Everywhere you look you’ll see the same sentiment embodied in a variety of profane, eloquent and/or emphatic ways: 2016 was a terrible year. A shitbird of a year. A mindfuck of a year. A year that seemed to ooze straight out of Satan’s own inflamed rectum to run over us all like a putrid, pervasive, inescapable lava flow of personal, emotional, national, and global trauma. I need not enumerate the seemingly endless list of fuck-all-are-you-kidding-me-worst-case-scenario bullshit that played out for all of us on our respective newsfeeds. Nor am I going to recount my own personal 2016 drama rama that has made this the second worst year of my own personal life (2008 still holds that distinction). In fact, most people I know had a particularly tough year; it was as though a front of bad karma was sweeping through the world and raining all manner of hellish weirdness onto us.

Accordingly, everyone is thirsting for the end of this wrecked year, calling for 2016 to stop stealing our beloved idols, our national dignity, our sense of security, our sense of trust; we are pushing hungrily toward the blank slate of 2017, its blinding, beautiful unknowability a tall drink of ignorant bliss in this beneficence desert we’ve been living in.

Well, I’m just going to say it: There is zero indication that 2017 will be any kind of improvement on 2016.

The calendar is a human construct, not cosmic fate. Whatever your spiritual or religious or political beliefs are, we can all agree that the 365 days we call a year, more or less aligned with the seasonality created by our earth’s rotation around the sun, is, otherwise, pretty fucking arbitrary. But that’s all fine and good. It works. At this rate, it may truly be the last thing we can all agree on. But does anyone truly believe that 2017 won’t also suck spectacularly? Broadly speaking it’s not shaping up so great. Actions have reactions. Those reactions don’t stop with the flop of a calendar page or the turn of a clock. Then consider our whole thick history of human actions and reactions—it’s a mire of consequence.

It is an inescapable fact 2017 will hold some very bad days; terrible things will happen; beloved celebrities will die; the geopolitical snakepit will widen and writhe and bring god knows what down upon the citizens of the world; our new president will make us cringe daily as he rides through the first year of his term like a giant orange drunk toddler on an enormous tricycle. We will start the year with hope, and end it with cries for its swift execution.

But may I humbly suggest that among all that reality, we will also have good days. Simple good days where we laugh with our friends; days when the weather is perfect and the wine is good; where we smile at our neighbors and they smile back; when we work and walk with others who are pushing back against the bad and we feel empowered and strong; when the lump isn’t cancer; when we meet someone special; when we are decisive and effective; when we are able to help others or accept help; when we see great movies or read wonderful books; when we welcome new family members in the form of new kids or new spouses; when we see the fight for good crystal clear and our aim is true; when we meet new friends or have energizing conversations with strangers; when we see new places we’ve never been; when we get a new job we really want. You get what I mean. Life happens. We won’t just be hunkering down waiting for the nuclear flash. That won’t be until 2018. (Kidding! Hopefully!)

I wish you and yours all the best in 2017. I wish all of us fortitude and focus and fight. I wish us all many, many good days; maybe even some excellent days too.