Another year in the rear view mirror. Another one now visible in the windshield.

The most popular resolutions people make:

1: Losing weight.

2: Finding a special someone.

3: Kicking a bad habit.

All good intentions, no doubt - geared towards self actualization, an independent future relying on intelligent decisions made in the immediacy of life.

Let me ask you this, though.

Do you know what the road to hell is paved with??

That's right: Good Intentions.

The problem is not so much with the intent, as it is with the time intervals.

"I'll be different from tomorrow. I swear."

And time will swear that you will be the same. Because, at the end of the day, time is the true enemy here. Not your own laziness or indifference, but the needles spinning around on the clock face, the numbers slowly marking down another 24 hour cycle on your phone screen.

Time.

The real four letter word.

It takes three weeks to build a habit into your routine, and even then it's really tough to stick with it.

"I've been good for so long. Let me have this once. Please!"

A cheat day, meant as relief for the life you've spent cheating yourself?? Get over it.

Keep telling your silly, simpering self that, then. Let the lies feed your consumption of that vice, only to discover that ultimately it's consuming you. You're trying to cheat the scale, keep those pounds off, only to realize you're swindling your body out of good health.

Well done, sir/ma'am.

The second thing, then.

"I want someone."

Do you? Do you really? Agreed, happiness in matrimony and holding hands is basically the entire essence of why Hallmark, the card company, is still in business. Family is where life begins, and happiness endures. I get it.

But do you truly think, that you can find who you are in someone else? True connection with someone really is impossible - demons hide beneath our facades, ones we either do not wish to exorcise, or ones that are way too overpowering and force you to host them. You've got about a camel's chance in a needle's eye, or a candle's in a snowstorm, but for that flickering hope, people try. God bless those people. I for one am not one of them.

"You're such a dark person. Geez."

If by dark you mean painfully cognizant of hard truths this blunderful life has to offer, then yeah, I'm a dark person.

Third one's the harm, right?

Charm. I meant charm. Subconscious typographical error there.

The Inherent Vices of Good People.

No, Inherent Vices of Good People is not my suggestion for a title for a sequel to this brilliant movie.

One last hit, a final ritual of consumption of whatever substance you feel you need a significant amount of everyday. Doesn't matter if it's alcohol or nicotine, because there are indeed more sanitized temptations that yet fuel addictive behavior. Coffee, fast food, that one thing you like at a restaurant that you know, in your heart and your stomach, is too big, and quite unhealthy for you to eat, but you order it anyway because food is comfort. It's not a room with red candles, a syringe sucking up liquid from a spoon - it's a drive through order, the one you almost know by heart.

It really is the little things.

It's the coffee shop in a college campus, where you get the same drink everyday. It's walking past the gym, saying everyday 'I'll go there someday" and before you know it, there's no days left. Soon, there won't be any, but let's not contemplate the crushing, impending doom of the limitations of our mortality just yet.

Anger, is an all consuming thing. It envelopes the skin, seeps into the blood, and is the feeling you get when you ball your fists up hoping the nails will create incisions in the skin underneath your fingers and paint a crimson network over the lines in your hands.

It is containing a storm inside your head, primeval and unrelenting, with your skull and your innermost thoughts playing the role of the unblinking eye in the center.

It is wishing that the world went away forever, and a yearning for the macabre to be normal, while wanting to be an old-school romantic, as if from a Clark Gable movie. It is being caught in a duality - either lash outwards, or smash inwards.

I recommend smashing inwards. It is definitely the option that has less potential for creating a scene in public. Hate yourself with such vitriol, such invective that any insult or snide comment drips away as if you are coated in impervious, water-repellent fabric. As an emotion, it walks the line of fire in between absolute evil, and necessary evil.

I don't know where this is coming from, but I thought that if I wrote about it, someone, somewhere, may be able to relate to it. If there's one thing I pride myself on, it's being able to describe the indescribable.

Thank you for reading. Hopefully you find happiness and calm in your life - if not now, then eventually. As for me, however, let's put that down as a "work in progress".

.