Young Thug's Jeffery was my favorite album of 2016, and Harambe was my favorite song. To me it's a perfect embodiment of the year that was... a bipolar drumbeat of aggression that's also a gasping, heartfelt paean to love, all in honor of one of the year's most prominent memes... it's perfect.

I'm having trouble thinking about how I'm going to remember 2016. In many regards it's outright been the best year of my life. New Gal and I got engaged, and even though we're still dragging our feet with setting a date, I can't flippin' wait to be married to this woman. We also jumped the gun a bit and bought an incredible house together (if you're ever in the Keewaydin neighborhood come say hi) and our life in this home is so blessed that it hardly even feels real. I've grown so much as a person this year, in ways that a younger me worried would never happen. I really have New Gal to thank for it, as she has been the best influence on me that I ever could have hoped for. 2016 is the year in which I finally started taking my life seriously, and I'm all the better for it.

But 2016 is also the year in which, for the first time in my life, I began being afraid of the future. Like, stomach-clenching-in-the-middle-of-the-night afraid. Please excuse the foray into the forbidden zone here, but I'm not exaggerating when I say that it feels like we are standing at the edge of an abyss. Everything I value in our society is about to be dismantled by a cackling team of ghouls, and every time I think about it I'm filled with the worst sadness, terror, and then a seething, white-hot rage. I can't believe what they are doing. I can't believe they are getting away with it. And I can't believe how many people are cheering them on. The sheer malevolent audacity of it all is so offensive that it feels like a true turning point in the way I see the world, where after this nothing will be the same and there's no going back. This perspective shift colors every moment of my life now, every interaction I have, every action I take. My resolution for 2017 is to find a constructive outlet for all this piss and vinegar, because keeping it bottled up and embracing the new status quo will quite literally make me go insane.

So yeah, 2016, a real sea-change year. I know I wasn't very active here in the last twelve months, which was part of a calculated strategy to spend less time screwing around on the internet and more time engaging with the world around me. With the exception of my incurable twitter addiction, I was actually pretty successful! But I've definitely missed the WGOM crew, and I hope you're all happy and healthy and just as half-baked as I remember. Here's to a watchable Twins team in 2017.

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