I'm staring at the maw of 2017 with trepidation and tears floating just behind my eyes- a little excess lubrication to make the night move on a little faster. The reckless abandon of previous years has given way to something unfamiliar for this season and this holiday. Some anxiety, some kicking some screaming to hold tenaciously to the buttocks of 2016 which as it turns out wasn't as bad as we've made it out to be. Sure we’ve lost a good number of influentials bards and artists and people who spoke to the spleens and humors but this was a coincidence of timing born of the tumultuous decades prior. We should see a similar shedding in 30 years time. But in my small existence with my small family and even with my larger family life beats steadily on toward the inevitable quietus, the silencing, the Nothing. Or something because just as 2017 will bring a host of unknowns, the undiscovered country will as well. Why ponder the feckless existence, the Sisyphean struggle to wrench from the universe that which she is unprepared to give. All is in the end for naught except as is applies to this immediate existence we must make, shape, push and pull, kick and scream.