Turning

Right off the bat, let's start by pointing out what I could not have predicted. Governor Cuomo shut down Red Hook Residential Center, my school for nearly a decade. He claimed that this was to patch a hole in the budget brought by COVID, but the annual amount saved was minute and was more than covered by federal money meant to prevent such drastic measures. He did it so that he could push the agenda of prison and juvenile center closures (along with Community Multi-Services Offices) and pretend it was a decision he struggled to make.

I now work at the highest security facility in the state. I don't hate this nearly as much as I thought I would. I enjoy most of my coworkers, adore a few of my students and classes, and find ample time to write when the units are locked down owing to misbehavior or rampant infection. I am even on track to become a member of the local community college's faculty (technically) to teach the college courses at my facility.

It was long and stressful but had not turned out too badly overall.

Added to the surprises, Dan and Becky received a job offer in Texas. As of my writing this, they have settled into their new home with five of their six children. (Alieyah was not about to give up her theatrical aspirations in Boston so she could swelter over the winter. Also, all of Dan's family had COVID, which did keep her away from Christmas.)

January:

I will get a check for an essay I wrote for a book on mental health, one few people will read outside high school libraries and overdue book reports.

This happened in December, but it did happen. The book is not out yet. I am marking this as mostly a win, albeit a belated one. I assume COVID impacted academic publishing.

I will begin making a steady income from my writing. It will not be an income that often reaches the double--to say nothing of the triple--digits each month, but it will be steady.

For about six months, I did hit four figures writing clickbait. Then an editor fired me because my article about Urbane Grandier -- murdered for being a horny priest on the wrong side of Cardinal Richelieu's plans -- required too much effort from her, and she objected to mention that he had impregnated his best friend's underage daughter. (Grandier had, and it was crucial to his downfall, but it was too distasteful for a site that enjoyed lurid serial murderers.) It was quite possibly a bit highbrow for a publication that otherwise wanted "The Weirdest Things You Don't Know About Dave Mustaine."

In the final days, Donald Trump will commit several more actions in trying to illegally overturn the election results that should result in impeachment, formal censure, or felony charges at the state level. The Republicans will brush treason off as unimportant. The Democrats will toothlessly wag their fingers and tweet about how someone should do something.

Eerily accurate, given that the insurrection was only a week away from my posting this.

Okay, this was far from a long shot. However, it is a bit of a surprise that it went as far as storming the Capitol and traitors calling for the execution of the Vice President -- which the insurrectionists seemed eager to do themselves.

Trump did get impeached again, but it hardly mattered at that point. He said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a voter. It seems he could go much further and only be more adored for it.

The outrage news cycle will obsess on another scandal and forget all about what Trump did.

We are still talking about it. Insurrectionists are facing charges, and a few are being sentenced.

Trump, though? He's still gloating.

He will immediately start running for 2024 and bilk his followers out of as much money as he can. Almost all of this will be laundered back into his pocket. The Trumpers will not care that they are being fleeced.

Again, can we even claim these as predictions at this point? Of course that was what was going to happen in 2021. It had been true since 2015.

Superbowl Sunday will bring the expected whining about how it isn't fair that we don't get to eat chicken wings together because it could kill our family members. [...] Try it next year.

I imagine that this was accurate. 2022 is no better, though at least venues are being more circumspect.

I will possibly manage to go sledding or do other winter activities with Aaron and Amanda, as she has never sledded before.

I never did. I haven't seen them in a long while. They claim COVID concerns. I suspect that we aren't that level of friends any longer.

February:

TV hosts will make jokes about Valentine's Day creating a Second (Third?) Wave because of kissing and sex. It won't be funny.

Swing and a miss.

Amber and I will have a subdued Valentine's Day, possibly another tea party, especially if we can convince someone else to come over and relieve us of some of the treats.

Subdued, yes. Friends, no. Few friends come over to my apartment in general.

Biden will be blamed for things that Trump did--things that he frankly did not have time yet to do. People will act as though they believe this until they do believe it. Biden will do next to nothing to disabuse people of these notions.

Yes, this is ongoing. He is being blamed for a COVID response that preceded him, though his approach has not been enough. At least he takes the virus seriously, which is itself treated as a political ploy.

Some members of the public will protest that Biden should prosecute Trump for all he did. Biden will not, saying that unity is more important. Trump's followers--and he will keep these no matter what he blatantly does--will take this as vindication that this racist, rapacious (alleged) rapist is the most innocent angel who has ever been.

This was going on well before I made my prediction, so it feels unfair to keep marking myself correct for things that would be shocking only if they didn't happen.

