Good F*cking Riddance, 2017

2017 has been one big, fat metaphor for your racist in-laws arriving uninvited, actively fucking up your entire life, and never leaving. I am ready for this shit to be over. Reflecting on what a monstrous dumpster fire this year has been could make anyone’s bowels flare up, so why don’t you join me on a stroll down Memory Lane (if Memory Lane was somehow flooding and aflame at the same time) as we aggressively wave goodbye to the suck fest that was 2017?

This Motherfucker

With Mein Trumpf getting sworn in as *dry heave* president not even three weeks into 2017, no wonder this year has been such an unbearable shitburger. Like a cranky preschooler walking into a screening of Coco and that Frozen “short”, 2017 did not stand a fucking chance. This motherfucker, this motherfucker, shuffles around the West Wing in his moldy bathrobe, tweeting whatever racist, sexist, grammarphobic vitriol happens to slosh between his ears and then we throw a parade every time he reads from a teleprompter because that’s where the bar for “acting presidential” has been lowered for the poster child of failing up.

Constant Anxiety

Has your casual morning scroll through social media been replaced by a frantic search of any news you missed while having nightmares during those four hours you were trying to kind of sleep? You’re in good company because we are all afraid we are going to die all the time. Who needs Shonda Rhymes mid-season cliffhangers when a news alert on your phone may signal the last straw in a pre-nuclear war dick measuring contest between two petulant leaderbabies? Or maybe it won’t be nukes. Maybe the health care system will implode and a lack of affordable coverage paired with a shitload of anti-vaxxers will be the lethal cocktail that bubonically plagues us out of existence. Hell, maybe it will just be the actual fucking apocalypse. If 2017 has taught us one thing, it’s that anything is possible. Make way for those horsemen, mortals.

Men Are Trash

Literal pieces of shit disguised as human men may be dropping like flies from their positions of power, but it’s not all sunshine and morality clause violations. Women all over, whether or not they’re actually coming forward against their sexual harassers and assaulters and rapists, are having to relive their trauma. #MeToo needed to happen, make no mistake, but it’s still painful. Just the realization that men we admire, respect, and love are capable of such atrocities is deeply upsetting.

Calling Congress

Mobile phone carriers must be raking it in with everyone switching to unlimited minutes now that we have to call Congress all the damn time. I’m paying out the nose to yell at these clowns whenever they’re about to ruin my life and they seem hellbent on frequent life ruining. My grandma wonders why she hardly ever hears from me anymore. It’s because I’m busy leaving salty messages about tax cuts for my representatives, MeMaw. I’ve got Andy Harris’s (Maryland Congressman) number saved in my phone and the only thing making me feel better about it is that he is actually saved under the name Ugh This Piece Of Shit Again. I talk to his secretaries so much that I find myself asking how their kids are doing in soccer and putting them on my Christmas card list. When I hear rumblings about Betsy DeVos pulling some idiot nonsense or another terrifying piece of gun legislation, I know a chunk of my day is going to be spent on the phone constituent-ing my ass off.

Fucking Nazis

Look! Over there! In aisle 12 of Sam’s Club buying all the tiki torches the tiny hands of a master race can carry: It’s a bunch of fucking Nazis that are totally fine with being fucking Nazis out in public. Everything that is terrible has been emboldened to slither out of the goddamn Upside Down, so why not fucking Nazis, too? They’re marching. They’re spreading propaganda all over your idiot uncle’s Facebook newsfeed. They’re beating up black people and murdering protesters with their cars and not nearly enough of them are getting punched in their fucking Nazi faces. If 2018 has one job, it is to Make Nazis Afraid Again. Slap it on a Chinese-manufactured baseball hat and make it so, please.

Mass Shootings

26 people murdered while attending church in Texas. 59 people murdered and over 500 injured at a country music festival in Las Vegas. Shootings at Congressional baseball game practices, in airports, schools, businesses, and homes. There were close to 400 of them this year, so take your pick. Don’t talk about common sense gun control though, or the NRA is going to threaten a civil war because why the fuck not?

Natural Disasters

Wildfires have torn through California. Hurricanes in Texas, Florida, and especially Puerto Rico have left behind destruction and devastation that will take years to clean up. Homes, lives, entire neighborhoods are lost. Most of the people in Puerto Rico still don’t have access to clean water or electricity. Maybe we can throw a few more rolls of Bounty at the victims? Nothing cleans up tears shed over losing everything like the quilted, quicker picker upper.

Literally Nothing Matters

Everyone running the massively corrupt show happens to also be a bunch of epically moronic fuck-ups who are really bad at being criminals. But do any of them face consequences? Robert Mueller is burning that midnight oil, I know, and he’s started to roll out some beautiful indictments. But at the moment, it still feels like nothing really matters. Trump can tweet an admission of obstructing justice, use racial slurs while pretending to honor Native Americans, brush off allegations of sexual assault and misconduct from over a dozen women, and a host of other shit falling somewhere on the scale between morally bankrupt and an Orange Is The New Black backstory, and he still gets to be the fucking president.

Everything slips off of him like he has bathed in a bucket of KFC and it is deflating to constantly wonder if the most recent terrible thing he has done is going to finally be the thing that wakes us out of this nightmare only to find out it is not the thing and nothing matters.

2018 feels full of possibilities though. Someone is probably getting Robert Mueller a bullet journal for Christmas to help him stay productive in the new year. Sexual harassment and assault are no longer being dismissed or swept under the rug. Women– especially black women– are leading the resistance with no sign of slowing down anytime soon. Someone is bound to invent something prettier than rose gold and I am ready for whatever the new rose gold is. But after we close the door on 2017, can we put it through that door shredder from Monsters Inc. and then burn all the pieces and bury the ashes in multiple toxic waste dumps for good measure?

Just to be safe.