In Memoriam of 2016 (Original Eulogy)

In memoriam of 2016.

You were a year. From start to finish, your sum is the increment of time occupying a calculable distance across space. You gave me the feeling of certainty. You convinced me that time is tangible.

Between you and me, you weren’t a bad year.

It helps me convert this collective mass of moments into a solid human aggregate. Put simply: I like to anthropomorphize the years.

Your name was Joey. You had a mole on your left cheek & a pencil-thin mustache. Your hair was parted in the middle where you’re been examining your hair loss every morning. You liked honey mustard on your hotdogs & you’d only masturbate on Sundays, for discipline. You had two pet mole rats & you’d feed them Ritz crackers and ice cream sometimes. You had a nervous habit of itching your belly button and smelling the lint. It smelled like crab cakes made with fake crab. You weren’t a bad man, but you had some ill-intentions that were well-disguised beneath a propensity for tipping 25% gratuity on lunch & dinner. You’d take food off your neighbors plate when he wasn’t looking. You were perpetually 10 minutes late for work and you lied to your dentist about flossing.

You spent your last day waiting quietly in the rain at a bus stop. You were wearing a wool blazer that had gradually been soaked through a leak in the skylight. The bus schedule had been changed without notice. You waited until hypothermia killed you blue.

Now that you’re over, I’m not so sure what I’ll do with this old calendar.

Even worse, now that you’re gone I’m not so sure about time.

Where does time live when there is no calendar to keep tabs on it?

I can’t get another 2016, Joey. I just can’t.
I spent a lot of time in 2016 forgetting about time.

You know what I accomplished? The cells in my body continued to grow & decay in strict relation to my surrounding environment. I observed these processes in unison. It sounded often like music, which I enjoyed halfway despite my immense boredom at classical arrangements.
There’s a lot I want to say to you now that you’re gone, Joey.
I wrote this poem for you:

They say that every rose has it’s thorn,
And every shape has its form.

Just like every clock has its hand
And every native lives on land.

Every candle has a wick
And every prostitute charges, even for a lick.

Every square has four corners, every circle has none
Each day lives through darkness, just like space holds every sun.

As a relative concept, time is pretty cool. It makes sense.

It’s something I can read. It lives in shadows and it’s written mostly on the wall.
2016’s abrupt end left a lot of questions lingering.

In an expanding universe, does time expand?

If so, do our clocks compensate for that expansion or does the watch shop sell expansion packs?

These things, I fear, we’ll never know by thinking.

So long & thanks for all the dust, 2016.

I’ll think of you during my next few bowel movements as the meat of the year filters out my intestines & swirls gradually down the porcelain highway to Shittsville.