Darrell Vickers: 2014 – A Sentimental Look Back
Well, it’s 2015 (It’s so hard to believe that 1915 was a whole hundred years ago, isn’t it?) and that epic New Year’s hangover, that made you feel as though a diseased ice weasel was gnawing upon your temporal lobe, has at last begun to wane. The bulging puddles of vomit you pass on the way to work each day have dried into lumpy blobs of bilious concrete and the dead and the dying are finally being carted away by city workers.
The myriad groundbreaking electronic devices you received for Christmas are already criminally out of date and an embarrassment to own. Ninety-Nine 
percent of the football players we cheered on New Year’s Day are now applying for jobs selling corn dogs door-to-door. You have less time, more cavities, fewer living friends, greater outstanding debt, a shorter attention span, longer ear-hairs, shrinking prospects, a ballooning prostate, thinner hair, thicker glasses, tighter budgets, looser morals, smaller paychecks, bigger wrinkles, younger competition and older fucking you.
Time used to be on your side but it’s been replaced by a highly suspect mole the size of a snowshoe. You look upon a new calendar year like a Dodo bird spotting a hungry Portuguese sailor. Your children are married, your friends are divorced and you swirl around endlessly in a flushing toilet of sour booze and abandoned dreams while waiting for that last noisy gurgle which will claim you.
That’s not tinnitus ringing in your ears, my friend; it’s the sound of the Grim Reaper grinding the blade of his scythe. And when he does come calling, it will be the first visitor you’ve had in months.
And then there are people even older than thirty-seven. God all fucking mighty!
Peek-a-boo!
2014 was the year of the scandalous exposé. There were heartwarming family snapshots and videos of Downton Abby’s Lady Sybil with her husband’s cock 
stuck in her eye socket. Jennifer Lawrence posed for a pic modeling a generous deposit of coagulating semen from an unknown donor across the bridge of her nose. And we all found out how fond Abigail Spencer is of polishing her fruit basket. Last year was replete with embarrassing emails, public apologies, resignations and Kim Kardashian’s Easter Island-sized ass (and she’s probably had more heads stuck in hers). We were also treated to a video of a sports figure knockingout his fiancée in an elevator and Stephen Collins (beloved 7th Heaven preacher) admitting to his wife that he was a child molester. And we found out just how far Bill Cosby was willing to go to 
taste his favorite flavor of pudding. Real celebrities were having such a bad year that you hardly even noticed that Justin Bieber got carted off to the hoosegow 4 times! Who knows how much semen from an unknown donor he received in there.
Econ 101:
2014 saw the rise of the corporation and the crushing of the individual. While this irreversible trend has taken a claw-hammer to the lifestyle of the average working stiff, it has also doled out a major biffing to the entertainment industry. From music to movies to television – big money and ugly men relentlessly cranked upon the handle of the sallow sausage grinder and an increasingly undiscerning public happily lapped up the stale septic waste billowing out of the soulless fetid midden once known as showbiz. Everything “entertaining” that took the country by storm had a decided-by-committee, ironed-flat feeling to it. Originality and spontaneity were about as rare as a smokin’ hot babe at a vinyl record show.
Miley Cyrus’ twerking wasn’t a disgrace, the song she was singing was. Back in the day, the Neil Youngs and Paul Simons of this world became well-sucked-upon millionaires, now they wash our car windows with their underwear at stoplights. Where are the new, great songwriters coming from, you ask? From fucking soup kitchens, it’s the only place they can afford to eat.
The 99 Percent Store:
Speaking of barely perceptible remuneration for one’s daily toil and drudgery, income inequality was big in the news, these past twelve months. The galactic wage disparity has always been around and steadily increasing since Reagan cold cocked the union movement but people didn’t really give it much thought 
it until it got so big, you just couldn’t see around the fucker. It’s like your Uncle George and Christmastime. Every year he gets plumper and plumper but nobody takes any notice until that one year he shows up and people go, “Holy fuck! Is Uncle George ever fat!” In the movie “Wall Street” Gordon Gekko went to prison. My, how utterly naïve and Pollyanna-like that seems today. Jail is for criminals of modest means driving domestic vehicles, not psychotically greedy securities swindlers in LaFerraris. Perish the thought that any of these Issey Miyake wearing, Gout de Diamants sipping charlatans 
should be brought to task for their money-grubbing malfeasances. In fact, you could fit all the high-flying, law-breaking banking moguls from the 2008 crash who went to the slammer comfortably up your ass and still have enough room leftover for several spirited rounds of butt-chugging.
So, as the top one percent feast unabated and make Jabba the Hutt look like Karen Carpenter, the rest of us are left to pick upon the microscopic leftover scraps of the American dream. Alas, in our little kingdom, the Emperor has plenty of clothes and we’re the ones that are naked.
