New Year's Resolutions Already Broken

merica from coast to coast set a personal best record Saturday when it was forced to announce, collectively, all resolutions made for 2004 have been broken since January 1st. The resolutions, some made half-heartedly to feel as if the maker was doing something different, and others made as die-hard declarations of change, were broken consistently in larger and larger numbers since the beginning of year.

Among the favorite quickly-broken resolutions are health concerns, resulting in promises of daily exercise or more attention to dietary needs. Resolution scientists at M.I.T. calculate approximately 63% of resolutions made address these concerns, and big fat America decided not to be concerned about the concerns entirely by Saturday. Excuses for ceasing daily exercise programs included: "Just don't have the time," "Just don't have the floor space," "Just don't have the energy," and "Just don'wanna." The most common cited excuse in quitting new diets was found to be attending a restaurant with friends where they had something really, really good, or the occasional explanation that a box of Twinkies woke them up, calling from the cabinet to be eaten.

Approximately 32,000 promises to go vegetarian or vegan this year were already broken as well, 12,385 of them because resolution makers just found out turkey isn't a vegetable. Resolutions to eat less fast food were abandoned when people found out how much easier it is to eat fast food than slow food, not to mention the comparative speed difference.

Other popular broken resolutions concerned finances, including putting more money into savings, spending less impulsively, and getting into the stock market. Frequent reasons for giving up these resolutions include being too difficult to save money, wanting to pick up something cute, and losing a whole ass in the stock market. One resolution maker reported the failure of his New Year's promise to save money when his dealer wouldn't negotiate a price drop.

Among rarer career-oriented resolutions were pledges to move up the ladder at work, especially for plenty of roofers out there. Quite often incompetence on the job led to quick dismissal of these resolutions, though researchers aren't ruling out complete unsuitability for a career or work in general, a total lack of motivation, and being universally loathed at the workplace. Steve Compson of Miller Beach, Florida, insisted his rejection of his New Year's oath was due to deciding he was happy not having all the troubles of assistant manager, and waiting to see if Lyle takes that sweet Burger King gig.

Resolution watchers found Americans are not only complete failures at controlling forces outside themselves, but the nation also does extremely poorly of holding true to promises of character improvement. Personal pledges to be nicer to people and listen to what they are saying were dropped like bad habits right away, frequently citing how much other people weren't nice or listening to them, with a few cases of he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about and the bitch just won't shut up thrown in for good measure.

Promises to have more confidence were brushed off when resolution-makers realized they lacked the personal power of change to do so. Several oaths to build self-esteem and fight depression ended with resolution-makers crawling into large tubs of cookie dough ice cream, and some still have yet to come out again.

On a more personal note, resolutions to get laid like cheap carpet haven't worked out for most either, often due to personal unattractiveness in non-reporter cases or incapability of saying anything without sounding like a smarmy ass. Then again, it's always possible women just don't give a brother no play.

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Try this on for size, commune followers: Inexplicably, I am sitting in a chair reading or, more likely, watching old stock footage of World War II to find proof Hitler escaped disguised as a Von Trapp, when I get up to do something. The next moment, I find myself in a room I did not intend to go into and have no idea how I got there or why I would have entered the room. What's up there?

No doubt you've figured out, as I immediately surmised, aliens are clearly using advanced teleportation devices to break down my molecular structure, turn me into a mass of unformed atoms, then reassemble me in exact working detail in another room of my house. That much is obvious. But why?

In all my years of studying the vast underlying conspiracies that affect us all on every level, I've never encountered one both so brazen and yet so curiously without motive.

My first thought was I'm likely being studied by said aliens, they beam me up to their ship, poke and prod me in every place, then return me, though they're always off by a few feet when they drop me off back in a different room. However, that falls through on several levels. For one, first and foremost, I show no other signs of alien abduction. There is no loss of time, and it would take quite a while to study this superb specimen, let me tell you. Plus, I have no feeling of being anally probed when I recover my senses, and after the commune's Christmas party a couple years ago I would certainly know if I'd been probed while unconscious. Also, speaking frankly, aliens would certainly not be so dumb as to return me without leaving me in the exact same spot, at least not anything but an extremely disappointing race of aliens.

No doubt about it, aliens are involved, but they are most certainly not taking me aboard their ship, at least not to study me. So what is their purpose if they're not adding to their vast knowledge of the human physique?

I asked Corey P. Myler, a physics professor, astronomer, conspiracy buff, and A-Team trivia master, a good friend who I sometimes catch in the laundry room of our building without explanation. Myler considered the facts I gave him and smoked three of my cigars while we were waiting for my whites to dry, then reminded me that recent crop circles outside Edinburgh appeared to resemble the giant footprints of an enormous alien who had pegs for feet instead of regular feet. This was of virtually no use in my query, though Myler said the evidence was too thin to speculate further.

