L: NOGGY!!!
N: Jesus, Lola…what?
L: It’s January 11, 2021.
N: Congratulations, you learned to read a calendar. Next, you’re going tell me it’s 6:43 p.m.
L: Shut up, I just meant eleven days is enough time to get some perspective on the most remarkable year in living memory.
N: Hate to break it to you, Silkysocks but I don’t even remember what happened last week.
L: Put the bottle down and let’s do this.
N: Fine, but let the record show I am aggrieved. Are we even allowed to talk about this stuff? People might get mad.
L: For that to happen they’d have to read our blog.
N: Which no one has. Ever.
L: So, let’s warm up with the good. We had two whole months that weren’t a pandemic.
The Good
- Launched End of the Loop and Starseed by getting drunk on something blue called Sex in (on?) the Driveway and presenting the first and possibly last episode of Between Two Flames over Zoom. Poor Guy…
- Attended Wordbridge in Little LA and got lost in a blizzard tryin’ to find Arby’s.
- Celebrated Noggy’s b-day sucking the cream out of a bunch of cannoli.
- Summer road trip to BC. Noggy, Lola, and Particle Man, running through the mountains, angering the gods, and capping it off riding Sturgeons in Revelstoke for Lola’s Birthday.
- Bloody Offensive Literary Salon. A real boner of a good time.
- Neither of us got fired/arrested/strip-searched or investigated for crimes against the living or dead. Or god(s).
- Crashed a wedding. That sooo needed crashing.
- Attended 80’s themed book launch in the most disgusting dive in the city on the coldest day in twenty years. Noggy really took a shine to his red metallic leggings. Cash bar. Bathrooms physically residing in Hell. But hey, great band!
- Noggy & Lola’s alter egos saw their very first co-written story, about Grandpa’s freezer meat, purchased for actual money, and published in an actual book called Chew on This!
- Road trip to Taber, complete with lunch at the Mexican-Ukrainian fusion restaurant and Lola desecrating Noggy’s grandfather’s grave (details redacted, but there were haunted soul holes and spiders. And owls.).
- Wrote an epic poem for Particle Man’s birthday “The Many Deaths of Particle Man.”
- Taylor Swift released two new amazing records!
- Exotic cocktails with the Secret Saturday Night Quarantine Society.
- Working from home.
- First name basis at local liquor stores.
- Picnics.
- Full moon runs.
- Jaja Ding Dong.
The Bad
- Lola dropped her phone down a mountain trying to take a picture of a goat.
- Virtual events. They suck. Good Merciful Gary, do they suck. Even ours. Especially ours.
- Writer podcasts that are 1hr+ of aimless, unedited yammering – but we listened anyways, cause.
- All races, literary events, festivals, and conventions cancelled. Although this is probably why we didn’t get fired or arrested.
- Everyone deciding they need to get some fucking fresh air, dawdling about in enormous groups clogging entire paths.
- Doing the summer scavenger hunt and Lola having to be nice to the path cloggers.
- Doing the summer scavenger hunt and Noggy forbidding Lola from sticking her hiking pole in some idiot cyclist’s spokes.
- Noggy forced to listen repeatedly to two new Taylor Swift records.
- Perturbed skunks on a full moon run.
- Sunday mornings.
- Trying to work from home with your entire family up your ass.
- Lola’s number one Spotify song: Jaja Ding Dong.
The Ugly
- This is eerily mostly the same list as The Good.
- Actually missing open mic poetry about rocks and streams and dead parents.
- Noggy projectile vomiting 65km into our 80km self-directed urban ultra-marathon. That bush is dead now, the city bench melted. They should really replace the memorial plaque.
- Lola setting her hair on fire doing witchcraft.
- Running 420km in December + Eggnog + Herring Rollmops.
- Homeschooling six (6) gremlins.
- 11 p.m. Particle Man ukulele singalongs (the other hotel guests loved it).
- The mall. Any malls. All malls.
- IT WILL NEVER BE ENOUGH!
Bonus List: The Weird
- Running at dusk and finding ourselves, no shit, surrounded by beavers.
- Approached by an elfin teenaged boy after dark and offered a cookie.
- Along the river finding many, many elaborate dwellings constructed from deadfall.
- Elementals chasing us off Mount Okanagan.
- Repeated sex dreams about all our friends.
- The metallic pants, again. Noggy can’t get enough.
- Onesies.
- Lola’s cover girl debut…as a corpse.
- And, as always, the weird wonderful constant in this topsy turvy world: Arby’s
In closing, there’s a lot more we could have added, but Legal has advised us to quit while we’re not in contravention of any number of municipal bylaws or provincial health orders. Suffice it to say, it’s been a trip. From the looks of it, 2021 is already asking 2020 to hold her beer, and you know what? We can’t wait.