Times they are a-changin'

Change. I hate it. And like other hermits and shut-ins, I can readily reference movie quotes to adequately sum up my feelings on the subject.

 

In this case, the movie is “Clerks,” a 1994 indie flick from writer/director Kevin Smith, a poop joke-loving, puerile filmmaker with a penchant for arcane Star Wars references and bestiality humor. My kind of guy, in other words.

 

The “film” – if you can call it that – centers around Dante, a 22-year-old convenience store clerk, and his best friend Randall, who works at an adjoining video store. Randall spends most of his time shirking his responsibilities, leaving his post to visit Dante at the Quick Stop so the pair of Gen-X slackers can sardonically mock the clientele, consisting largely of glum smokers and melancholy high school guidance counselors obsessed with finding the perfect batch of eggs. High drama, I know. Makes “Gone With the Wind” seem as exciting as playing canasta against a quadriplegic circus monkey.

 

During one scene, Randall chides Dante for not having the courage to face change. Dante attempts an explanation.

 

“My mother told me once that when I was 3 years old, my potty lid was closed, and instead of me lifting it, I shit my pants,” says Dante.

 

“Lovely story,” replies Randall.

 

“The point is,” says Dante, “I’m not the type of person who’ll disrupt things just so I can shit comfortably.”

 

I know the feeling, dude.

 

Which is why I’ve built my life on rhythms. Get up, go to work, bust my buns, go home, yadda yadda yadda, repeat. “Yadda yadda yadda,” in case you were wondering, consists largely of watching superhero movies and Photoshopping my head onto the bodies of centaurs. I’ve become disturbingly good at the latter. And yes, this is a cry for help.

 

All this is well and good, until something happens to foist change upon my comfortable routine – and nothing is as emblematic of change as the dawn of a new year. I’ve mused before on how the calendar is largely arbitrary, the numerical uptick indicative of nothing more than our attempts to make sense of time. Which is true. Time is just something that happens, and quantifying it is merely a necessary measure to ensure we make it to juggling practice when we’re supposed to. It doesn’t change the phenomenon. Mother Nature’s indifferent to balls dropping in Times Square; I like to think of her laughing as we spend the better part of January learning to write “2015” on all of our checks. Nothing is ever altered at year’s first light except our own perceptions, and maybe the hangover cures of college students, who use New Year’s as an attempt to ingest more chemicals than a dolphin at a nuclear reactor spill.

 

Regardless, change is constant, and sometimes it does coincide with our calendars.

Take those libation-quaffing students. They’ll start all-new classes this semester, leaving behind Contemporary Russian Feminist Abstractionist Bohemian Poetry 101 for the stimulating discussions of Mid-18th-Century Avante-Garde Impressionist Fingerpainting. Out with the old, in with the new, literally. For them, the switchover into a new year is less an arbitrary necessity than a brick wall seprating one epoch from another. New courses, new faces, new opportunities for skipping class in favor of day-long Lord of the Rings marathons. Clean.

 

In sports, NFL teams lucky enough to make the postseason will start their Super Bowl campaigns, each vying for a coveted spot in the big game – along with the distractions of a lip-synched halftime travesty of baton-twirlers and washed up pop singers who were a big deal in 1996. New year, new goals. Also clean.

 

Then there’s the Journal Tribune. There’ll be changes here, too.

 

Seems like I’m writing goodbye odes every other week these days. This time, it’s our intrepid City Editor, Robyn, who’s leaving. She probably won’t want a big fuss, so I won’t give her one. (Although she just so happens to be eminently professional, superhumanly patient, and encyclopedia-level knowledgeable about the biz. Okay, so a little fuss.) Suffice it to say, we’re gonna miss her.

 

Change. And though her last day is technically today, it coincides roughly with the year’s infancy, lending a little more legitimacy to the notion of new beginnings. For us, anyway, and surely for her.

 

We’re happy for her, of course, partly because she’s no longer forced to read my weekly dissertations on flatulent farm animals and the relative merits of breathable underwear. Speaking personally, though, I expect to feel the void. It’s funny: You walk into a place as a greener-than-grass freshman, wide-eyed and naive, and the cast of characters by which you’re surrounded become your mentors, your teachers. Then time passes. People come and go, the character of a place morphs and evolves, and then one day you take a look around and realize you’re not the kid anymore – your green veneer has faded like the overwashed denim on a pair of jeans. It’s a necessary part of life, but no more comfortable for that. The only thing left is to stay standing and keep flying the flag. Growth and maturation are the result, and these are desirable ends; but there’s still a part of me that clings wistfully to that long-ago innocence, a time when I could easily embrace the delusion of comfortable stasis, the permanence of place of all things. 

 

But that’s just my nature. I’m not the type of person who’ll disrupt things just so I can shit comfortably.

 

So it turns out New Year’s actually means something, after all. What will 2015 bring? There’s no real way to tell; here, prediction gives way to hope, and the yearning to make this year better than the last. Change isn’t always a bad thing, especially when we’re the agents of it.

 

That's something you learn, too.