Mostly sunny this late-afternoon Monday here in Merced, a place stranded in California’s Jan Joaquin Valley and seemingly lost between Modesto and Fresno — an affliction of ordinary.
And it’s the eve of New York’s Eve, where soon we’ll start the beginning of a brand-new year and celebrate the end of another decade.
Wonders will never cease…

A bit of poetry for a new year by Terrance Hayes (via The New Yorker last week):

“things got terribly ugly incredibly quickly
things got ugly embarrassingly quickly
actually things got ugly unbelievably quickly
honestly things got ugly seemingly infrequently
initially things got ugly ironically usually
awfully carefully things got ugly unsuccessfully
occasionally things got ugly mostly painstakingly
quietly seemingly things got ugly beautifully …”

(Illustration: M.C. Escher’s ‘Tower of Babel,’ found here).

Now more than five years since I retired and each year seems worse than the last. In 2014, Obama was still president and the unspeakable horror of the T-Rump was an unknown waiting-to-happen nightmare — the shit-turd orange A-hole was still just a TV douchebag, not a serious threat to humanity.
And each year of the T-Rump is also becoming way-worse than the year before — he seems to be winding himself up to become a self-inflated fart-blossom of a nuclear meltdown constructed to take all of us with him down the poopie drain. At least the motherfucker has been impeached.
Earlier this month, the T-Rump passed his 1,055th day in office with an accumulating total of 15,413 false or misleading claims, averaging 32 lies a day. And 2020 will be worse, count on it.

Moving New York City’s homeless into Trump Tower would help solve the problem and at the same time bring a much higher quality group of people into the building. Win-win for everybody. https://t.co/hyZJ3OurU7

— Richard W. Painter (@RWPUSA) December 30, 2019

Yesterday, the great Dave Berry evaluated departing 2019 first with a note (per The Washington Post):

Can we say anything good about 2019?
Was there any positive news, a silver lining, a reason to feel hopeful about the future — to believe that we, as Americans, can recognize our common interests, overcome our differences and work together to build a better tomorrow, for ourselves, for our children and for the world?

Nah.

And after reviewing the closing year month by month, Berry still can’t find solace:

Finally, mercifully, this highly eventful year draws to a close.
As New Year’s Eve approaches, the nation pauses to look back on 2019 and throw up a little bit in its national mouth.
But then the nation looks forward to 2020, and it feels faint stirrings of hope in its national heart.
Because America has been bitterly divided before.
There was the Civil War, for example, and that time we could not agree on the color of that dress on the Internet.
If we got through those troubles, we can get through the current ones.
Because in the end, despite our political differences, we’re all Americans, and we care about each other and want the best possible future for everyone.
Right?

Nah.

On the eve of the eve…