File this under content that might be scribbled onto a rock with a burnt stick if I ever find myself alone on a deserted island.

This spring (I’m talking Q1 2023), I noticed more than ever before that the year doesn’t really start on January 1, which is what we have been socially conditioned to call “New Year’s Day.”

In fact, I discovered that the so-called “New Year’s Season” lasts 3.5 months!

No one is talking about this.

When it comes to my list, I restricted myself to New Year’s Days that either I or close friends and family personally celebrate/experience. I’ve also categorized these days as religious, familial, culturally specific, meteorological, and governmental, at least from how I experience them (like, as a person living in the Northern Hemisphere, etc.). If you take a hard look at your own life, you might find more ways that your year starts (Nowruz and Rosh Hashanah are two more examples).

Here are all the ways the year turns over.

• Christmas (familial/religious) – December 25
• New Year’s Day (governmental/cultural) – January 1
• Lunar New Year (cultural) – 1st new moon of the calendar year (in 2023 it was January 22)
• Winter ends (meteorological and lunar) – March 1, or the “vernal (spring) equinox,” when the Sun is exactly above the Equator and day and night are of equal length (in 2023 it was March 20, but it is always March 19-21)
• Lent to Easter (religious) – 1st Sunday after the full moon (the “Paschal Full Moon”) that lands on or just after the spring equinox (in 2023 Ash Wednesday was February 22 and Easter was April 9)
• Filing your taxes for the previous year (financial/governmental) – April 15 (in 2023 this has been moved due to the weekend and a holiday to April 18).

This is huge news and probably comes as a relief to many. If you haven’t yet figured out what you’re doing this year, you have until April 19 until 2023 actually starts. After that, I don’t know what to tell you.

Just kidding. I figured I would just share some words I took note of. Yeah, I’m talking vocabulary!

Now, some throat clearing. A lot of these words I knew already (and you probably do, too), but I made a conscious effort last year (well, since April) to actually look up a word if I couldn’t honestly tell myself what it specifically meant.

I only included the definitions here that I found relevant — for example, I knew “redolent” meant something along the lines of “remind” but I found out that it was more specific to the nose…

The words

Weltanschauung: a particular philosophy or view of life; the worldview of an individual or group.

anodyne: not likely to provoke dissent or offense; inoffensive, often deliberately so.

orthogonal: of or involving right angles; at right angles.

farrago: a confused mixture.

epigram: a pithy saying or remark expressing an idea in a clever and amusing way.

meretricious: 1. apparently attractive but having in reality no value or integrity. 2. (ARCHAIC) relating to or characteristic of a prostitute.

flywheel: 1. a heavy revolving wheel in a machine that is used to increase the machine’s momentum and thereby provide greater stability or a reserve of available power during interruptions in the delivery of power to the machine. 2. (My definition from context clues) something that provides balance.

exegesis: critical explanation or interpretation of a text, especially of scripture.

occlude: hide or obscure from prominence or view.

zugzwang: (CHESS) a situation in which the obligation to make a move in one’s turn is a serious, often decisive, disadvantage.

scabrous: 1. rough and covered with, or as if with, scabs. 2. indecent; salacious.

redolent: (ARCHAIC) fragrant or sweet-smelling.

Bildungsroman: a novel dealing with one person’s formative years or spiritual education.

panegyric: a public speech or published text in praise of someone or something.

Observations from the Fall

The prompt that inspired this was “Adapted Nursery Rhymes.”

At the beginning of February, I wrote the dumbest play I ever attempted, and I’ve written some stupid plays.

Evidence: the first professionally produced short play of mine was a Zoo Story rip-off about bacterium during the Cambrian Explosion of Life. In the past 11 years, this play has been produced several times since, published, and even produced a few times without my permission — it might actually be my biggest contribution to the culture so far…

But we’ll see. Last fall I was accepted into the initial writing pool of the New York PlayGround writing pool. PlayGround, which originated in the Bay Area, produces a monthly night of short plays that were written within a few days of receiving a topic prompt. The pool is full of talented writers and I’m honored to be among them.

The prompt for February 2022 was “What the World Needs Now,” based on the Burt Bacharach song. My submission, “Inflections in Greatness,” didn’t make it.

However, since I thought I reached a new height in stupidity, I knew I needed to unleash it on the public.

I also thought I would post “Dispatches from the Vaccine Wars,” which is also pretty stupid. It was my submission for October 2021 and was likewise rejected.

Why publish these online? Both of these short plays are oddly dated (like literally set in 2023 and 2024), so they have a short shelf life. They both directly reference the pandemic, and they might be my only work that will reflect on the pandemic.

Either way, enjoy – and if reading these negatively impacts your IQ, I am not liable.

Inflections in Greatness

Dispatches from the Vaccine Mandate War

Dear Target, Walmart, Westfield Shopping Centre, Best Buy, Macy’s, et al.,

Americans are hurting. This year has been rough for so many of us. We’ve faced trials and tribulations. Lockdowns and second lockdowns. Pandemics and potdemics. President-elects and president suspects. And there is one simple way you can make 2020 a little brighter for everyone: give us a coupon.

What do we want? We want 15% off the latest electronics. We want $20 off outerwear for the whole family. We want $0.98 off brand-name sports drinks when you buy two.

