So You're Going to Write a Year-End Best-of List
And other answers to unsolicited questions
“I am going to write a year-end best-of list. Any pointers?” — Thomas 2016
How can one survive the dark days to come? It’s supposed to be the most wonderful time of the year, but these days can be the bleakest. Because of course every damned person is writing a Year-End Best-of List about something. Music, movies, books, sex partners, tweets. The snake won’t just eat it’s own tail, it will shit its own tail out to boot.
Time may be an illusion. Look it up. By observing a clock in your own universe you are not merely accepting that it is 4 a.m. and you have no pants on. You are making it 4 a.m. What happened to your pants is a different physics equation. Attempts to observe another universe from your universe makes the other universe seem frozen in amber. Or in my case, frozen in Jesus and Mary Chain songs. Which is why, although your #1 band for the so-called year 2016 might be 70 Foot Rotating Dildo, my #1 band for this year, a year I call “The Year Steve” is Stiff Little Fingers. Or maybe actually OK it was A Tribe Called Quest.
Einstein also said time is an illusion. And he was usually right about everything. Our human minds conceive the universe in a particular way, as moving forward. Science types are skeptical. “The cat that jumps is not the same cat that lands.” Let that wash over you for a minute. Until we get to the Roaring 2020s, we will probably no longer think of decades the same way. The human brain creates shortcuts for itself. It pushes a lot of information in on itself, like a monkey pushing an accordion in on itself to make a farty noise. This is how Year-End Best-Of Lists are made.
If one believes time is an arrow that flies from January to December, then I guess it makes sense to take the time to chronicle that arrow’s trajectory in movies, TV, film, etc. Without lists and awards, how would we know what was any good? Not that anything is all that good anymore. It’s as good as can be expected in ‘these dark days.’ I am going to preface all statements going forward with that, for context. We will need context in these dark days.
The internet basically exists to deliver four things at this point: Fake news, pornography, cat stuff, and list articles. I have no beef with the first two. If we could somehow combine cute cat photography and humor with hardcore porn I think we’d all have a lot more time on our hands to write bad novels in “Novembers,” if you wish to continue to believe in such quaint things such as months and days and monogamy. And, now, democracy. And the fundamental goodness of white people.
The internet fails when it fails to surprise and delight us. Or to horrify and depress us. Either way. When the internet gets predictable we go to HBOGO and watch “Deadwood” for a week. So many of us need to crank out content to please the Cubicle Class: young creative people in depressing desk jobs. Beneath their Excel spreadsheets they got the Twitter. They ride the Twitter to direct them to surprising or terrifying content. We’re all Walter Mittys now. Rich imaginary internet lives to go with Bartleby-level busywork drudgery. I feel for you, Cubicle Class. Time is a very slow illusion for you. That’s a lot of Excel files.
Boredom, invented in the late pre-internet 1980s and responsible for things like irony, nostalgia and grunge music, is part of a physics equation that involves Time and Repetition on the other side. Time is a constant. It’s imaginary, and therefore needs to be represented by an imaginary number. like 5i. Repetition, the stuff of comedy when in threes, gets super-annoying and bore-inducing in more than threes.
Meme culture demands everyone act like lemmings. We get a billion similar jokes, but only over the course of a few days. Afterwards we all lose interest, and wait for the next nip slip. The meme of year-end best-of list lasts for the entire month of December. Even Movember and Write A Crappy Novel Month only lasts as long as we bother to grow bad beards and write bad books. We will exhaust ourselves on both measures, and quickly.
The List is the lowest, and therefore the most popular, of internet writing assignments. They’re easy, people click on them. We’ve gotten better at titling them. “657 Things You Will Die Soon If You Don’t Know.” I’m not sure why the number is important at the beginning of the title. It just is. People won’t, in the middle of it, be like “Well I know the first 300, I will probably live through the week.” You will have to click on every damned page of the thing. And either agree or disagree. And of course, the more website hits you get the more all-powerful influence you wield. And someday your lists will be collected into a “Collected Lists of Jim Behrle” which will hopefully make everyone’s Year-End Best-of List for whatever year that comes out. And maybe even the movie list. With Whoopi Goldberg as “Jim Behrle.” And Emily Blunt as “The List.”
I find the whole endeavor extremely depressing. No one wants to be on a list. They want to be singular, to stand triumphant upon the Internet Pigpile and shout from the rooftops “I, for this fleeting moment, MATTER.” To have to share this pigpile with anyone else, or stand below stuff you know just plain sucks and is lame.
Say you are the #10 movie on someone’s list. Being #10 means you almost didn’t make it and probably kinda suck. You are basically “Star Trek: Beyond.” Probably a perfectly fine movie to watch drunk some night by accident. And if you’re super-into Star Trek still, maybe you camped out all night to get in first and have tricorder sex with your girlfriend in the back row. But whatever. It’s #10. Why even write about it? Why not just draw a picture of Mister Spock and Captain Kirk making out?
If you insist on writing a list to mark the end of this year, make it a short list. Around 10. But maybe 11 or 9.
Throw some wacky things that are not technically from this year into them. Just to keep us on our toes. I hate surprises. Like that nothing matters and that everything is a lie. That was a horrible surprise to have sprung on me.
I want things to matter. Should I make a list of the things I wished still mattered?
- The Truth
- Human Decency
- Rock n’ Roll
- The X-Files
- The Suffering of Others
- Star Trek
- Sex
Good luck out there. Years are just a constant barrage of dead famous people and depressing world news. Billy Joel will probably write a song about it, but only if we’re already all in Hell.
Jim Behrle lives in Jersey City, NJ and works at a bookstore.