View from the North 40: If it were a commentary on the new year …

I know we’re still in Week 1 of 2023, but I am not impressed — and this is from someone who doesn’t put much stock in the whole new year is a new beginning, to be a new person, to have new goals. It’s a clean slate. Goodbye old year we got a newly swaddled baby year we can raise to be anything we like.

A new year is just another day, the significance of which is trying to remember a new number for any references to the date. I appreciate the day off in its honor, but I don’t throw it a party. I don’t make lists for it. I don’t have expectations. Move along, people, there’s nothing here to see.

And yet.

And yet, when the calendar turns to a new year and a tragedy occurs on the second day then a stressful event with possibly dire implications occurs the third day, heralding sleepless hours into the future with no known end date, it’s hard not to think of the year as its own entity. To make entreaties for better outcomes going forward. To say in one’s own head, “2023, we’ve started off on the wrong foot. Please don’t be a crap year.”

I do not normally think of a year as its own entity, yet here I am thinking things like:

If 2023 were a K-12 teacher, it would not be seventh grade English teacher Mr. Farag who challenged us academically and socially in positive ways to be better people and to understand a strong Egyptian accent even though we were just a pack of small-town, mountain-bred hicks.

No, 2023 would be that senior-year drafting class substitute teacher whose name was never worth remembering who stopped at my desk — while I and all my classmates were quietly working — to provide a surprise announcement that I “would be pretty” if I “didn’t have that big nose.”

If 2023 were a movie, it’s title would be “Apple” and it would not come with a preview or a poster, so I’d sit down with my big tub of popcorn to watch, all the while wondering, is it a movie about a fruit farmer? Is it about the late Apple technology giant Steve Jobs? Is it the tale of Eve and the forbidden fruit? Is it about a patient, old carriage horse named Apple who teaches a little girl valuable life lessons?

Then right after the opening credits scroll by a sudden, violent and grisly murder occurs, and the perpetrator leaves an eye impaled to an apple next to the body, leaving me with popcorn spilled everywhere, wondering if this is going to, mercifully, be a dark mystery movie or if I just committed to watching a horror movie that that I can’t leave or recover from.

If 2023 were a canine, it would be a rambunctious 12-week-old puppy, with all its piranha puppy teeth and a fiercely contagious case of ringworm.

If 2023 were the weather, it would be climate change weather bringing record flooding, record drought, record cold, record heat, record tornadoes and anything else weather related that could surpass a record all at once, and I wouldn’t know how much of it was caused by natural cycles or by my own poor decisions or lack of planning. Nor would I know if I could affect change, or how bad things were going to get.

If 2023 were a living organism, it would be a fungus or a mold, but not the fungus that gives us penicillin or the bacteria that makes that tart Greek yogurt I like. It would be some raging imbalance of either organism — or both — and it would require a dreaded doctor’s visits and a more-dreaded prescription. And when I ask the doc how long it’s going to take to clear this up, all I’d get is a shrug.

But maybe, if I’m lucky, the doc would say, “Stick to the course of treatment, and things will get better,” which, of course, would be a nice metaphor for 2023.

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Judging by Week 1, I have to say that I’m really glad 2023 isn’t a leap year. Oh, and side note, even though I was rendered speechless by the substitute teacher’s comment, my classmates, heroes every one, spent the rest of the week randomly commenting to him throughout each class period that he would be good-looking if he didn’t have that dandruff or he would be imposing if he wasn’t so short or he would be a catch if he didn’t look so dumpy and so on at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .