CHCH News - Be It Resolved...

As I write this, it's two hours and 15 minutes into the New Year. I have just gotten up from a brief night's sleep, having been summoned back to the salt mines. Sheetz is closed and there's no Beefaroni in the house, so I don't know what I'm going to do for chow before heading out the door. And since, when I get where I'm going, it'll still be New Year's and nothing open, I expect my holiday dinner to be composed of wallpaper paste and Cashmere Bouquet hotel soap.

But reflecting back, 2004 wasn't such a bad year. For one thing, we're coming out of it with George W. Bush still our President, and not Hillary Rodham or Howard Dean. Either seemed possible this time a year ago. The razor-thin margin Bush held over his opponent, Anyone But Bush, gave him victory - depending on Ohio's eighteenth recount - but denied him a mandate. Plans for implementation of repressive Judeo-Christian morality in government will have to wait until Karl Rove arranges another puppet-President.

The downside of this is that now we're promised another four years of such unheard radical agendas as, say, rolling back the Tax Tables to 1980s-rates, or prohibition of same-sex sodomite matrimony. The nation, we're told, is at palpable risk from such a pretender, one so mad as to humble himself to G_d - instead of to the network anchors, Gallup and the focus groups. For it's the latter views which really matter.

Nor was the old year very old when we were exposed to another risk: boobs on TV. Boobs in the halftime Super Bowl burlesque farce...producing it. Boobs who thought that exposing an uninteresting, middle-aged once-briefly-successful singer's breasts, would go over as successful, family-oriented, afternoon entertainment. Sandwiched in-between halves of the most-anticipated football matchup of the season, the one fathers take time to watch with their preteen sons...and their wives.

Planned and produced...byboobs.

And speaking of boobs, both behind and before the camera, there's that one so astute as to know that the camera never blinks...twice. He's never quite explained the meaning of that Ratherism, but one thing is certain - you can't pull one over on Old Danny.

Old Danny-Boy, it seems, was slipped a secret letter proving, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that George Bush had been given special help in obtaining a National Guard fighter-pilot's billet - and this by a man who at the time was in no position to help him. Not only that - young Bush was a crack-addled lush and a waste of good oxygen. This letter, a typed memo for a personal file, was the proof.

But you just can't pull one over on Danny-Boy. He's seen it all...two county fairs and a goat-ropin'. Ol' Danny, never one to be a stooge for those slickers up Austin way, discovered, with the aid of half the Internet Blog community, the document to be a forgery. Not only that...the forgers, mindful that typewriters can be traced, were clever enough to write this 1973 memo in Word 2000. CBS News investigative reporters continue their inquiries...but a separate investigation confirms that the facts proven by this forgery, remain unassailable.

There's other things to be thankful for: That "Sandy" Berger used his own National Security Advisor records for a codpiece - instead of, as Bill advised, the Constitution and other founding documents. That the September 11 Commission was content to crucify John Ashcroft in the court of public opinion, rather than in legal proceedings - for daring produce the documentation which proved Commissioner Jamie Gorelick's duplicitous thread of attack, a baldfaced lie.

And that Ronald Wilson Reagan was finally, belated, excused from his torturous end to find eternal peace.

And it's in this frame of mind that I drift toward thoughts of New Years Resolutions. The annual empty promises: Lose the weight. Quit the cigs. Love the wife a little more...and her best friend a little less. The kind of throwaway promises to one's self that are forgotten by Presidents' Day.

This year, I'm going to make one that'll be easy to keep. And a bear to keep. This year, I resolve to be more grateful for what I have.

Because my lot's not such a tough one. Neither very rich nor very successful nor very much loved, I still-and-all don't have it that bad.

It's true, I'm another year older. It's a sobering thought for an American male ricocheting through a prolonged midlife crisis. But it happens to most of us...and those who it didn't happen to, they'd probably have preferred it to the alternative.

I have clothing in abundance. I haven't gotten around to being fitted for an Armani suit yet, true...but it hit me, as I packed for an extended business outing. I had the clothes I needed. Then the clothes I wanted, for off-time. Then the optional clothing for the optional Night Out. Three sets of shoes. A week's worth of incidentals.

This is a far cry from a century ago, where a working man had his Sabbath shirt and his other shirt.

Then there's food. Food in abundance. Our biggest health risk, here in the America where liberal prophecists speak of children dying on the sidewalks of secondhand smoke...is, not starvation, but obesity.

I'm a single guy. And I never learned to properly cook. Any sense of adventure I might have once had, looking at a well-equipped kitchen, has long ago left. It's work - unfamiliar, unrewarding, time-consuming work. So I eat out a lot.

I have a sort of informal track I run. Sunday, it's brunch at a certain buffet restaurant. Monday, Angelino's has a $5.00 Large special. So Monday is Pizza Night.

Other times, there's the local Chinese Buffet - the one run by Chinese. There I can find Generow Tso's Chicken and Mashted Potatos and U.S. Cheese. There's an uncommonly clean truck stop not far away with a fine hot-and-cold salad bar. And Rosie's has the Friday All-U-Can-Eat Fish Fry.

I sit in one or another of these places, surrounded by good food in abundance - meat and produce and vegetables twelve months a year, as much as I want each time I come in - and marvel at our miracle of plenty. Expensive? No, half an hour's pay, even at my anticipated lower wages.

And then there's shelter. Do I live in the Taj Mahal? No, I do not. But as I sit here I'm in a comfortable chair in a comfortable room with electric lighting and a modern computer before me. I can secure all of it as I go out.

A week ago I was elsewhere, for three weeks. A careful search secured fine temporary lodging, a motel-cum-efficiency apartment, for less money than most people pay for rent. Beamed ceilings, hot-water heat, color television, even free Internet. It didn't matter to me that it overlooked a farm-implement dealer's junkyard; it was clean and secure and with an amiable host.

I have all that I need. And I have the realistic expectation that I can obtain more. What I lack is not so much what I need as desire - toys, affirmations, status symbols..

And my resolution is to remember that; to avoid allowing myself to join, spiritually, with the alienated, self-pitying crowds who feel want for many things - but who truly lack only perspective. When faced with such people, I resolve to remember the old proverb: I was unhappy because I had no shoes; until I met a man who had no feet.

And that is where I'll leave it this morning. Rather than engage in more caustic commentary, I will take some satisfaction in reflection - that the past year wasn't so horrible, and the prospects for 2005 not so black.

May you, our readers, have pleasant and prosperous and happy and healthy New Year.

North Ridgeville, Ohio

January 1, 2005

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JustPassinThru is a forty-six-year-old adolescent in varying stages of employment. He alternates between sorting the shambles of his life; and expounding his views on the Web - telling others how it's done.

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