Moniker

It’s the name of the year.

The whole year. You don’t know what will happen. You don’t know what the tragedies and successes will be. You have no idea if, say, a pandemic may occur that comes to dominate the year and completely change everything for everyone. How are you supposed to name a year ahead of time?

In fact, literally, how do you name a year? What are the rules? What is the name supposed to accomplish? Who are you naming it for?

If you are the McElroy brothers, you are naming it for your podcast audience, said podcast being a comedy podcast, the premise of which is it is an advice show. Ostensibly their audience sends in questions and the brothers answer them, among other various bits they added over the years, but primarily, they tell people how to live. Of course the questions they choose to answer almost exclusively pertain to determining the appropriate reaction to an awkward personal or social interaction, with no too great of stakes, these are not make-or-break scenarios, they’re more along the lines of ‘my husband’s father gave us a bonsai tree for our wedding but I’m allergic to pine, how do I tell him to take it back’ or whatnot.

But even joke advice is still advice, and the impulse infects their yearly tradition of naming the year. Whatever they name it has to do something for people. Do what? Nothing too important, not grandiose, not monumentally inspirational, not life-changing, but not negative, either. They always want to give their audience a good vibe, an attitude to keep in mind while they take the year head-on. Also the name has to invoke the literal name of the year.

The early selected year names were not necessarily cognizant of the attitude-affecting aspect the name would have on their audience. In the beginning it was just a goof. The first-ever year name was 2010, which the brothers named ZOLO. That was the beginning. It didn’t mean anything, but it was unmistakably a name. They weren’t even the first ones to call it that, and only a few years later was it retconned as the official name they had bestowed upon the year just by referring to it as such a few times.

In 2012, Justin McElroy opened a January show by saying “Welcome to twenty-doz,” in which episode Griffin McElroy said the following: I have resolved to make Twenty-Doz the year that I just get it. This year’s name now had a subtitle. Twenty-Doz: Gettin’ It.

Thus a tradition was begun.

Twenty Dirt-teen: Dig It Up, Get It Out.

Twenty Forward.

Twenty Grift-teen: The Con is On.

2016 was the first year the brothers dedicated an entire episode to naming the year, and this process is the part I’m really interested in. The episode is not scripted or pre-determined, although the brothers each show up with some level of preparedness for pitches they want to make to the others. What you hear is essentially a writer’s room with an awareness of an audience, and therefore the brothers are doing all of this work in character, in full persona, large as life.

In 2017 (Twenty Serpentine: Keep ‘em Guessing [Zag on ‘em]), the brothers really nailed the tone intentionally for the first time. They had learned their lesson from the previous year (Twenty Fix-teen: Building Bridges), saying you can’t be so prescriptive (read: sincere) with your inspirational subtitle. People want a suggestion, advice, not a mandate. It’s all about the tone. It’s in the delivery of the message. The message is the medium, and the medium is the message. This is a podcast. This is an audio-format entertainment product which you the listener seek out of your own volition and procure and store and consume during your own precious free time, and why? Generally for one of two reasons: entertainment or edification. The McElroys’ podcast is one of these, pretending to be the other, but not with any degree of subterfuge or malicious intent. Everyone is in on the joke, and that is the real message. Everyone belongs here. Everyone is welcome. Come, sit, have a good time.

I’m sitting at a bar. The Ohio State-Texas game is on tonight and they’ve decided to only show it on ESPN, which I do not have access to at home. I knew they’d be showing the game here tonight, and I knew I could not very well come to a bar to watch the game and not drink, so I took a Lyft here, and I’ll take another Lyft home, because one DUI in a lifetime is enough for me, thanks.

I’m in my new city, my new home. I don’t have any friends here. I have a few people from work I’ve hung out with outside of work a few times but none of them live anywhere close to me. So I’m here by myself, and I thought I’d write a little to pass the time in between plays. There were several people at the actual bar when I arrived, but now as though to distance themselves from someone apparently doing work, everyone has vacated the bar itself and is in groups at the tables, except for me and the one other guy who’d come here alone. He’s not writing, he’s on his phone. I think he’s interested in the game but I don’t know that he came here specifically to watch it. Seems maybe he’s lonely.

