In memory of The Year 2017, who died peacefully in its home located at what was previously the end of the Gregorian calendar. 2017, the beloved child of the amount of time it takes the Earth to revolve around the sun and mankind’s desperate need to construct markers of its own significance during the slow, painful march toward mortality’s ghastly embrace, was one year old.
In life, 2017 was an avid collector of mass shootings, devastating natural disasters, and unfortunate accounts of famous old men groping their female colleagues. At an early age, 2017 inaugurated to the most powerful position on the planet a man who uses Scotch tape to secure his neckties, then went on to regard him as “presidential” if he so much as managed to answer the Oval Office phone without getting his dick caught in a Garden Weasel. A lover of practical jokes, 2017 was responsible for promoting Stephen Bannon to the highest levels of government before casting him back to his previous job purchasing swim trunks on Craigslist and smoking banana peels in a dilapidated Toyota Previa behind the little league fields.
Among its other accomplishments, 2017 freed O.J. Simpson, accelerated global warming, blotted out the sun for several minutes, and brought to Charlottesville, Virginia, a group of young men who otherwise would have spent the summer attending Limp Bizkit reunion concerts and scrawling manifestos on their bedroom walls in fecal matter and Cheeto dust. Loved ones will fondly remember 2017 for wrecking Puerto Rico, then promptly forgetting about the U.S. citizens living there for months without electricity because Colin Kaepernick thought that black people being disproportionately and routinely killed by agents of the state was suboptimal. Prior to its passing, 2017 found great joy in executing Apple’s latest planned obsolescence, charging people $1200 for the same hand computer as before but this time with no button.
2017 passed without flushing Ed Sheeran through a space station toilet out into the darkest reaches of the universe.
In lieu of funeral services, 2017’s family has requested that well-wishers celebrate its life by spending the day watching college football players attempt to cave in each other’s skulls for the enrichment of athletic directors and television executives, and desperately scrubbing linens and area rugs to remove the scent of vomit, Korbel, and shame.
2017 is predeceased by the American middle class, going to concerts without having to keep an eye out for the shooter, the meaning of the word “populist”, any consideration as to whether Facebook is actually necessary, and Chuck Berry. 2017 is survived by resurgent Nazism, brazen public corruption, the flu, letting Amazon record your voice and enter your home like that’s no big deal, Congress governing like Scrooge McDuck on bath salts, stepping in dog shit, The Internet®, celebrating the narrow defeat of a mall perv in a Senate race as some sort of moral renaissance, ticks, and however many weeks we can wring out of 2018 before the nukes go off.