MMXX

2020's had a sour note like taking a big bite out of a lemon, peel and all. It's made us all pucker our lips, wrinkle our noses, and screw our eyes shut. Shut the gates. Close the doors. Batten down the hatches, my friends. It's coming for you.

It's just round the corner with its many heads and dripping fangs. It'll fuck you up if you stop and look. You won't turn into a pillar of salt like Lot's wife. You'll get torn limb from limb and chewed down slowly by a monster a lot bigger and stronger than you. Evolution's a bitch, yo and we're in her grinding jaws getting chewed up and mangled.

How've you been keeping? I wanna ask you but my jaw's broke, my skull's crushed, and my spine's been smeared across the road.

It's hard hard hard to think of the right words to describe this year. FUBAR, perhaps. But it's still recognizable. It's amazing how incredible things seem credible when they happen at life's natural pace. I wouldn't have believed it had I told myself last year, but now I can fully believe it, 100%.

Shit's too real out there, friend. This isn't a movie. There's no lone star, no one single hero who's gonna infiltrate the base and take on the baddies one by one. There is no hero. There are heroes, seven point five four billion, in fact.

We've each got a little version of ourselves that lives in our hearts – our own very personal hero, rooting for us through thick and thin, pulling and pushing us to victory. We're free to listen as well as ignore our hero.

Our ability to do so is complicated by a messy combination of nature and nurture. The way your genes interact with your environment and the other people around you affect the little hero within. You gotta tend and nurture it like a plant. And what does it take to tend a hero? Do I hear power cords? It's montage time.

Run some hills. Do some push-ups. Throw a log around the forest. Eat big bowls of hearty food. Sleep well at night. You know the drill. What would Rocky Balboa do? That's what you gotta ask yourself every damn morning before drinking ten raw eggs with a pound of coffee mixed in. As long as we do that shit every single day, we'll be fine.

As we look over the precipice, gazing into the future, what can we take from the past? What treasures, tools, wisdom can we integrate into our souls for the next part of the adventure? It's far from over, my friend. It's gonna keep getting worse and worse. Unfortunately, that's how stories work. But each trial surpassed offers a reward. We gotta take all the valuable lessons we can, even while we're getting hit in the face over and over.

You feel that burden breaking your back? Feel that boot pressing down on your neck? It's painful to be a human being. We have all these messy emotions and feelings. When shit isn't going our way, we feel rotten and angry. It's easy for regret and depression and angst to rule our minds. The chaos is sometimes too much to bear. But don't worry. It's always been like that. Humans have always felt like that. Every human felt just the same as you. You're no different to anyone else ever in history.

I don't know about you, but this idea helps me calm down and relax a little. My feelings don't matter so much, is that it? Not quite. It's more like your feelings matter but they don't change anything. The world does what it wants, regardless of your hopes, dreams, feelings, and wants. Got plans? Not in the eyes of Mother Nature and God. These things exist that are so much bigger than the hopes and dreams of every single human being on earth combined, let alone one of the single constituent parts. I am the centre of the universe, hear me roar—silence replies.

So? In culmination, I would like to draw your attention to the fact we're all fucked and most likely going to die in a pile of burning rubble. But. But. But. There is a slight, infinitesimal, narrowing, tightening sliver of a chance that if, and only if, we all work together, arm in arm, hand in hand, feeler in feeler, we can motherfuckin make it.