I don’t religiously follow the My Brother, My Brother, and Me podcast. More like I come back to it in fits and spurts now and again ever since originally discovering it in 2014. I’ve heard a few of the naming-the-year episodes now, including last year’s and this year’s. Last year’s went 74 minutes, at the end of which the brothers were near fuming with brain-dry exasperated heaves, they had nothing left, they’d poured it all out of themselves and into the mixer and come up dry for about 70 minutes before they almost willfully decided to mis-hear the proposed moniker Twenty Fun Galore! as Twenty Fungalore, at which point they fell into hysterics as they invented a wizard-like mushroomy character who heard your wishes—did not purport to grant them, mind you, but he was willing to listen. And so the year name became Twenty Fungalore: He Heard Your Wish. After about minute 30, the frenetic repetition of potential names, all of which rhymed or sounded reasonably close to “2024,” was enough to send me into a sort of fugue state as merely the listener. I continue to be astounded with how quick each of these brothers’ minds are. They are able to almost instantly react to a pitch with a pretty accurate return, in that they don’t often come back and change their mind, and when they do they always react to the change with surprise and call themselves out and detail why they’ve switched their positions. That’s not me. I need to marinate, I need to bathe in something for a while before deciding its worth.

At the end of the school year, my son brought home a flyer from school with a poker chip affixed to it. They’ve decided to enact a house system at his elementary school, six houses, each emphasizing a different positive character trait, each house with a Latin-sounding name, each with an insignia, each with a color. My son’s house is green. The flyer was inviting people to come to one of those former-grocery-store-turned-trampoline-amusement-parks on January 2. No way we were going to attend—the last and only time I went to one of those places I popped my shoulder out of socket for the third time—so the flyer was still hanging from the fridge early this week, and I pried off the poker chip at some point and threw the flyer away.

I don’t drink a lot, but I drink frequently. Two or three drinks, three or four times a week, when my son is not around. It’s mainly out of habit. It helps me from feeling impossibly lonely, but mainly it’s become a way to permit me to let go of my high expectations of myself and just hold still, without the niggling anxiety of what-should-I-be-doing-right-now. Up until March of last year I was taking classes. I had to be doing something, almost all the time, in order to pass the classes, and then suddenly there were no more classes. I tried to find something else to do. I gave myself assignments, but none of them really stuck until the one I’m currently on, which started in about August, and it’s a large project and I should be proud of the progress I’ve made on it thus far, but I also feel like I should be much further on it. I tried dating. I met a few people—once. Never twice. Each day of the weeks I don’t have my son, I come home to nothing, to no one. Sometimes I go to Target first and just walk around, pushing a cart like I belong there, eventually buying some things, whether I need them or not.

I listened to a book this week called Hell of a Book, in which a main character, who may or may not have been both of the main characters, has what he calls “a condition.” He is an author who has written a successful book and is on a book tour, and his condition is he has an overactive imagination, he sees things, experiences things, can’t always tell what is real and what is not. His therapist tells him his condition stems from a trauma, but he claims he cannot remember what the trauma is, if there was one. He blanks out, can’t remember anytime he talks about his book, blocks out even his own ethnicity so that he doesn’t have to think about the difficult realities of his existence. And ever since he published his book, he drinks a lot.

Ever since my DUI, I’ve hated myself to some extent, considered myself an alcoholic to some extent, although simultaneously I feel like it’s insulting to real alcoholics who start drinking the moment they wake up, who drink throughout the day, who can’t stop drinking once they’ve started, who have emergency stashes of alcohol in empty laundry detergent bottles, who have experienced grotesque levels of trauma I couldn’t even dream of, to call myself an alcoholic. So I’m in this weird place where I can’t logically call myself an alcoholic, but I still feel like one. Still feel that guilt.

At the same time, I don’t believe in ultimatums. I don’t believe in behavior dictated by principles, because principles change based on circumstances, there is nothing about us set in stone. I am not a murderer, but there are certainly circumstances in which I would be left with no choice but to murder, or to steal, or to eat a human being, or to pray. I don’t want to live falsely. I don’t want to say “I don’t drink” even when I am not drinking (I have quit for extended periods before) because I feel like, you know, one day, I might again. I don’t want to be controlled by a false premise. If I feel like having a drink, if the occasion calls for it, I want to be able to have a drink and not immediately feel as though I’ve betrayed myself and my values, and without feeling like some alcoholic making an excuse.

As it happens, I do know how to get to that state of being. It requires a long period of abstinence from drinking.

This year’s naming of the year went for 120 minutes. Two excruciating hours. I couldn’t fit it into one day of even my driving schedule. These poor bastards were burned out after 30 minutes, started trying to tie things up, I expect hoping to decide upon the name within an hour. At about the hour mark it seemed like they were going to come around on calling the year Thunder Force Five, establishing a sort of comic book mythology which would’ve played well at their live shows, but they couldn’t improve upon the original subtitle Travis had supplied, The Omega Continuum, finding it too Michael Crichton-y. They didn’t achieve final inspiration until just about minute 100, at which point they were too intellectually spent to trust their own instincts and had to rehash their decision for another 15 or 20.