Yes, you could say things went a little “askew” in 2020, but you have the power to make our lives better. Maybe we could even have 0% APR on a new Hyundai Elantra until 2022!

We don’t ask for much. We don’t really ask for anything. In fact, we’re very good at internalizing and adapting to our world getting worse each day without too much complaint. So, what do you say, stores? Let’s make a deal.

Signed,

The U.S., which also spells “us” (makes you think)

Now it is time to come together and heal the soul of a divided nation…hold on, what’s that??? More VIBES!

Whew, wait, we really need to talk about unity and the bright future of the world’s sexiest democracy….calm down, we can cool it down.

Yup, the mood is pure 2013 party – we just got out of a terrible relationship and we. are. ready. to. VIBE! Pound a Four Loco, inhale that tasty menthol flavor of a Camel Crush. Drop a dime in the jukebox and play me that sweet, sweet Of Monsters and Men.   

But these vibes…there is a sourness to them. Some great tasting headlines, but I’m picking up notes of losing, and a heady bouquet of handwringing in the nose.

Because let’s get real: the 2020 election was a disaster for the Democratic Party down-ballot.

No mandate in the Senate. A very slim majority in the House. Catastrophes in state houses around the country. Yes, we should all care about the two run-off Senate races in Georgia, but even if both are wins, that still means the entire legislative agenda for the next few years will be based around what red state Dem senators like Joe Manchin will sign off on.

So post your cringe and post your cope, but you can’t scold me (or the Democratic Party electorate, for that matter) into believing that I shouldn’t feel at least partly desolate about the political possibilities in the near term (ok so this is my own form of cope).

Already much cringe and cope has been posted, and much of it has tried to shore up the narrative that Democrats need to run toward the magical, sensible, boring realm of “moderation.”

Don’t fall for this!!

Elections are fascinating, the saying goes, because ideology collides with reality in real time. What is the overarching narrative of 2016 to 2018 to 2020?

It is definitely not the “demographics are destiny” and “increase voter turnout” slogans so many of us have been told – turnout was huge this year (cool!), but there was no tsunami Blue Wave beyond the White House, and Trump’s increases with Black and Hispanic voters should be raising alarm bells with DNC leadership that they can’t assume whole demographics will vote Blue, as if that ever was the case.

The latest cope to be shoved down our throats is that voters were scared off by worries about police departments defunded, high taxes, atheist college professors dating our daughters and other signs of encroaching socialism.

In a nutshell, the argument is that Democrats lost because the electorate wants moderation….

Now, a thought experiment (this blog posts counts as immersive theater).

Think about any arena of political policy. Healthcare. Racial justice. Climate change. Guns. Truly anything. Now articulate a policy goal that you think should happen regarding that issue (whisper it to a houseplant).

How did you come to this conclusion? Did you think about the two most extreme positions out there and then calculate what you believe is the best median position between the two poles? No? Why do we assume other people think like that?

When people call for moderation, it is based off a faulty understanding of how everyone actually formulates their own viewpoint (assuming these calls are made on good faith — I’m not getting into the fact that there are plenty of people making this suggestion who make a whole lot of money off it).

Most likely, I’m guessing that policies you believe in are based off of lived experience and some personal value system (if your value system is finding the political center of every issue, then you have overdosed on West Wing and there is no saving you).

To me, there is no overarching electoral narrative defining the past five years (besides: “yikes.”)

When you pop the hood on the 2020 election, you find lots of contradictions. Floridians rejected Biden, but voted for a $15 minimum wage. Montana voted for legalized weed. On the darker side, California went to Biden but approved Prop 22, a major win by Uber and Lyft in their efforts to make us a nation of beautiful, benefit-less independent contractors (time to hustle BABY).

Very interestingly, polls continue to show huge support for government-run healthcare plans.

How do we solve these contradictions so we can create a more equitable and just society?

Hey, I don’t know, I’m just another sensitive artist. I think there are many talented thinkers who agree with me and I’m hopeful a strategy for a reinvigorated Left will begin to cohere in the coming months.

My wider point here is that you shouldn’t believe it when pollsters, the media and political leaders rebuke you into believing that American voters are “moderate” in the sense of “not extreme.”

I think it is closer to the truth that the vast majority of Americans (especially the ones who don’t obsess over politics online) hold a bunch of loosely connected, and often contradictory, political beliefs that are often vastly more extreme (right or left) than what Joe Manchin or Susan Collins believes.

Maybe with targeted outreach and the right kind of messaging, something resembling a quality future can be achieved through the ballot box (ok so this is more cringe with a dash of cope).

Oh yeah, so in the 2.5 years since I’ve updated this blog, I’ve moved to NYC, attended NYU Tisch for a MFA in Dramatic Writing, received my MFA in Dramatic Writing (my Thesis in Screenplay, thank you very much), and I’m frothing up in Final Draft most days. Also, there was a global coronavirus pandemic and Clare and I were supposed to get married this past weekend (11/7/20, i.e. Bidenday AKA “Bruncher’s Revenge”), and we had to move our wedding until next November….but we’re still feeling these vibes!!!

Longish-form blogging on current events? I’m sort of feeling it. Are you? If so, let me know. If not, cry more lol

Love,

Barry