Lost Journal

Humor Column
by Tim Mollen
January 1, 2012

New Year's Resolutions for 1987

Journal Entry:  January 1, 1987 (age 17)

It’s my senior year in high school, so this year’s resolutions need to be especially new, annual, and resolute.  Here’s what I’ve come up with:

• Start smoking.

• Quit smoking the next day, thereby establishing that I am capable of keeping a New Year’s resolution.

• Watch last night’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve 1987 on my VCR, then tape over the segments featuring the Jets and the Miami Sound Machine.

• Continue to base my behavior on the irrefutable fact that I know way more than my parents do.

• Get a varsity letter in running from the cops after parties down at the river.

• Break it to Fievel that there is no one out there.

• File a civil rights lawsuit against people who wear Member’s Only jackets.

• Lure Geraldo Rivera back into Al Capone’s vault with vague promises of “some real dirt.”

• Get into a college without a phys ed requirement.

• For my high school graduation ceremony, arrange for the speaker to be a personal assistant to Australian funnyman Paul “Crocodile Dundee” Hogan.

• Rework the title of my college application essay, “Mascot Major:  Let Me Be the Anthropomorphic, Frisbee-flinging Face of your University.”

• Convince an elderly senator from Texas to run for president and choose beloved television icon Robert Guillaume as his running mate, creating an unstoppable Bentsen-Benson ticket.

• Escalate my long-running feud with media tycoon Ted Turner by co-opting what I believe will be his next successful move – blackandwhitizing films shot in color.

• Join the cast of Saturday Night Live and angrily refuse to hug anyone during the closing credits.

• Live more Bon Jovily.

• Cross that bridge well before I come to it.

• Visit the refurbished Statue of Liberty and tell her that some of my best friends are the wretched refuse of the teeming shore, and she can’t have them.

• Petition the Federal Reserve to revert to the gold standard with the important caveat that it be based on copies of the 12-inch dance mix of “Gold,” by Spandau Ballet.

• Levitate.

• Marry Miss Walsh, my former English teacher and current yearbook moderator.  (I read Ethan Frome for this woman.)

• Attend the second birthday party of Stefani Germanotta and refer to her as “Baby Googoo.”

• Mime louder.

• Get backstage on the second season of The Oprah Winfrey Show and tip her off to Phil Donohue’s plans to start a televised book club, yell the name of any celebrity he is introducing, and put himself on the cover of every issue of his own magazine, Phil.

• Fail with greater dignity.

© 2012 Tim Mollen

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