Buh-Bye, Bitch

continuing our annual tradition of flipping off the old year on New Year's Eve

One of our friends' progeny, passing along our tradition to his friends
our work here is done

2013 was a quintessential Yin and Yang year for me.

High and Low. Light and Dark. Life and Death.

On the high side, Pittsburgh was THE place to be! Big time movies were shot here, the art world shined with a yarn bomb on the Seventh Street bridge, A most adorable ginormous yellow rubber ducky charmed the pants off all who saw it and the Bucs broke their 20 year-old losers streak and brought our city together with good old-fashioned hard work, dedication and joy for the game.

Personally, there was live music out the wazoo, lots of friendships bonded and travel. A LOT of travel. A veritable crapton.

The year began and ended with bookend trips to New York City. In between were Geneseo, Illinois, St. Louis, the triple Bs: Baltimore, Boston and three fabulous nights in Brooklyn, Chicago, my beloved Jersey shore, Bethany Beach, Erie, The Finger Lakes, Philadelphia, New Paltz, NY and Maplewood, NJ. All thanks to my incredibly tolerant, loving Geo... and our Southwest Mastercard.

Nearly half of the aforementioned destinations were Old 97's/Rhett/Francis related, finally meeting imaginary friends and revisiting old, not-so-old, and new compadres. The other journeys involved dear friends and family. All time (and money) very well spent, in my humble opinion. And honestly, in this bloggity blog, mine is the only opinion that counts. So keep your judgy, contrary remarks for your own damn e-journal, unless your think my butt doesn't look big in these jeans, then by all means...remark away.

But I digress...

That was the light part of 2013. The opposing dark realm was too full of heartache, disenchantment, sorrow, divorce (not ours), fucking cancers and death.

Far too much dying.

Far. Too. Much.

But that's behind us. Today is a new dawn, a clean slate, a fresh start and all that other happy horse shit. On this, the first day of 2014, if there is only one tidbit you take away from this crap-ass blog, let it be this piece of wisdom my late brother-in-law, Art imparted to me...

Never let anyone take your joy away.


It's a new day, MoFos. Make the best of it.