A domestic terrorist or two will try to bomb or shoot up a clinic giving free inoculations.

Well, not bomb, but they aren't exactly fond.

Q may be involved, but I hope they are going to try to fade away since almost none of their ludicrous predictions came true and Trump has been thoroughly escorted from the White House.

Okay, I get 80% credit here. Q has not posted since Trump left. QAnon keeps looking for clues that don't exist. They gathered on the street, knowing that JFK Jr. would appear to lead them. This didn't happen, in no small part because Kennedy continues to be dead.

Trump will have his first campaign rally (ordering people to come unmasked and unvaccinated). He will spend three hours riffing on the theme of his having not lost, that he is really the president, and it isn't fair that the Radical Socialist Democrats (I wish) deposed him.

Again, nothing revelatory here.

He did say that the vaccine was promising, and he was glad he got it. When his followers booed him, he walked that back at once. He was far sicker with COVID than he was portrayed. It was only through expensive and exhaustive procedures that he survived.

Some of his followers think that what he was really suggesting they take was his vaccine: a cocktail of ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and some vitamins. This, needless to say, is not a vaccine and not what he took when he had COVID, which might tell them all they need to know about the efficacy of dewormer but didn't.

This may inspire his followers to march through cities with guns and possibly commit terrorism on his behalf, though he will officially wash his hands of it while also saying they are very fine people who love their country.

I'm sure some would have liked to, but the Capitol Insurrection arrests seem to have tamped down their enthusiasm.

Some Republicans who served as his fervent enablers will back away as quickly as their constituents will allow them once it is clear his power is waning.

Huge miss. Trump's toadies, if anything, love him more. It is by his grace that they will be reelected. If he bestowed upon them a slighting nickname, that would be the end of their careers.

Most Republicans persist in doing whatever Trump wants not because they believe in him (few politicians have principled stances or believe in anything -- even if they did, Trump's message is stream of consciousness egotism most of the time). They do it because he holds them by the shorthairs.

They will then try to reframe history and gaslight citizens that they didn't really believe in Trump and were working behind the scenes to stop his agenda.

A few -- but very few -- have tried to make this claim when selling their new tell-all books. Most have doubled down.

There will be an entire bookshelf of books published from insiders in the Trump White House, all of whom will lie through their teeth that they were noble obstructionists and only let people think that they were slavering minions. [...] Each of the books will make millions from liberals who want to have the certainty of their assumptions validated. Orange man bad.

Is this really a prediction? It was happening during Trump's tenure as well. You read a few of these, but they were hardly enlightening.

Governor Cuomo will try to forcibly detain someone with COVID who refuses to quarantine, or he will try to level a million-dollar fine against a nurse or doctor who gave an about-to-spoil vaccine to the hospital janitor.

Not that I can recollect, though I cannot promise that the thought didn't occur to him.

Cuomo will bluster but will ultimately back down while still trying to sound like the dad who just caught us smoking pot behind the shed.

Cuomo resigned because of sex abuse allegations and for having obscured the deaths of senior citizens (resulting in more deaths) to make New York look better, and Trump look worse.

I would love to say that this will negatively impact Cuomo's evident presidential aspirations, but it absolutely won't. He got an Emmy for telling people every day to wash their hands and not cough on strangers.

They took his Emmy away. I would hope that his presidential aspirations have been inhibited, but it is not as though he is the most scandal-riddled politician to keep throwing his hat into the ring.

March:

Ted Cruz will kowtow to Trump on some plainly false point and be seen as even more of a kicked lapdog.

Come now. That is not going to change.

As more people are inoculated, and fewer wear masks because of it, there will be small explosions of COVID among pockets of anti-masker anti-vaxxers who only pretended they got the shot. Pundits will cite this as evidence that the vaccine doesn't work, masks don't work, the government is trying to microchip you, vaccines should be mandatory for public life, a card or barcode must always be kept on one's person, and we need to close the country down immediately (depending on the pundits' orientations on the axes).

My only objection to this prediction is the word "small." The explosions of COVID cases reach startling proportions at times. On the other hand, there are sometimes what should have been super spreader events where only a few new cases are reported, which might be because more people are getting vaccinated. Not enough, not more. Some people are prosecuted for selling fake vaccine cards, though, and I have an app that shows that I have been vaccinated.

Trump will have blamed the last three years of COVID entirely on Joe Biden.

Yes, he basically does. Most don't take this seriously.

I may be able to coax one or two of my inoculated, antibody-rich friends over to my apartment for a movie and dinner, still with what social distance is available to us--but I am not optimistic.

