I think too much. I could lose 30 pounds, easy. I still smoke, though I think about quitting. So there’s that.

I have this novel I’m trying to finish. I’d like to get more exercise. I’d like to make time (and space — we have a toddler in bed with us) for more romance with The Lady.

And honestly, I had a molar pulled two years ago and a tiny gap has appeared in my lower grill. It keeps me up at night.

I want to spend more time with my kids — good time, not just hanging out in the living room while simultaneously maintaining our random and various online avatars. Seriously, penguins?

I also need to make sure they get the guidance and discipline they need while having as good a time at life as possible. I choose to believe such a thing is possible, though I might be fooling myself. It happens.

I should also do my damndest to make more money. I need a better job. We’s poor, times is hard. Welcome to America.

Then, of course, right on schedule: Kaboom!

It’s the New Year, 2016, and this is the perfect opportunity to get these things done, right? I dust off the old dry erase markers, elbow-wipe last year’s Christmas list away, and start enumerating all the fantastic goals and character improvements I plan to make overnight when the calendar flips a digit.

As soon as the dry ink dries (?), of course, I fall fast from an airplane of hope flying high against blue sky to plummet like a Looney Tunes anvil toward the desert where wiley coyotes never get to eat.

It’s unbearable. The weight of all this responsibility. Sure, I need to change — who doesn’t? I could be better in about as many ways as there are skis in a Polish phone book.

Yet it feels like ass to wake up on the first morning of a brand new year and immediately consult the list of my depravities and failings, my sickly habits and poor attitudes, before navigating my sorry ass through a minefield of temptation and growing desperation.

And this is just Day 1.

Obviously, I’ve become very good at failing. I set these arbitrary goals for myself, all perfectly fine ambitions for improving James, but I’ve learned this past year that I actually expect myself to get them accomplished.

Weird, huh? And when I don’t, given the inertia of human existence and the thick chains of habit I clink around in, those expectations are thwarted and I begin another year yet again resenting myself.

Resenting yourself is useless, a feedback loop of self-driven neurosis where you’re at the butt end both ways: The giver of bad feeling and the taker of said shit. The worse part is that you control the whole damn process, so with a blink and a fart you could wipe all this negative baggage away.

I say you, but I really mean me. I always mean me. Most people do. Just saying.

So, this year, I say no more! I’ll be the Che Guevara of anxious assholes everywhere. Let me climb up on top this rickety faux fruit crate and proclaim to the wide world that I’m getting too old for this shit.

Life is too short to hate myself, and too long to smoke my own pole. Instead of an annual list of resolutions, containing several clauses and subsections, a dozen heretofores and harrumphs from every which way, I’m going to sit right back on my deck chair, stroke the scrawny mustache I’m still trying to grow, and concoct an image and idea of the man I’d like to be.

And every day, this year and next year and four years later not including the leap year, I’ll check myself against this idealized James. If adjustments are necessary, I’ll make them. If I’m on course, yay for me.

It’s a shortcut to happiness. sans the annual failures of broken promises and resulting self-flagellation.

It won’t do a damn thing to help thicken the scruff on my upper lip, but such crosses have always been mine to bear. Yea, verily.

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James Faulk is a writer living in Eureka. He can be reached at faulk.james@yahoo.com.