It’s the first Thursday of 2021, so here we are with the first TBT of the year!  Fittingly, I’m looking back to the first post of 2020, “Dawn of Decade.”  As I noted at the time, the decade really began on 1 January 2021, so I suppose this throwback post works even better now.

In looking back at this post, it’s sobering to consider how much difference a year can make.  At the end of this post, I wrote, “Predictions being what they are—extremely unreliable—I’ll make a bold one:  2020 is going to be a great year.”

Yikes!  Talk about missing the mark big time.  Of course, on 1 January 2020, everything was going pretty well, at least for yours portly.  Sure, Trump was facing a sham impeachment, but the economy was swingin’.  I’d just come off my best year financially in terms of musical proceeds—enough to pay cash for my plucky 2017 Nissan Versa Note (a fitting model for a music teacher), and was booking some gigs at fun new venues.

Then, of course, The Virus changed everything, possibly forever.  Despite that, I still had a great year—reconnecting with friends and family; traveling far more extensively than normal; and diving more into my love of music.  It was just a very different year than I anticipated.

At the end of least year’s post, I included a word total for the year 2019 (which now WordPress tells me is slightly higher than I reported originally:  232,348 words total for 2019), so I’ll do the same for 2020.  In 2020, I wrote 253,377 words.  Assuming a page of double-text, size-12, Times New Roman font typing is roughly 300 words per page, that comes out to a whopping 844.59 pages of writing.

Granted, some of that is from TBT posts like this one, but the takeaway for me is that it’s time to compile some essays into ebooks.  Cha-ching!

With that, here is 1 January 2020’s “Dawn of a Decade“:

Happy New Year!  It’s 2020!  Wags will quip that “it’s not really a new decade—that doesn’t start until next year, in 2021.”  It’s a case where the wags are correct on the facts, but don’t appreciate how appealing that nice, round “0” at the end looks.  Everyone was excited for 2000 AD; 2001 was greeted with shrugs.

Regardless, it’s an exciting time to be alive, in every sense of the word “exciting.”  2020 is a presidential election year, with a contentious, cartoonish Democratic primary season to endure.  The impeachment trial is (allegedly) coming up soon, if Speaker Nancy Pelosi decides to rummage through her purse and take them to the Senate.

America is enjoying an economic boom, with a long bull market and the lowest unemployment rate since 1969.  President Trump’s administration is restoring some sense of sanity and reason to the absurdity of 21st-century governance.  He at least expects the government to work for the American people, not actively against them.

New Years’ Day is when bloggers both look back to the year recently passed, and look ahead to the coming year.  Prediction posts are popular and fun, so long as you don’t take them too seriously.

I’m not sure how this year will shake out.  The Democratic primaries look murkier and murkier.  I thought Kamala Harris would ride a wave of Leftist identity politics and racial manipulation to secure the nomination, but she dropped out.  Former Vice President Joe Biden just keeps short-circuiting with creepiness.  Bernie Sanders could die at any minute; Elizabeth Warren is a shrill, unlikable liar; and Pete Buttigieg is gay mayor of a third-rate city.

Folks on the Right and Dissident Right seem divided on whether or not Trump will win reelection, but everyone seems to think it will be close.  Right now, none of the potential Democratic challengers seem all that capable of dethroning GEOTUS.  Then again, I’m fairly biased in favor of Trump, and the love his supporters have for him is matched—even exceeded—by the hatred his opponents possess for the President.

As for The Portly Politico, I’m going to attempt to keep the daily posts going strong.  I will, of course, keep posting to my SubscribeStar page every Saturday (and, for $5 subscribers, uploading doodles on Sunday).  As the election gets closer, I’ll look to cover it more, but I am going to shift more of the focus to cultural matters, such as my series of pieces on Christmas carols.

For years I’ve been kicking around eBook ideas.  This summer, other than private music lessons, Minecraft Camp, and maybe a summer course, I do not plan on working my usual maintenance gig.  Instead, I’m going to dedicate that time to writing, and to writing and performing music.  I have several ideas in mind, including a compendium of the histories of popular Christmas carols.

I may finally get around to The Portly Podcast, but realistically that probably won’t launch until summertime.

Regardless, I’m looking forward to 2020.  Predictions being what they are—extremely unreliable—I’ll make a bold one:  2020 is going to be a great year.

Happy New Year!

—TPP

P.S.—For those interested, I wrote 232,085 words in 2019.  If a standard, double-spaced page of typed text is around 300 words, that comes out to about 773.6 pages of text.  Whoa!