Random thoughts during the holiday season:

2011 was interesting for all the wrong reasons.

If it’s going to be winter, let it be winter. Drawn out autumn-ish weather stinks. The rink across the street from my house isn’t done yet because of the weather. If we’re going to live in Canada, snow is part of the contract.

Never mind winter, Canadians have a love/hate relationship with weather, period.

I don’t get the emotional attachment to college sports or to the sporting exploits of any youngster that is not YOUR kid. In Canada, this includes the World Junior Hockey Championships, a kind of holiday-tv event nationalism projected onto teenagers that is as sickening as the pedestal Americans put college sports (and even high school sports) on and, well, that’s exploitation on a massive scale: money coming in to schools because of kids who will never even graduate. What I’m saying: the tribalism of sports affiliation is fine as long as you’re supporting highly paid mercenaries upon which to project your own inadequacies and hopes and dreams. Like the way I do with my beloved (and infuriating) Habs.

How do the brave people who toppled Hosni Mubarak feel now?

They risked their lives for change and then the people who sat back and watched on TV went out and voted in religious conservatives. So it is any coincidence the security forces are now beating women?

With a kind of impunity we didn’t even see before?

Those who think the reaction to Steve Jobs’s death was over the top kind of missed the point. People were generally mourning a man who unleashed the creativity in millions. And so they mourned in a creative way. Now, Kim Jung-Il’s death, that’s a different story.

Is it just me or did no one see any actual tears from the mourners? I mean, the soundtrack to the funeral was the buzz of mass crying. It was a rather amazing sound. But there were no tears. That much crying creates snot and other bodily fluids. (and let us pause here to reflect on the passing of this pop culture icon – his portrayal as a puppet in Team America

was smarter than anything else – and a reason that Kim-Jong-Puppet has lived on as an artifact far longer than any other character in that movie).

 
I hope to live in a world one day where people stop confusing “weather” with “climate.”

I’m pretty sure we’re going to find a planet with life on it soon. Sooner than a lot of people think. That’s going to affect some people’s cosmology. I hope in a good way.

Hollywood receipts are down because the amount of sequels are up. It’s simple. And it’s why all the great writers want to do TV now. (another request: can we start ranking movies based on how many people saw them? The money coming into theatres is a massive distortion and amazingly dishonest).

Plastic remains evil.

Social media is heading for some kind of tipping point. There’s too much out there. There are more and more ways to share, more time to spend, except that time itself, at least how we live it, is finite. We have the big boys in social media and now everyone else is just fighting for niche. Niche is good. But it’s niche. In that sense, social media is going to become like every other form of media, if it isn’t already.

In 2012, my novel will find a publisher. I kind of know this.

I’m going to do something with my Twitter stuff. I just wrote a short story based on a tweet. First time. I’m going to do more of that. I have a screenplay starting to get mapped out based more or less on the Twisters. I want to find an awesome illustrator and perhaps do a little book with them. My wife also wants to make coffee mugs with the tweets on them.

I’m going to finish the TV treatment I’ve half-written based on one of the stories in Squishy.

I am a lucky man. I come home every day to a home where I am loved (most of the time). I have a roof over my head and a comfortable life. I earn a decent living in a line of work that takes me places, allows me to meet interesting people and create things that I genuinely enjoy. I earn enough to give to causes I believe in. I create work that has touched people I don’t even know and might never know. I have wonderful friends and family. I have you, reading this, a gift like no other.

Thank you to everyone who comes here, who takes the time to follow me on Twitter, who have read my work in whatever form in whatever forum, who have reached out with a kind word or even criticism – who have engaged in other words – and who continue to allow me to enter their busy lives.

Have a productive, lovely, peaceful and joyous 2012.