"There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so"

Now's the time during which all of my social media friends start posting about their year. A lot are already summing it up as a horrid one as a result of celebrity deaths. Some just had crappy years; others, not bad one. I haven't heard any really good reflections on the year.

For some reason, summing up a year has never worked for me. I am not saying it is bad or wrong to do so -- just that it has never been something I am inclined to do. And thinking about evaluating my year sort of makes me feel a little squirmy, if I'm being honest.

I think of bad events as bad events, but isolated ones. A year is an artificial construct of the human need to organize its existence. Maybe this is all just another manifestation of my often-visited concept of the real versus the unreal; the idea that there is so much that we see as hard reality that is just plain phony. A "year" is just bookends on the shelf. We just happen to place it between 365-day cycles. It could have been anything in terms of parameters... What's real is the death of a loved one; what's fake is that he died on a "Tuesday." It seems really -- at the lest -- unhelpful to call a whole 365-day cycle "bad" because within the same span in which one's car was "totaled."

Contrary to what I said above, maybe it is bad. It's really a kind of pessimism to label a year as bad because it contained a few -- or even a lot of -- bad events. Yeah...see? I was trying to be nice, but I think it is bad.

I think my other "problem" might be that I have always naturally done what a lot of people seem to have a hard time with. I really seem to "live in the moment." (Sometimes, this can be a problem...but that is another post.) For me, though, benchmarks have never really meant much. New Year's Eve means nothing to me. Graduations have always been something to get over with. I knew, sitting on the football field of Eastern High School in 1986, that I would be no different of a person the next day than I was before... There really is -- cliche, though it may be -- only now.

David Bowie, Gene Wilder, the all-of-a-sudden-beloved Alan Rickman and, now, George Michael were not killed by 2016 -- they just happened to die within the artificial frame created by humans.

So, no, it wasn't a bad year. Not to me. I'm sorry we lost those people -- especially Gene Wilder. But I just can't make it work out to a post about how mad I am at 2016. It's like blaming the shoe box for the shoes' fit.

As I looked up who died in 2016 for this piece, I saw an article for The Mirror: "Why have so many celebrities died in 2016?" Are people really reading stuff like that for "answers"?

Each of the people we lost is bigger than a calendar with inked borders, so let's not reduce them to some superstitious cause. We might as well go back to blaming fairies for stuff.