Old Years’ Resolutions

Stop wasting so much hunting-and-gathering time painting bison on the walls of my cave

Perfect my two-dimensional Egyptian walk

Tone down my slaughter-every-male-child-under-two policy to a five-minute time out

Eat more zinc lozenges before the Black Plague arrives in my village

Reorganize my moveable type

Consolidate and streamline my blaspheming to merely insisting that the earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around

Accuse, try, convict, and burn more witches

Revive the flagging pastry industry by encouraging my poverty-stricken subjects to eat cake

Forget about slowly poisoning Mozart and just stab him in the neck with a quill pen before his career overshadows mine

Read Moby Dick, then kill Moby Dick

Invent moving pictures, then invent pornographic moving pictures

Stop swallowing live goldfish to impress flappers, and just brush up on my Charleston

Stop asking the guys selling apples on the street for a nickel for a discount

Release Amelia Earhart from her decades-long imprisonment in the well I dug in the basement of my moth-filled house

Combine my interests in feminism and solving the energy crisis by developing a burning-bra-powered automobile

Give Mr. Dangerfield the respect he has so long deserved

Be a Pepper, like the commercial tells me

Upgrade my mimeograph to a dot-matrix printer

Publish a book of my secret Pac-Man patterns and retire a millionaire

Finish the job that Kristin Shepard failed at so miserably and shoot J.R. myself

Restrict my use of the word “gnarly” to objects that are, in fact, knotted and/or twisted

Restrict my use of the word “awesome” to objects that fall into the category of the Grand Canyon

Invest my entire life’s savings in macarena futures

Start a “weblog”; come up with a shorter, cooler name for “weblog,” like “eblo.”