Pray Tell:
It was the year of the “Nice Pope” and the evermore-evil Southern Baptist. While Frank (his buddy Cardinals like to call him that) railed against social injustice and intolerance and stressed the value of actual good deeds over mere stated piety, the rabid fire-breathing snake-hugging, tongue-speaking angels of God’s savage vengeance embraced torture, rapists’ fatherhood rights and the mowing down of hungry brown people. And don’t get them started on 
women, Muslims, visible minorities and the poor. The Pope is against the death penalty whereas the fancy-suit-wearin’, hair-lacquered holy men of Old Dixie, who mourn Jim Crow and guzzle Jim Beam, can’t jab theoretically toxic cocktails into the arms of dusky delinquents fast enough. It seems like every kindly pronouncement out of the new Pontiff’s mouth sends these alabaster-skinned, baby-dunking spite machines into volcanic fits of brimstonian rage. I think it’s way past time. God needs to send a burly archangel down here to bang a few heads together.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect Explodes
2014 was the year Ebola arrived on our panicked shores (a pleasant little disease that will cause you throw up your own ass-meat). Clamant cries to medically incarcerate all suspected carriers of the contagion rang throughout the land. Everyone on the Right knew way, way more about this fearsome plague than those foolish doctors. Step aside Mr. Saw Bones and let the real experts handle this. Serious inquiries were made on how much it would cost 
to place all of Africa in a Ziploc bag. Luckily, in the end the U.S. did not turn into World War Z and the congenital morons who bloviated ad nauseum on a subject they obviously knew shit-all about were so chastened that the next time we have a similar crisis, they’ll just shut the fuck up…except for that last part.
The same distressing pattern followed for Global Warming – the less you knew, the more confident you were that your knowledge of infinitely complex 
weather patterns and climactic trends far outstripped those of people who’d spent their lives studying it. “I’m a politician and not a scientist but everything scientists say is political and everything I say is scientific.” Meanwhile, the heats got hotter, the colds got colder, the draughts became dryer and the floods got deeper. Southerners were left sporting sweat-patches the size of Ivory Coast dictatorships. Antarctica lost more weight last year than Chumlee from Pawn Stars! It was the warmest year on record in 2014. It was so hot; it could have melted Dick Cheney’s old heart. It was so steamy, people were eating Hungarian food, just for the fart breeze. It was so roasty toasty that Hasidic Jews were converting just so they could take off their prayer shawls. We’re talking hot! But perhaps the greatest minds of our day are in error and these self-professed Einsteins and Newtons and Archimediocres are spot on the money. It is possible, I suppose.
Keep in mind – the network you are reading this on “Is a series of tubes.”
They Put the “No” in Knowledge:
2014 was not a good year for the advancement of academe. Politicians who actually believe the world is 6,000 years old are now lecturing us on science 
and trying to get Evolution removed from curriculums. In Arizona, schools were ripping pages out of text books lest their students actually learn something unsavory. In Texas – school boards are changing vast swaths of world history (including that whole slavery thing) that they didn’t approve of. Their intractable yet uniformed opinion seems to be that “Knowin’ Stuff” is some sort of communist plot that needs to be eradicated post haste. In fact just using a term such as “post haste” will probably will get me dragged before a “Smarty Pants” tribunal one day. These deafening dullards hold up their myopic stupidity like it was a prize-winning ticket. They wave it around proudly for their fatuous friends and cretinous colleagues to admire and emulate. They chuckle dismissively at the slightest whiff of intelligent thought 
or critical reasoning like renaissance be-hankied toffs guffawing at a limbless peasant. Any fact or statistic that displeases them (and in the real world, that is nigh on all of them) is instantly cast down into a bottomless oubliette to rot among the crumbling bones of introspection and scruples.
On The Upside:
At least the consumption of cannabis is now legal in some states so you can just ride the buzz, eat a donut and forget the world’s mounting cataclysms.
If you need something to cheer you up after that – try my deliciously witty novel about a recent college grad that gets the best job in the entire world.
Farting Through Nylon
=DV=
Darrell Vickers appears here every 4th Monday
Contact us at dbawis@rogers.co
Darrell Vickers started out as one half of Toronto area band, Nobby Clegg. CFNY fans may remember the cheery song “Me Dad” which still gets airplay. From there, he valiantly ventured to L.A. and eventually became head writer for The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Since then, he’s created numerous sitcoms and animation shows in Canada and the U.S. He still writes music and has an internet band called Death of the Author Brigade (members in Croatia, Canada and the U.S.) Mr. Vickers also had a private music mailing-list where he features new and pre-loved music. Anyone who would like to be added to his daily mailing list, just write him at Radiovickers1@gmail.com .
Segarini: Don't Believe a Word I Say 
January 5, 2015 at 10:11 pm
Excellent!