I had Black Turkey Day with Sarah M., Kristina, and Daniel. In November, mind you. Not March.

There will be an irrationally big snowstorm in the Northeast out of nowhere, possibly leading to a state of emergency. After this, winter will finally relax its grip.

Not that I recall. We get by without this, even though it happened in several years prior.

April:

Easter will be treated as a bigger deal than it usually is. There will be headlines playing upon the Resurrection theme. None of them will be that creative.

Nope. Easter was as big a deal as it ever is. I did see my family, and, aside from masking, everything was normal enough.

A few newer movies will tentatively go to theaters instead of streaming. Some people will treat these tickets as though they were the next of "Hamilton." None of the movies will be that great, especially not the potential for death (however dwindling). There will be articles about how streaming is probably better for most films, now that Hollywood has given us a taste for it, especially given the quality of most TVs on the market.

Accurate aside from the tickets being like "Hamilton." Enough people decide that they like streaming at home better, and they don't particularly trust movie theaters to keep them safe.

I did see Spider-Man: No Way Home, the only movie I've seen in a theater all year. It was all I could have asked for in the film. Days later, as though chastising me, I got a COVID exposure alert on my phone, but it amounted to nothing.

My mood will be buoyed by the consistently better and sunnier weather, as well as the opportunity to see friends and loved ones again (outside, while socially distancing). I will have semi-regular campfire dates with Aaron, Amanda, Kristina, and Amber, and will treat this as close to the best thing that has ever happened to me.

Your mood is buoyed. Other people are not much involved.

You have zero campfires with anyone. You see Kristina on occasion, but no one else.

May:

There will be a lunar eclipse that will last about fifteen minutes. Most people won't notice.

There was?

The Large Hadron Collider will be turned back on after renovations. Late show hosts and memes will talk about it bringing us back to a timeline where Trump was never president/COVID never happened.

It was not turned back on yet. Maybe in February.

June:

At least We Shadows will be republished, though ideally all the backlog. As Amber is, of this writing, still trying to get through the first revised book of my series, I would not place money on this outcome.

Listen, the formatting of We Shadows is beautiful. She did a line-by-line edit. The whole thing is gorgeous. I can't wait for you to see it.

She hasn't made a cover yet, though this does seem to be the final step.

It is not republished, so I was right on that point.

There will be a solar eclipse, which will be over North America, so I will care about it. It will not be a sign of the End Times, though reactionaries will claim otherwise.

I did not especially care, and no one said this.

By this point, there should be immunity enough that, coupled with fairer weather, things begin to feel almost normal in some quarters. Some people will still wear masks--I think I will keep one close for months more--but there is the suggestion that we can have social events.

There is occasional follow-through, but things are not normal. People still wear masks, as they are mandated in most places. Of course, the summer eased new cases a little owing to vaxxing and masking, but COVID is never far from our thoughts.

However much of a bacchanal you are imagining, it is going to be a bit more. If you don't see this, it is because you were not invited to the orgy.

I am invited to few orgies indeed, but I do not think they occur much. No one is tearing their clothes off along with their masks. This was not the Summer of Love. It was a summer that was more open than 2020, but it was no bacchanal.

For my part, I will begin feeling as though it might be okay to hug my friends once more.

I recall having hugged four friends in 2021, most of those only once.

July:

Some band, venue, or company will try for a large, outdoor concert. There will be hand-wringing, discussions if this is safe, but it will go forward anyway because enough people feel invincible and pent-up.

Well, obviously. I don't think it goes too badly per COVID.

Now, when the act on stage suggests actions that get the concert-goers stomped to death...

Anti-vaxxers will still insist that the vaccine is a Bill Gates trick in insert Luciferin full of 5G trackers into everyone's blood to alter their DNA.

That is not going to change for years, if ever.

Comic-Con will try to go on, but they will work much harder to keep everything sanitary. To protect everyone, fewer tickets will be available, meaning that people will scalp them for startling amounts. Given that Con Crud is a known quantity even outside a pandemic, this will result in a noticeable, if isolated, uptick of COVID cases for the next two weeks.

I don't know about Comic-Con. However, AnimeNEXT was a super spreader event. Emily Ree, the webcomic maven, got infected.

Comic-Con will also involve more live streaming, as celebrities are not universally keen on pressing their luck. This may become closer to the standard going forward.

What celebrity would be keen to deal with more unwashed geeks in person than they have to?

The rescheduled Summer Olympics will widely be considered not totally valid.

No, people don't make this accusation, remarkably. At least, they don't make it about COVID, but rather political atrocities and transphobia.

