Dear 2015:

How’s it going? Very nice to meet you the other night. Sorry if I seemed a little under-enthused. It’s not you. The kids made me stay up and I’m just not good at it anymore. (There was a time though—just ask the mid-’80s.)
Listen, I know it’s not my place, and I won’t even pretend to know what you have planned for the next 12 months, but if you can, would you mind taking it a bit easy on us? Twenty-fourteen was, well...I think it had good intentions, but it seemed a little...inattentive...and to be honest, we’re all a bit exhausted.
It didn’t start with 2014. In fact, 2014, if you’re reading this, I hope we’re cool. You had a full plate, and I’ll still go glow bowling like we talked about—first pitcher’s on me—but maybe it was the year that, to borrow a term from running, we finally hit the wall. Epic storms. Epic droughts. Earthquakes. Vanishing jetliners. ISIS. Robin Williams. Bill Cosby. Ferguson. Ebola. Kim Kardashian baring her butt to try “breaking the Internet” (but, as Blake Shelton so aptly put it, managing only to add a crack to it). Yeesh.
Look, it wasn’t all bad: Those Ice Bucket Challenges for the ALS Association were pretty cool…literally. The Giants won the World Series (and, speaking of—how about all those awesome Hunter Pence signs? I think my favorite was “Hunter Pence pronounces it ‘li-berry’”). Craft breweries were hoppin’, spacecrafts landed on comets and Jimmy Kimmel’s “Mean Tweets.” Compassion seemed to finally trump ignorance regarding people’s personal lives—like how they live them and with whom. The economy seemed to be waking up (although at about the same pace as a teenager on summer break, but still...).  And last fall fuel prices dropped so much I started driving to gas stations further away just to fill up. Only kidding. It was nice to see them come down though.
But a lot of problems prevailed: Much of the Middle East remained utterly devoid of peace or sanity. We mourned, heartbroken, with the families and colleagues of two brave law enforcement officers cut down in the line of duty one senselessly tragic afternoon. We watched thousands of firefighters struggle to keep our forests from going up in giant mushroom clouds of smoke. Kindergartners still understood the importance of cooperation better than most of our elected representatives. We learned Sam’s Club had better front door security than the White House and, in the name of homeland security, we found out some poor bozos have been tasked with what has to be the most soul-crushingly mundane job the government ever created: keeping track of our every inane email, text and phone call. Talk about LOL. Meanwhile, cyber crooks leaked our credit information online and cyber creeps leaked nude celebrity selfies.
Oh, that too: People were still taking selfies.
Hey, we know that just flipping the page on a calendar isn’t going to make all of our problems go away. We totally get there’s a lot of work to be done and the only ones who can change things are us. So please, 2015, no pressure. But if it’s possible, could you lighten things up—just a little? It’d be hugely appreciated.
Now, I seemed to have accidentally deleted 2014’s number from my phone. Do you have it? Glow bowl starts in a couple hours.

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