Now we’re ready to start a new
compartment of days with a new number. Then when we’ve got ten of those, we’ll
call it a neat little decade. That way, we’ll know kind of music we’re talking about.
Everybody goes home contented as clams and happy as cows. (Larks are happy too, aren't they?)
Arbitrary chronomatic designations? Of course. But
then so is any time period, be it an hour, a day, or a millennium. They’re just
pretty numbers, and that’s precisely why we can’t resist them. They seem to us to carry
inherent meaning in them, if not for the fact that they were contrived by us, with us, for us and on behalf of us. Otherwise, they’re virtually dripping in intrinsicness. (Note: It would appear that my lexicon is more extensive than spell checker’s, so sue me)
At any rate, what was the big deal
about this 2012 glob we just encountered? We want to feel a heightened level
of importance, thus we want to attach some degree of legitimacy to our
experiences, particular the more recent ones, and so we want to encapsulate and
memorialize our latest journal of entries. Our accomplishments, our memories,
our veritable legacy, as it were. At the essence of the matter, we want to come more in touch
with our core identities, thinking we can throw a lasso around a set of unrelated random occurrences and associate ourselves with it in some adroit metaphysical maneuver. Or at least that's my initial impression at face value. And with that, we now look at a list of things that didn’t
happen in the past 12 orbits of our unassuming yet ever-chronicling moon.
2012 — The Year That Wasn't
2012 — The Year That Wasn't
What
didn’t happen: Siegfried & Roy didn’t perform
complex algorithms at a Bon Jovi concert.
Why
it didn’t happen: Siegfried perhaps did, but
definitely not Roy. Somebody has to keep the operation with its feet firmly
planted on the ground, and that would be the aforementioned ever-resolute Roy.
Side note: Siegfried is admittedly partial to Rage Against the Machine.
What
didn’t happen: The world didn’t end*. (*-except in strategic
parts of New Jersey)
Why
it didn’t happen: The Mayans were instead merely trying
to predict when Desperate Housewives would be going into syndication, and everybody gets their knickers in a bundle.
What
didn’t happen: Dick Clark didn’t do the New Year’s Eve
countdown.
Why
it didn’t happen: He’s grown bored of the whole saga and
feigned his death so he could enter the witness protection program and live out
the rest of his days with high school buddies Elvis and George Burns in Bora Bora.
What
didn’t happen: The Cubs didn’t win the World Series.
Why
it didn’t happen: So 1908 wasn’t good enough for
you greedy Cubs fans?
What
didn’t happen: You didn’t win the lottery. OK, so I
got lucky guessing on that one.
Why
it didn’t happen: Because nobody wins the
lottery except for imaginary people and incredibly lucky zombies.
What
didn’t happen: Penn & Teller didn’t invade
Belgium.
Why
it didn’t happen: Penn ran into complications communicating by walkie talkie with Teller, plus they ran out of army tanks.
What
didn’t happen: A news anchor didn’t act nonchalantly
about an incredibly unextraordinary occurrence while donning a King Kong suit,
doing the backstroke on the newsdesk and singing the full lyrics to “Moving in
Stereo.”
Why
it didn’t happen: Like they would ever act
nonchalantly about something.
What
didn’t happen: A mass exodus of squeegee operators
didn’t infiltrate a laundromat at closing time.
Why
it didn’t happen: Philosophically speaking, feasible
if but only for a glut of factors coming together in a perfect storm, so they’d
be just as likely to infiltrate an auto parts store at an undisclosed location
in the Alps. Stay tuned, because this could get quiet intriguing.
What
didn’t happen: A diva once again didn’t make a
noteworthy song. Webster’s: noteworthy, n. — something that’s either worth
writing home about or that will matter to anyone on the planet in ten years
besides their mother.
Why
it didn’t happen: See also: duh.
What
didn’t happen: Soccer moms didn’t traverse the
Serengeti on mopeds.
Why
it didn’t happen: They wouldn’t be caught dead
out of a mini-van, their natural habitat. So the imagination winces to consider
the unlikelihood of the event, let alone its reality.
What
didn’t happen: The fiscal cliff wasn’t averted, as lemmings catapulted to their ultimate demise.
Why
it didn’t happen: Um, the government is in
charge.
What
didn’t happen: People didn’t read blogs while looking
at this sentence without having déjà vu or flashbacks. People didn’t read blogs
while looking at that last sentence.
Why
it didn’t happen: Just would never happen. Too
pie-in-the-sky for my pragmatic propensities. (Did I read that already? I
didn’t think so. For a minute there, I thought I might be hallucinating. Hmm. Is
it safe to come out of the parentheses yet?) Ah, thanks. A little stuffy in
there. Feel like I can breathe now…
What
didn’t happen: We didn’t see the first woman U.S.
president.
Why
it didn’t happen: Women are too smart to mess
with such tomfoolery or chuckwoolery.
What
didn’t happen: Metallica didn’t write a song called
“Smurfs Are Our Friends.”
Why
it didn’t happen: Because Smurfs aren’t their
friends. Like it took a neurosurgeon to analyze that one.
What
didn’t happen: I didn’t get rich and move to Paris.
Why
it didn’t happen: Paris, meh. Furthermore, Eiffel Schmeiffel.
What
didn’t happen: Gerunds were not expanded to include
the word “Peking.”
Why
it didn’t happen: Asiatic linguists were heard
all around to be saying “No Peking.” Actually, they were just in a grumpy mood. OK, so
linguists are always in a grumpy mood, but that’s beside the point.
What
didn’t happen: Hell didn’t freeze over.
Why
it didn’t happen: Global warming.
What
didn’t happen: Reality shows didn’t exist.
Why
it didn’t happen: I continued to fail to
recognize them as part of my perpetual moratorium against inanity.
What
didn’t happen: Monkeys didn’t create the complete
works of Shakespeare.
Why
it didn’t happen: They were busy writing popular
romance novels.
What
didn’t happen: Hypnosis wasn’t added to general
health insurance premiums.
Why
it didn’t happen: All in good time, once there's money in it.
What
didn’t happen: Pigs didn’t fly.
Why
it didn’t happen: They were engineered for
taste.
What
didn’t happen: The Cowboys didn’t make the playoffs.
Why
it didn’t happen: Global warming.
What
didn’t happen: We didn’t change to a Base-17
numbering system.
Why
it didn’t happen: People are too firmly
ensconced in tradition. And it doesn’t match our toes.
What
didn’t happen: There was no “Land Before Time”
animated dinosaur video release.
Why
it didn’t happen: It was an even-numbered year.
2013: Fossil Retaliation.
And there you have it, the things that
we unfortunately didn’t see happen in our illustrious 52-week period of
non-events. That’s what we were missing, in case we start to pat ourselves on
the back with an overinflated false sense of accomplishment. It’s now quite evident
we could’ve done much better.
And then my annual predictions of the
coming year…
None.
Gee, I sure hope I’m right.
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