If you click, don’t click now, please don’t click my words away… but if you do you’ll find an interview with Jules Archer, author of Little Feasts over at the Zest section of The Citron Review, my editorial home. I won’t say too much about it here, it’s one of the best new books I read this year, ranking it among favorites like Laura Van Den Berg’s I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, Tara Isabel Zambrano’s Death, Desire and other Destinations, and Jenny Slate’s Little Weirds. I’m thankful to Jules Archer for thinking deeply and sharing generously when answering my weird craft questions. Her book is brave, dirty, smart, and hilarious. I will buy anything she writes.

From the above list, you might notice that I love reading stories that are dark and funny. This year was dark and painful, for sure. But, funny? We had covfefe, right? Wait what! That was 2017? What the hell happened to the years? Oh right. Human rights abuses, systemic discrimination, and a global pandemic. Barry and Dear White People were consistently funny shows that I watched this year, one skewers racism and the other features a hired assassin. That was 2019? Crap. At least, Samantha Bee continued killing us satirically regardless of the year.

Is it funny that The Masked Singer was viewed by people who refuse to wear a mask to prevent airborne transmission of a deadly virus? Though this missive isn’t about 2020’s music and has become more about general confusion, Alanis Morissette was back with “Reasons I Drink” this year, and I wonder if she could tell me whether there’s irony in the abundance of mask shows and their popularity (even with anti-maskers). I believe that she could! In this house, we stan with “Ironic” and Alanis, or at least I do. Did I use that right? Did anyone else awkwardly start using stan as a verb in 2020? How many years late am I for that? Anyhoo, let’s raise a glass of non-alcoholic mimosa to 2020, the year that made the phrase “dumpster fire” a cliché.