Happy New Year everyone! As much as I’m looking forward to 2016 I have to tell you that I’ll miss 2015. It wasn’t a great year, it wasn’t a terrible year, but it certainly wasn’t a boring year. It was a year filled with enough national, international and even personal events to keep things interesting.
It was a year I won’t soon forget; I was a securely employed middle class longhaired married guy enjoying waterfront living in Florida a year ago when we celebrated the New Year. Since then I’ve been laid off, moved back to Fallon, got a part-time job, got a haircut, experienced marital discord, got a full-time job, traveled to overseas, moved to Reno, drove a U-Haul truck from Florida to Nevada, traveled abroad again, experienced increased marital discord, visited my grandkids, watched Blazing Saddles (again) and bought a really cool new suitcase.
This morning I’m celebrating the New Year from a small apartment in downtown Florence, Italy, having survived the marital discord and several glasses of something the Italians call Grappa. This is a strong Italian liqueur that seems to specifically target memory cells in the brain, which may well one of the reasons I survived the marital discord.
While I traveled the long strange road that was 2015 for me, the rest of the world was having a pretty interesting year as well. Last January some whacko in Ogden, UT tried to hold up a sushi restaurant with a pellet gun only to be thwarted by a chef wielding his razor sharp sushi knife. This is noteworthy for several reasons; first, who knew they had sushi restaurants in Utah? Next, how many guys in the whole world can claim that they have flipped an egg into their hat with a spatula and stopped an armed robbery with a ginsu knife?
In February marijuana officially became legal in Alaska; prior to that marijuana use was pretty much ignored in Alaska because the cops were all for anything that kept guys mellow in a frozen wilderness with darned few women … well, few recognizable women.
Marijuana use also became legal in Washington, D.C. in February but that pretty much had no impact. Those nut-jobs in Congress have been smoking some serious stuff for a long time now. Smoking a little weed might actually be useful for that band of idiots.
In June the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of same sex marriage making it legal in all 50 states. People who wanted to marry other people of the same sex met this decision with positive enthusiasm. Strangely, the decision was met with equal but negative enthusiasm from people who had no desire to marry someone of the same sex. Color me confused.
About that same time in June I was going through severe marital discord (with my wife who is, for the record, not of the same sex) and could not figure out why anyone of would want to be married to anyone of any gender. From where I sit, 2015 was a very strange year for marriage.
In July NASA’s New Horizon spacecraft passed close to Pluto and sent back detailed photos proving once and for all that Pluto is neither a planet nor a cartoon dog. So, again, color me confused … what the heck is Pluto?
In August former president and all around swell guy Jimmy Carter announced that he had cancer that had spread to several areas of his body, including his brain. He continued to work on Habitat for Humanity while undergoing chemo; then, in December President Carter announced that he was cancer free and in total remission proving once and for all that good things happen to good people.
I only had throat cancer, and I laid around and whined throughout my treatment, say what you will about President Carter but that is one tough peanut farmer!
In September a University of Michigan study revealed that more college students smoke marijuana regularly than habitually smoke cigarettes. Well there’s a news flash! You can smoke weed almost anywhere on a college campus but you pretty much have to be in the middle of an empty 40-acre field to be allowed to smoke cigarettes these days. Do you know how hard it is to find empty 40 acre fields anywhere near the University of Michigan?
Oh, and Donald Trump decided to run for President and people took him seriously. Go figure. Like I said, 2015 was a whacky year!
Rick Seley is an award-winning humor columnist. He may be reached at news@lahontanvalleynews.com.