Politicians will give supposedly stirring speeches on how this is indeed our Independence Day. The opposing party will point out that this is tone-deaf and ignores the day's true meaning: explosions and barbecue.

Unless we are counting rousing Twitter threads that were ratioed in mockery, no.

[M]ore of the Night's Dream series will be out, as Amber has more time to work on covers and formatting. [I]t is also possible that she will want nothing to do with book design.

I would not say nothing, but her summer of picking up the slack at work was draining for her.

September:

To Save Her World will be published.

Nope.

The Pine Bush UFO Fair will go on. People will joke about space viruses. It won't be funny.

It did! They did! It wasn't!

The fall semester will begin, and my facility will tell us that we don't need to wear masks anymore. The guards won't. The kids won't unless they think that they are rebellious by doing so--at which point, the bureaucrats in Albany will ban them, possibly as gang-related paraphernalia.

Entirely the opposite. Masks are mandated and then double mandated from on high. The YDAs aren't great about wearing them correctly, but they all have them. Some of the kids wear masks occasionally, though never as often as they ought to.

I have at least six masks at this point. I have preferences about which is appropriate to what event. I may have a designated formal mask gathering dust because few are having weddings.

Traditional schools will open and act as though everything is supposed to be normal. However, there will be many students who are scholastically and socially two years behind where they should be and three to four years behind their privileged peers who had supportive parents at home, good meals, tutoring, and all the needed technology.

They tried, though they soon decided that too many kids stayed home and online. Cases spiked anyway.

We do not have the evidence for the long-term effect of this interrupted schooling, but these theories are likely.

October:

No Such Convention will tentatively announce that they might possibly consider theoretically planning a con in February. Maybe. If that's okay with everyone?

They didn't. I am 90% sure that we have seen the last of No Such Convention.

Halloween is going to be ridiculous. Other holidays will have been heightened, but Halloween will be an all-weekend, if not all-week affair to make up for the Saturday, full moon Halloween we missed in 2020.

Halloween does happen, but it is subdued. Vaccinations are not robust, but the new variant is.

Still, New Paltz had its annual parade. Amber and I attended. It was something, but it was not enough.

There will be COVID costumes. Not even one will be clever or funny, but you will see more of them than you will the Joker.

This is still considered too tacky en masse. I remember having seen none, and I would have noticed.

Hunter Biden will do something embarrassing. The Republicans will treat this as exponentially worse than everything Trump did in his entire life combined.

He may have. If he did, it is not widely reported. I haven't heard much about him in months.

In speaking about this, Joe Biden will make some verbal gaffe. The Republicans will want him impeached for this and threaten to invoke the 25th Amendment because of the president's apparent senility.

He makes frequent gaffes, though not any recent ones about his son.

The Republicans wanted him impeached before he was elected. They would take any excuse. (For the sake of fairness, didn't the Democrats want Trump impeached before he was elected? The only difference is that Trump never stopped taunting Democrats with reasons he might be impeached and did get impeached twice--a presidential first.)

November:

Public schools will not be so obsessively noting how strange the COVID year was.

Oh, absolutely not. COVID is in schools more than most students.

Superintendents will begin acting as though teachers are slacking because they do not reach the benchmarks established before COVID.

Not so far. Try again next year.

Standardized tests will be pushed hard in classes because the only education an administrator knows is that which can be measured by a Regents exam.

The Regents exams have been canceled yet again.

I will have my annual Black Turkey Day and will not feel horrible guilt about offering my home and food to my friends.

Correct! One person declined because she was exposed to a COVID-positive child. I suspect that she might have skipped it anyway.

I will go to the typical Thanksgiving buffet with my family, but it will feel peculiar.

It felt a little peculiar because of COVID, though masks are second nature now. It felt far more peculiar because that was the last Thanksgiving I would have with Dan and his family for the foreseeable future.

There will still be calls for Trump to be prosecuted for his many crimes. By this point, it will have become a meme and lost all meaning.

Not a stretch of a prediction.

The seasonal flu will begin. Right-wing pundits will put on whiny voices and ask why the libs don't want to close the country down again and how the flu is different from a pandemic.

Again, they had this whine locked and loaded when the first case hit American shores.

People also call a concurrent infection of the flu and COVID "flurona," which some claim is a new, far more fatal variant.

December:

You thought Halloween was intense? Let me tell you about Christmas. It will be one of the greatest shopping seasons in capitalist history. Everyone you know will be having parties. We will go so far beyond holly-jolliness that it will be genuinely embarrassing.