On the other hand, I can speculate until the cows come home. I often do. I speculate day and night, sometimes without much to start me off. I've made a career, at least a column, entirely out of speculation, and I'm currently writing a sitcom about speculators. It's my favorite past-time, next to punching pigeons, so I figured it's up to me to speculate alone on this one.

My first explanation, and the easiest, is that I'm merely part of an alien psychological experiment. But that's boring! That's just off the top of my head. I have not yet begun to wildly speculate.

My next guess is that aliens are indeed taking me aboard their ship, forcing me to masturbate until ejaculation with nude pics of that top-heavy girl who used to play Punky Brewster before she grew up and out. They then take the "deposit" back to their world and use it to propagate their species since years of space travel have left the males flaccid and sterile. They then erase my memory and travel back in time to drop me off in my house where they found me, though because they are jealous I am able to provide healthy sperm when they are not, they exact revenge by putting me in another room. It confuses me, but I'll live on unchanged.

Or, and this may sound a little silly, but I am being observed with observing rays from the computers of the alien race, in an attempt to graph a precise robot duplicate of me to set up an alternate world of robot humanoids, or possibly even a robot world of Red Bagels that can form conspiracy theories to save the world. Perhaps just for worship on their homeworld. But the observing rays can only observe for very short moments before I am totally disintegrated. Using what they have learned, once I am disintegrated, they reconstruct me short seconds later. They cannot put me back in the same spot otherwise I would see the stain where my previous incarnation used to be standing.

Whew! That was damn fine speculating. I'm tired. I'm going to grab a Shasta.

Now… what was I talking about? Who wrote all this nonsense on my computer?

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I hate to sound like a party pooper, or even worse, like I've grown cynical, but I have to admit that this year will be known for me as the year I stopped believing in Santa Claus.

It wasn't any one particular thing, just a series of things that built up until I said, "You know what? I'm fed up. Every year I keep asking for stuff I never get and there's too much proof. There is no Santa Claus."

Kids line up around the block to sit on my lap and tell me what they want for Christmas. And this isn't any one place, it's every town and every city everywhere all over the world. How is Santa supposed to be in all those places at once, you tell me that? It's just physically impossible. Some of them don't even look like me, they'll be Asian guys or black guys or occasionally a woman or something. Nothing wrong with that, of course, I just think it's obvious most of them—oh, let's face it, all of them—are guys in suits pretending to be me. Well, there goes Christmas, kids. You just told some minimum wage former stockboy what you want for Christmas. That helps.

This thing about the flying reindeer, too, it's complete baloney. Reindeer? Flying? Now if the story was that Santa had magical kid-loving dragons whose back he rode on, that would be pretty cool and believable. But you can see reindeer anywhere. Go ahead, push one off a roof, tie one to the back of your Cadillac and pull it five hundred yards at 60 mph, of all the things it will do it won't fly. If there's ever a time to go ahead and fly, that would be it, and they don't.

Who makes all these friggin' toys, too? Sure, in the days of the wooden rocking horse and the worthless rag doll with buttons for eyes, I could see that being the product of some elfin workforce laboring away in freezing conditions, but what about these cell phones, Playstation 2 consoles, Casio keyboards, and computers these kids are getting these days? Forget the difficulty in building toys that require high-tech skill, let's just ask about Star Wars figures or Pokemon cards or something. Not that elves couldn't make that stuff, but they'd be in violation of serious international copyright laws. You're talking about one bad-ass criminal St. Nick there.

He must be trained in some shady business to infiltrate houses all over the world. How many houses have chimneys these days? Santa's out there squeezing down air ventilation pipes, under locked doors, through keyholes, through sealed windows, all sorts of unimaginable stuff. Forget laughing with a "Ho, ho, ho," the Santa they're talking about must be a scary Eugene Tooms X-Files motherfucker.

And how many kids throughout the world? How many houses, how many presents? One guy doing all this stuff in one night? Even including time zones and expanding it out to a full 24 hours to get all this done, one guy, I don't care how mystical his ass is, will be finishing that job. Forget it. Not in one year, certainly not in one day.

I'm not even leaving the house this Christmas. It's too confounding to think about. I'll probably just stay in with Mrs. Claus, sit around the fireplace and lick candycanes, maybe watch that Charlie Brown Christmas special on DVD or something, catch It's A Wonderful Life if it's even playing and just take it easy this year. Get a good night's sleep for once and check out the Day After Christmas sales if I get up early enough on the 26th. The only person I'm going to be asking for anything from is Mrs. Claus. If Santa can do all this other amazing crap he can read minds as well, so maybe he'll bring me that Palm V I've been eyeing in the Office Depot newspaper supplements. But he probably won't be happy because all I'm thinking this year is there is no Santa Claus, sorry if that pisses off the time-bending B&E reindeer pilot himself.

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