHIT ABOUT YOUR STUFF.

This is where we are with words. There’s a glut. They’re everywhere all around us all the time, and we bat at them like gnats. No one takes them seriously any longer in this post-truth, post-knowledge, post-learning, post-evidence, post-reality age. We are living in a new and strange dimension where facts are dismissed as beside the fact, where tweets blat and rage, where fake news gets shared reflexively while real news struggles for a hearing. Truths are now transient. Challenged, they shimmer into nothingness. They and the words that express them no longer matter as they once did.

This is what I have to say about that: Words matter. Words are real. Words have weight. Words spring from the mind, enter the world and linger there, changing us. Spoken, they alter the speaker and listener both. Written, they bridge miles of earth and understanding between writer and reader, building fortresses of imagination no less tangible for lacking mass. Words create and destroy. Words spark love, sow hate, stir resentment, inspire hope, instill fear. Words hold power, bearing the authority and currency of poets and prophets and God. In the beginning was the Word, yes? I read that somewhere. But what about the end? Where will words be then?

Words build nations. Sway nations. Fell them.

It’s words that got us into this crazy mess, and words will get us out. But ONLY IF WE TAKE THEM SERIOUSLY. Only if we value them. Only if we stop treating them like some party-size bag of cheapo tortilla chips that we bought at Wal-Mart that day and then stuffed into The Cabinet of Neglect (which every kitchen has) and never thought of again, much less ate.

Just to prevent the punsters among us from going there first, no, I’m not suggesting that we eat our words. But I am suggesting that we treat them with a little more respect. Listen to them. Weigh them. Hold them for a moment in our palm and consider their heft. If they’re hollow and shallow and convey only lies, we discard them. If they bear truths – even unwanted truths, even the hardest and most painful to grasp – we must tighten our grip and carry them to safety. We owe it to them, and to ourselves.