Vain hopes for 2018

Last night we headed for bed just before midnight. The New Year’s Eve gunfire was like the opening battle scene in “Saving Private Ryan,” to the point that the dog followed us upstairs to cower by the bed.

My wife asked me what my hopes for 2018 might be. She asks things like that. I hadn’t thought much about it, but the answer came pretty quickly: “To see Donald Trump driven from office in disgrace.”

I don’t know if that says more about me, or more about Trump. Is my life so barren that I should for the first time in my life care that much who occupies the White House? Or is this president so loathsome in every respect that his ouster should be my fondest wish?

Obviously, I’m going with the latter. Trump cast a pall over pretty much every day last year, a thickening miasma of dread and disgust that all the late-night comics in the world couldn’t quite dispel. I woke up in the morning with minor hopes and dreams, and every day there was some new outrage concerning Trump and his terrible circle of sycophants. It’s gotten personal by now. For me, it’s become a quality-of-life issue.

So yeah, I’d like to see him go in in 2018, in the most unseemly fashion possible. Tar and feathers would be good. I know that’s unlikely, even if Democrats were to somehow gain control of either the House or the Senate. But a man can dream. Somehow, this will end.

After that, my list of hopes for the New Year is pretty open. I was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2017, and the radiation treatment to cure it will finally conclude in about four more days. So that would be next on the list: to be done with cancer and perhaps achieve more normal intervals between urination. Is that asking too much?

The other things are more prosaic. To drink less, I guess, as always. To weigh less, even though history would suggest that’s unlikely too. To mean more to the folks I love. To fret less about the things I can’t control, which kind of gets back to the first thing.

But resolutions are self-deluding, aren’t they? You can’t make them just at the beginning of a new year. You have to make them every freaking day. That’s the hard part.

Anyway, Happy New Year. Whatever your resolutions are, I hope they stick.