How's 2025 So Far?

2025 began a little over eleven hours ago here in New York, and for most of that time I’ve been asleep. Before I conked out there was Champagne, and now I’ve got coffee, so if the remaining 8,749 hours continue the trend, I’m in for a pretty good year.

Elsewhere, the trends were less inspiring. Some jerk drove his pickup into a crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing at least 10 people. Ukraine shut down a natural gas pipeline from Russia to Europe, which probably should have been done at, like, I don’t know, the start of the war, but also just makes everything there more complicated; I guess they like complicated? And after going without electricity for about a day, Puerto Rico woke up to the lights back on, signaling a fresh start to a year in which nothing will go wrong and this will never happen again.

Is there anything to look forward to in the coming twelvemonth? Well, we’ve got some cool numbers! Check this guy out:

For those of you who hate clicking through to social media videos in the middle of a text-heavy email, I’ll summarize:

2025 = 45² = (20 + 25)²

September 16, 2025 = 9/16/25 = 3²/4²/5²

Not long after September 16, we’ll get another edition of the World Gurning Championships:

We’ve all got about nine months to practice making faces in the mirror, so I expect to see you all competing at the Egremont Crab Fair, apparently the biggest, most important annual event in the Cumbrian town for the last 758 years. This year, surely, will be its crabbiest.

Semi-relatedly: Whenever I happen upon a mirror or mirror-like surface outside of the usual locales—say, in an elevator versus in my own bathroom—I cannot help making funny faces in it. I squint, I pout, I grimace, I gurn. Always I’m wondering: Can I make a face I haven’t made before? Is there a movement or an angle I’ve failed to consider these last 50 years? Might I have some mental or emotional block keeping me from exploiting my features to the fullest? I don’t know, so I squint, pout, grimace, gurn. I almost don’t even realize I’m doing it until I catch sight of the other elevator passengers not pulling faces in the background. And then I stop, pretending embarrassment. But in my mind, I keep gurning on.

How do you people do it, though? Presented with the random opportunity to examine your own reflection, to test the hilarious limits of your brows and jowls, how do you not make faces alongside me? This may not be the most sophisticated form of amusement we humans have developed, I understand, but it’s there for you, this easy opportunity to revel in absurdity.

You should definitely take advantage of it because most of the year’s forthcoming absurdity will be far less revel-in-able. The guy who’s about to become president and his coterie of dorks, sycophants, and cutting-room-floor super-villains will return the shitshow of 2017–2021 to the so-called front pages. Do you remember how dumb and annoying everything was back then? How you couldn’t escape the noise and the nonsense? How exhausted everyone was trying to simultaneously keep up with and ignore the stupidity of it all? Well, good news, because this time around your employer will be openly supporting the fascists, so there will be no escape whatsoever. The absurdity will be boulder-shaped.

At least we will have some good television to watch while the United States crumbles. I’m especially looking forward to new seasons of Severance, Yellowjackets, and Andor, because art at its highest levels reminds us of the wonders humanity can create, providing much-needed light even in the darkest of times. Also, Yellowjackets has teenage cannibalism!

(A side note to my earlier piece on cannibalism: I feel bad, in a way, for the German cannibal who killed and ate the guy he met on the Internet, because I imagine him realizing he has a freezer full of human meat—and therefore must eat it every single day until it’s gone. If you’ve ever participated in a pig or cow share, you know how difficult this is. Because sometimes you feel like chicken. Or pizza. Are you allowed to eat anything other than that big old animal that died for you? I mean, you’ve been cooking it every which way for days, weeks, months, and although yes, it’s great, healthy and fresh and organic and lovingly raised, it’s also now boring. Plus you’ve already eaten your favorite cuts! The vacuum-sealed packets contain 20 kilograms of tongue, gristle, tendon, and that one muscle you can never remember whether you’re supposed to sear quickly or braise overnight. Maybe just leave it there and do Seamless?)

Meanwhile, I went to a New Year’s Eve party last night, and at no point did anyone ask, “So, what are you guys watching?” I could hardly believe I was surrounded by middle-aged people. Imagining that we as a culture have moved beyond the stock question of the past decade actually gave me a surge of hope: Perhaps some good will come this year!

But not for the guy having a mental-health episode in the street outside my apartment. For ten minutes he’s been shouting and screaming things like “Why? Why is my head? Why is my tailbone? Why? Why is my tailbone always ripped out? Why would they rip that out?” I never know what to do in these situations: I don’t want to call the police, and NYC’s 311 app does not have a way to notify a more effective set of authorities about people in crisis. The street has grown quiet again, so I guess he got over it. He’s all better now, right? Right?

Now there are sirens. I don’t know if they’re coming for him, or dealing with someone or something else. It’s New York, so there are always sirens—cops, EMTs, firefighters—and when you hear them you always hope they’re bound for the next neighborhood over. Most of the time they are, but once in a while the flashing lights flash outside your window, across the street or down the block, for an hour or more as things and people get dealt with. At least it’s not you, you think, not this time.

Look, I don’t know what the year will bring. And I don’t want to know what the year will bring—I don’t want to have hopes to dash, expectations to upend, plans to ruin. I want to focus on the boulder in front of me, and getting it to the top of the hill, and enjoying my brief, joyful reprieve as I watch it roll back down my own personal Mount Tartarus. That’s the kind of certainty I appreciate: the knowledge that only in my own weird head can I find a way through the seemingly unending (but unfortunately finite) pain and drudgery of life on earth.

Except… I do hope. I do look forward to things, and make plans, and try, however I’m able, to improve my life and the lives of my family and friends and especially my paid newsletter subscribers. There is a chance, here on the first day of the new year, to try harder than we did before, and it’s the same chance we’ll have tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. We don’t ever really know what’s coming, and while in all likelihood it’s going to be shit, it might… just… not be? 🪨🪨🪨

It’s Good and I Like It: Cunk on Life

“Have you ever wondered about the biggest mystery of all: what is the meaning of life?” asks Philomena Cunk, host of Cunk on Life. “Well, I haven’t. But others have.” In this new Netflix series, Cunk—an idiot documentary host played with deadpan brilliance by Diane Morgan—speaks with philosophers, scientists, and our planet’s greatest thinkers, asking them inane and insulting questions that invariably make me LOL. Watch it! And then go watch the previous Cunk series, Cunk on Earth.

Read Yesterday’s Attempt