Happy New Year Zero

For auld lang syne, or something like that.

At the end of 2020, on New Year’s Eve, in fact, I put out an essay for this blog called “Buh-Bye, Annus Horribilis.” In it, I recalled how crappy the previous twelve months had been, from a global pandemic, to the murder of George Floyd, to Trump’s attempts to delegitimize the presidential election before the fact:

I’ve rarely been so happy to turn the page on a calendar.

I’m aware that our measurement of time is an artificial construct. I know that, in reality (or is it Reality?) the sun that sets on the evening of December 31, 2020 and rises on the morning of January 1, 2021 is the same star. I am also aware that even the idea of a sun “rising” and “setting” is an anti-Copernican illusion. In other words, the line dividing 2020 from 2021 is a purely imaginary one.

But as long as we are maintaining arbitrary allegiance to Gregorian calendar, this New Year’s Day merits an assessment of the past 366 rotations of the planet.

They sucked.

How little I knew. Not being part of the John Eastman-Rudy Giuliani-Steve Bannon planning cell at the Willard Hotel, I had no idea that an even more mind-blowing event — an attempted coup d’état by an ousted president — loomed just on the far side of the Times Square ball drop and yet another godawful…