Happy New Year’s Eve folks. If there were ever a year to dump, this one sure feels like it.
I’ve been pretty quiet on Substack lately because frankly it hasn’t felt entirely safe to write all the things I’d like to say, my work as a lefty media whisperer and muse is most effective when I can operate somewhat in the shadows.
If you’d like more info on those shadows, you can find me camping out at independentmediacollective.org.
This behind the scenes business needs to and will change in 2026, probably. But I’ve been enjoyed the last few months not having to meet a publishing schedule, the number of crash outs I’ve avoided since August not trying to say all the things is enormous. But they will be said in due time.
I’ll spare you the onerous annual recap…I saw some good movies, I read some good books, I bopped to some good music. I went places in Europe and Asia and Mexico and America. Some stuff fell apart, some other stuff came together. I was loved and I loved, I was sad and I cried, I was elated and I celebrated.
But it was my friends, my family, and my colleagues who once again carried me through this dumpster fire of a year. I couldn’t possibly begin to list all of you who opened your homes, your offices, your kitchens, your vacations, your assignments, your text messages, and your companies to me while I hurtled through my universe and into many of yours. Thank you all tremendously for always reminding me that I am lucky to know some of the very best people anyone can ever hope to call friends, family, and co-workers.
This gift of being surrounded by excellent friends and family goes back to my childhood, and over the holidays we found an old VHS cassette I digitized a few years ago, quite possibly the first “party recap film” I ever personally shot end to end on New Years Eve, 1999.
The film is crudely shot by a clueless 13 year old and is perhaps a bit hard to follow if you don’t know the characters, I’d take the time to explain it but frankly I’m already running late for the evening and even writing this much feels like more than I intended to do this year.
But there will be more parties from me in 2026. There will be more videos from me in 2026. And yes, there will be more writing from me next year, too. Standby, as always, for more to come on all those fronts.
But a final shout out to the real ones who remember what it felt like ringing in a new millennium, when even the adults in the room weren’t sure we were going to make it through the night. So we gathered in the cold darkness with the people we loved most, and we lost ourselves in music, in jokes, and in each other; truly nothing more to the holidays than that, going back more millennia than we’ve been counting them.
Happy New Year friends, looking forward to making 2026 a special one for everyone. Now go out there and party like it’s 1999.
Until next year!
