There’s always a moment, isn’t there? It’s innocuous. It means almost nothing to the other people around you. In fact, everyone but you is likely to forget mere moments later. But in just a few seconds, the entire story of a year can be told.
Lora and I are at Circle. Like one does. We’re walking in to see Jaws (1975) for its fiftieth anniversary. People are coming out of the last screening. Being me, I reach for the doorstop to make sure people can get out with a minimum amount of fuss. A guy in his 60s is coming out.
“You work here, don’t you?” he asks me.
“Uh—no,” I answer.
“I thought you worked here,” he repeats. He must have seen me there before. I’d get into why guys that age feel a need to double down on getting something wrong, but that would be more of a metaphor for 2024, rather than 2025.
“Nope,” I repeat. “I do volunteer here a lot, though.”
Silence. “Ah,” the man says. “So you work here for no pay.”
“Sure.” I didn’t laugh. It was before both October and the government shutdown, making my life wall-to-wall volunteer opportunities. His remark wasn’t yet objectively hilarious.
“How’s that working out for you?”
“Really great. Thanks for asking,” I reply.
That wasn’t the answer he wanted, but he moved on his way.
Through the second half of the year, my mind kept going back to that exchange. I spent so much time over the last several years trying to remake my life. Get a new degree. Get the new job. Life will just contort itself to fit whatever vision I had for it.
Right.
But something happened in this most harrowing of years. Somewhere along the line, Donald Trump managed to Forrest Gump his way into getting me to make peace with a day job I would have made a deal with the devil (or the School of Library and Information Sciences at OU) to get out of only a year ago. He’s made it something of an act of protest to just show up in the morning. It can do all of that, and allow me to do all the other stuff I want to do.
My friend, the guy-who-recognized-me-at-Circle, may not think of any of the stuff I really want to do as a job, but it is what gets me out of bed in the morning. Were I living in the 24th Century, no one would blink an eye at me saying I have five or six jobs. If I think of myself as a 24th Century man having to live in the 2020s… Well, it’s still horrifying, but at least it’s a bit more fun.
As I’m writing this section of the post, I am sitting in the back of our minivan as Lora drives us to New Mexico for our Thanksgiving extravaganza that will take us all the way to California. I am sipping some tea, listening to Warren Zevon, tinkering with some movie reviews, and occasionally reading. I’m the video archivist at All Souls Unitarian Church. I am the poster archivist at Circle Cinema and will be joining their board in the new year. All of that coalesces in my head, and something occurs to me:
My life might not conform precisely to how I might try to design it, but I am at this point the most Mac Boyle anybody could reasonably expect to be. I’m going to take that as a win.
The world is on fire, and I cannot put it all out, but I can try to make it a little bit better where I can. Politics might not always be the way to fix the world. But we can all do better person to person.
But, please, let us work on fixing some of the larger problems next year, shall we?
Now, let’s talk about some of that other stuff that did happen this year. I actually did a tally of the movies I watched this year. Yes, all of them. I saw 61 movies in the theater (that may sound like a lot, but it feels a little anemic for me), and (brace yourself) I watched 428 movies in home viewing situations.
That’s… a lot, right? Here’s my top five for the year:
As predicted in last year’s end-of-the-year blog, I hit my 1000th review here on the site this year. I briefly entertained stopping the reviews right there, but why on earth would I quit a job that doesn’t pay anything?
With all of that, it feels like I should probably get more into Letterboxd in the new year, right? I’ll make a point of that in the new year. I really master this, and my next stop is the Criteron Closet, right?
On the podcasting end of things, both The Holodeck is Broken and Beyond the Cabin in the Woods are going strong. Cabin will have its 200th episode in 2016, and THIB will improbably hit the magic point where we are all caught up with our Star Trek rewatch. The board at Party Now, Apocalypse Later HQ currently has a cluster of new podcast ideas coming in 2026. Stay tuned.
On the writing end of things, I wrote 450,537 words this year, which is another record. I’m also noticing that I keep writing more words every year. One of these years, I’ll just start typing and won’t stop, forever. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve published much of anything outside of movie reviews, but that’s more than likely to change here pretty soon.
Barely hit my reading goal for the year. I was busy! As usual, (c) indicates a graphic novel, and (a) indicates either an audiobook or one that Lora read to me.
Kingdom Come (c)
Star Trek 2 (these being collections of The Original Series novelizations by the late sci-fi author James Blish… Now, I wonder why I’d go eyeball deep into that all of a sudden?)
A Nation Under Our Feet (c)
Live From New York (a)
Seed of Destruction (c)
Don’t Panic (a)
Star Trek 3
Thunderball (a)
The Dying City (c)
Macbeth (CI) (c)
Dune: Messiah (a)
I’ll Be There For You (a)
Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live (a)
Resident Alien - Vol. 1 (c)
The Secret of the Old Clock
Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective
What’s Next?
Sonny Boy (a)
TMNT: Black and White Classics - Vol. 2 (c)
Cunk on Everything (a)
Eaters of the Dead (a)
I, Asimov (a)
Spare (a)
Star Trek 8
Homecoming
Dying of Politeness (a)
The Den of Thieves (c)
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League, et al: A Compendium of Evils (a)
Universal Monsters - The Mummy (c)
The Sinister Shadow
Star Trek TMP: Echoes (c)
Holo-ween (c)
The Scorpius Run (c)
Fantastic Four Masterworks - Vol. 1 (c)
Gangsters Vs. Nazis: How Jewish Mobsters Battled Nazis in Wartime America
It’s Alive!
The Jetsons (c)
Batman ‘89 Echoes (c)
The Truth, Finally
The Thrawn Trilogy (c)
The Secret History of Star Wars (a)
The Star Wars (c)
What if…? Aliens (c)
Gothic (c)
The Black Incal (c)
Day of Blood (c)
Batman by John Ridley (c)
Dark Nights (c)
Supergods (a)
The Death of the Dream (c)
The Professor and the Madman (a)
Les Misérables - CI (c)
Big Dumb Eyes (a)
High Fidelity (a)
Because I Know You Don’t Read The Newspaper (c)
Mission: Impossible
You Never Know (a)
Batman: Resurrection (a)
With a Mind to Kill (a)
The Last Halloween (c)
The Science of Storytelling (a)
Star Trek TMP Novelization
The Invisible Man (c)
Star Trek TWOK Novelization
Batman ‘66 Meets Steed and Peel (c)
Catwoman: When in Rome (c)
The Illegitimates (c)
World of Krypton (c)
Locke and Key: Welcome to Lovecraft (c)
Nobody Does It Better (a)
The Oracle Code (c)
Octopussy and The Living Daylights (a)
Alien: Bloodlines (c)
Goldfinger (a)
The Final Days
The Flash - Vol. 1: Move Forward (c)