Oh, this optimism makes me sad. No, things are locking down again. I saw my parents, but Dan and his family came down with COVID just before going to Texas. I heard of no Christmas parties and would likely have not attended if I were invited.

I might consider having a birthday party.

I didn't!

Masks will still be worn by people when they have a cold, as they are in other countries. The flu season will be milder because of this. Masks may just become something that we accept as not unusual when one can spread illness.

Masks are still worn because they are mandated, and we are worried with good reason. I haven't heard of anyone around me infected with the flu. The anti-vaxxers would suggest that all flu cases are labeled COVID, but that isn't how testing works.

This is all a rosy picture. It assumes that none of my loved ones will be infected (or more seriously infected) before they can get the vaccine.

It was rosy indeed.

Several people I know were infected with COVID. No one was harmed for too long, though at least one lost his sense of smell and taste for days.

Even with the mentions of domestic terrorisms, it assumes that there will be the establishment of something like order. A bit over a year, and then America, if not the world, can start to dust itself off.

Very much no. If America dusted itself off, it quickly sullied itself anew.

I cannot predict when, for instance, I will be willing or permitted to go to the grocery store without a mask. Will businesses unfasten the Plexiglas from in front of their cashiers? When, if ever, will constant sanitation start to grow lax?

Not yet. They did scrape the directional arrows off the grocery store floors, but those may return before long.

There will never again be the normal we knew before. It feels like 9/11 in that way. The world before 9/11 was irrevocably different than the world after. [...] The world may begin a recovery from COVID in 2021, but we will always be a little stranger for it.

Sadly accurate.

I will not go month by month for this year's predictions or be so hopeful. If nothing else, one has to learn from experience. If the predictions are obvious, it is nothing that I can avoid. If I am taken by surprise, who among us isn't?

COVID will persist in casting a shadow over my every day. I talk above about 9/11 -- a commonplace comparison that has been worn threadbare -- but at least that day was felt keenly and then eased by degrees. COVID has not done us this courtesy, seeming to wane a little before mutating such that we have to fret again that the hospitals do not have beds enough to accommodate all the acutely infected. More variations will be spawned from countries we deprive of vaccines out of some Western-centric belief that we do not share the same biology and air. There will be more boosters that short-sighted, comfortable people will refuse on conspiratorial grounds. Their infections or deaths will be mocked on social media by those who call themselves compassionate. Television talking heads who were vaccinated the moment they could be, who get their staff tested daily, will tell the gullible that COVID is fake and the vaccine is poison. 2022 won't be the cure for the virus. Talk to me in 2023, but I am not optimistic.

I can hope that spring and summer will bring a relaxing of restrictions again, which will cause an uptick in cases come fall and winter. Perhaps, though they increase in virulence, the coming variants will be milder. Still, I would rather not get any version of COVID, so let me go another year without infection, please.

Politics will not cease being a circus, a quagmire, a clusterfuck. Pick your analogy. Trump will continue twisting Republicans to his whims. The best thing that actual Republicans can hope for is his quiet death in a fashion that is inarguably innocent of agenda and suspicion. Not COVID again. Nothing that could be fodder for too many more conspiracies. Let him pass peacefully and Republicans to realign with their values, many of which I oppose, but at least a party that can return to the pretense that they support country over demagogue. (Should he die, may no one pretend at Trump's sainthood, and may the Democrats keep his name out of their mouths going forward to put this chapter of history to rest. This is asking too much, I know. I do not think that the current Democratic Party, arguable center-right as is it, tends to do a better job of representing America over their crop of donors.)

Will there be more acts of terrorism before the midterm elections? Probably. I hope that the climate is such that they will be stopped before attempting another violent overthrow of democracy. Will politicians on both sides of the aisle be corrupt and obnoxious? Of course. Will this spur us to vote them out or consider that we need more parties? Of course not.

Let us take things more personally: I don't know. Amber and I will persist in our love -- it is one of our best habits. I will see friends, though not as often as I would like. I may continue trying to kindle new friendships, but it may not be any more successful than 2021 was; there simply are not opportunities enough to brush against new people. Online encounters do not produce the authenticity on which a desire to see one another (again or at all) is built. Of course, I would like to add people to my life, feeling energized by friendship, but my track record has grown less stellar as I've aged.

Will there be concerts? Plays? I intend to plan a vacation for my family (mother, father, Bryan, Amber, and me -- not Dan and his brood) in Maine for August, which I am more confident than not will occur.

In a sense, it is exciting to know how little I know about the coming year. However, I am also keenly aware of how strange twelve hazy months can be.

last watched: Birds of Prey (2002)
reading: Danse Macabre - Stephen King