Dead Week

I simultaneously love and hate dead week. The seven days between Christmas and New Year’s Day serves the dual purpose of providing time to rest up for the new year while boring you to tears. Add to this the inevitable post Christmas letdown, the disturbing weight gain, and the physical exhaustion from two weeks of non-stop holiday hustle and you find yourself mostly sleepwalking through dead week. What snaps you out of the malaise is the eventual resolution list making. But before you can get there you must first endure a few days of reflection. What exactly happened in 2021?

For me, this is easier than for most people since I do not have to rely on my increasingly faulty memory. I have this blog, which conveniently keeps a tidy record. I can look back and see which posts were the most popular each month. I can then easily recall what we were all terrified by back in January or May or that weird week in August. Here are some observations:

Last January it was all about the events of the 6th—the (pick your preferred modifier), riot, insurrection, violent coup attempt, theatre of the absurd, storming of the capital, or glorious exercise of free speech. I wrote a piece entitled Character is Destiny and a bunch of you read it.

February lived up to its well earned reputation for dreariness. Nothing of consequence transpired, evidenced by the fact that my most popular post concerned my adorable next door neighbor kids showing up at my door to deliver the Girl Scout cookies I had bought back in the Fall. Entitled, The Garland Kids Strike Again, it once again reminded me that people love cute kids about as much as anything.

March featured a scary COVID outbreak at my office which shut us down for a week and sent us all scurrying to get tested. The post I wrote about it called, The Return of Covid, was my most read post of 2021. Nothing sells quite like bad news.

April, May and June all featured sentimental posts about nostalgic visits to places I used to live, trying to decide whether I was happy or sad about the disappearance of men’s suits from the modern wardrobe, and a collection of creepy photographs of weird evangelicals. Apparently there is no accounting for the tastes of the average Tempest reader.

Our time in Maine always leads to a pronounced reduction in readership. Although I post something nearly every day while I am up there, people don’t care to keep up with the Dunnevant’s while we are joyously frolicking away in our paradise. Maybe its because its 15 degrees cooler in Maine, and you guys resent being reminded of this unhappy fact. Or maybe, nobody wants to hear all my blubbering about how perfect it is to be living on a lake in Maine. I get it.

For the rest of 2021, my ego took quite a beating due to the fact that the three most popular posts were by guest bloggers!! First, my daughter blew me out of the water with the story of her slapstick accident at the lake, then my friend, Tom Allen, topped the charts not once but twice, with his two posts—Mistakes and Pumping the Brakes. The nerve of that guy!!

While reflecting on 2021 it occurs to me that it wasn’t an awful lot different than 2020. We were all expecting it to be the year when we all got over the COVID thing and got back to our lives. While much improvement was made, COVID is still very much with us, meaning that 2021 has been basically a big disappointment. But that doesn’t mean everything was bad. I made some money. Business was good. Many fun things happened. And best of all, I have not assumed room temperature.

Now, its time I got started on those resolutions. But that is a blogpost for another day.