I’m one of the lucky ones. For a lot of people out there, 2011 didn’t turn out as planned. Last January, Muammar Gaddafi figured he’d be spending New Year’s Eve 2012 like he does every year, drinking hot cocoa with mini-marshmallows and tiger blood (Charlie Sheen’s recipte) in his fortified compound as he is lulled to sleep by the dulcet sounds of tortured prisoners and Ryan Seacrest, safe and secure in the undying love of the Libyan people. Turns out instead, the Libyans threw him out of power, killed him and sodomized his orpse with a knife (keepin’ it classy, Tripoli!) so he’ll be spending this New Year’s Eve dead in a ditch with no hot chocolate or mini-marshmallows in sight.  With any luck, though, he’s in hell, so he’ll still get to watch Ryan Seacrest.

It was a tough year for people who aren’t homicidal dictators, too. 2011 sucked for movies, television, music, weather, politics, sports, the global economy, American democracy, Barack Obama, compromise, sanity, rationality, science, the environment, the Americans Formerly Known as the Middle Class (broke is the new black!), Japan, Turkey, Joplin, Springfield, Chile, North Dakota, Iceland, Alabama, Memphis, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Thailand, anywhere in the path of Hurricane Irene and for the ridiculous number of birds and fish who kept showing up dead because they just couldn’t handle living in this world anymore (It Gets Better videos for Birds? Come on Big Bird, hop all over that shit- you could be the feathered Dan Savage. Aren’t you sick of Bert and Ernie hogging all the attention like a couple of puppet queens? Get down with your big yellow self and keep those squeaky little fuckers in the air!). You know it’s a bad year when you need to Google “Natural Disasters 2011” just to put together a halfway complete list at the end of the year and your realize you don’t even remember half of them (oh yeah, right- like you totally remembered the New Zealand earthquake- don’t fucking judge me) and then you have to figure out which ones to leave out so the list doesn’t get too long (SPOILER ALERT: China didn’t cut it. I guess they had mudslides or something- but who the hell knows what goes on over there? It’s their own stupid fault for keeping Facebook out of the country. Hell, I didn’t even know there were trees down in Pasadena until everyone started posting damage photos instead of videos of their cats. And, no, Californians- a tree knocking your fence down isn’t considered a natural disaster and neither is your patio furniture blowing away. Go to the East Coast and get some perspective, you spoiled little weather brats.) If the Mayans are right about 2012, then 2011 made the perfect prequel year for the apocalypse

Author’s Note: Uhm, yeah. So…Hi there. Is this thing on? Yeah, uhm, well, this is awkward. I actually have nothing to say. I’ve just always wanted to be refered to as “Author”. I think you’ll agree it’s a way better title than “Arts Administrator” or “Local Oaf” or “Really, really angry guy on the back of the bus who scared all of those ‘special needs’ teens when he screamed at the driver for missing his stop” (at least, I’m assuming they were  “special needs” because they were taking the bus and if they weren’t “special” they would have been driving. It’s LA, after all, every bus here is the short bus) or “World’s Youngest Cranky Old Man” (it’s supposed to be an actual world record by those anti-semitic Irish mamzers from Guinness won’t officially recognize it. Stupid kids! Get off my metaphorical lawn, whatever that means in this context!) or, god help me, “Blogger.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with being a blogger- somebody’s got to keep shoveling out content into the gaping maw of the insatiable shiksa bitch goddess that is the internet and there’s only so many cat videos humanity can make before the cats all rise up as one on two legs and adorably claw all of our eyes out. Still, “Author” has a much better ring to it than “Blogger.” “Blogger” sounds like some smarmy, unshowered nerd banging out filth on his laptop late at night in his soiled sweatpants while he eats Fruit Loops out of the box and half-watches reruns of Psych on TiVo (Oh wait, it’s the shark one! I love this one!) while “Author” – well, that sounds dignified, respectalble- like someone with a pipe and a drinking problem who uses words like “deconstruct” and “semiotics” and actually fucking gets paid for the stuff he writes. How sweet would that be?

Of course, I really have no business complaining about how internet content isn’t worth anything since my entire music library was downloaded from Napster in 99 & 2000 (I was “working” for the Jewish non-profit sector at the time- they were practically paying me in non-dairy creamer and bandwidth.) I suppose that generating free content is my karmic reward for all the times I said something like “Dude, the Bloodhound Gang is so rich, they’re totally not going to notice if I download their album” (Yeah, I downloaded the Bloodhoung Gang  album. It was the late 90’s. DON’T FUCKING JUDGE ME!)