2014: Closing Time

What a fucking year.  Not in the sense of 'what a fucking terrible year it was', nor in the sense of 'man, what a fucking awesome year it was'.  No, neither of those, really.

2014, more than any year I can remember, was both.  It was fucking terrible and fucking awesome.  It seemed like a non-stop roller coaster; nothing that happened was just moderate.  Everything, for me personally, went either amazingly well beyond my expectations, or absolutely awfully.  I could often go hardly a day between moving from some really shitty thing happening to some absolutely spectacular thing happening.  It applied to my work, my family life, my hobbies, the Lodge, friends, finances, the whole shebang.

Looking back, though, I wouldn't pass up any of the good if it would mitigate the bad.  Hunter S. Thompson once said that on his tombstone they would carve "It never got fast enough for me".  I dig that.  Give me the extreme over the boring any day, as long as there's a way for me to make good out of bad. I'll spit out the lukewarm; the Chinese were wrong when they said living in interesting times was a curse.

And we live in maybe the most interesting times the human race has ever seen. We're on the brink of something.  Once upon a time, if people were asked to imagine how life would be like in a hundred years, they would have imagined it would be pretty similar to how it was in the present, and they would have been mostly right.  In the last couple of centuries, people who imagined how life would be like in the future were still imagining things very similar to their own world, and they started to be (increasingly) wrong.
Today, I don't think anyone can honestly hope to imagine with any degree of accuracy how things will be like in even a couple of decades, and I think that's amazing.  It's only going to get faster.

Bring it on, 2015. Whatever you have to offer will be gratefully received and properly directed, to the best of my efforts.

RPGPundit

Currently Smoking: Ben Wade Canadian + Image Latakia