The name of this year, 2025, is… Tummy Buddy Life: Dare to Care.

They are simpatico with me in terms of the disaster of this political climate, what that means for the future, what it means for the people on the outskirts just trying to live, what it means for minorities, what it means for women, what it means for anyone except the billionaire class. They are nervous. Of course they are always nervous, but, facing all of this, they are also probably terrified, like I am. They probably see the unabashed abuse and destruction of the world on the horizon and they, like most intelligent folk, are afraid. So—eventually—their response to this climate, their advice on how to keep moving, was the suggestion to maybe forgo apathy. Despite the outlook, despite the fate we have prescribed for ourselves. Put yourself out there anyway, and maybe even make a friend. Without making promises, they landed on nudging us toward camaraderie. How do we soldier on, well, maybe… together? Make yourself a tummy buddy. Pull up a chair, settle in, tell me a little about yourself, what do you like to eat, perhaps. That might be enough. We can decide to make that enough, for now.

But again, my interest in this is the process. Every year they do one of these episodes now, I almost can’t believe it. They do not take this lightly. Their entire occupation is to take things lightly, but they do not take that responsibility, they do not take their jobs lightly, and they insist on doing it exactly as best they can, to the fullest of their individual and collective capacities. It’s inspiring. It’s a sacrifice. It takes effort. Creating something valuable takes effort, and for whatever reason they have decided to let us in on that creative process, and it really hits home for me. Nothing I have made that I love has come to me easily. Having not completed something for so long, this is very easy to forget.

But ya know what, maybe I know exactly why they post these writers-room episodes, because it’s the same reason I post shit like this. The motivation is in the exposure. I know, it’s pretty sickening, the culture we live in where likes are commodities, where nothing we do matters unless it’s got an audience. But there is no “like” button on podcasts, and although yes, I do receive stats on number of views, yes I have a quantitative measure I can look at if I so choose, all it really takes is one. One person. My mom reads this stuff. Every single one, I know that, she’s never going to not. That’s enough. You post it for accountability. You post it for the record. If you go through the long and arduous process of creation and perfection of a thing, and that thing never gets published, never gets a promoter, never finds its audience, then the process is what matters. This? This is my process. A popular final product, everyone assumes it took work. If the final product is not popular—or in the McElroy’s case, even if it is—your real reward is in the accountability. In the assumption that someone, somewhere, cares that you put in the effort.

Last time I quit drinking, it was because I was on the verge of going through a divorce and I knew that the crutch of alcohol was a little too cushiony to permit. It could’ve enveloped me. It could’ve absorbed much of that stress, if I’d been willing to cede enough self-control. Even if my delusions of gravitas are overblown and my own personal alcoholic tendencies are not up to the level that would seem to demand intervention, I was witnessing the detonation of the life I’d spent six years building, and I didn’t think going through that with a chemical dependency was an especially great idea.

Last time I quit, it was defensive. This time, I want to be on the offense. I want to want something. To do it this way, the audience has to be assumed, taken for granted, I have to feel loved in the first place. My mom is giving me that. My dad too. Also Mandy, who liked Hitler. And Katrina. There are others.

The poker chip has been sitting on my kitchen counter for three days because I know when I pick it up I’m going to keep it in my pocket and I’m going to stop drinking for as long as it takes. As long as it takes to what? I don’t actually know. I’ll know when it’s done, though. When I’m ready. When I have whatever it is I needThen, I will be able to define the what, but the when?

It’s got to be now.

He said. At the bar.

***

He watched the game to its end, and it was a successful game, and he celebrated and drank and had fun at the Irish-themed pub with strangers he will never see again. He did not remember the end of the night, at least, whatever happened after he got home, he doesn’t usually stay up that late so he was very tired and of course not at all sober. He woke up in the morning and felt close to death. He’d forgotten the feeling. Dehydrated, of course, bowels reeling, oh that’s right he’d ordered the fried cheese, head stuffed with cotton. His only concern was recovery. He’d forgotten how nice it can be to feel terrible. Nothing mattered for him, this morning. He did not care about anything. There was zero internal pressure to get up, get moving, get things done, be successful. There was zero guilt for having what he has, for being safe, for being wealthy enough to afford safety and security and to have all of his needs met. He was not immediately confronted by the news and crushed by the reality of the future and the impending heat death of the planet. He did not want to move, so he didn’t move, and that was fine. When he did want to get up, then he got up. When hungry, he ate, when thirsty he drank. Everything deliciously uncomplicated, moving from point A to B, no distracting obstacles to be considered and navigated. No guilt. No embarrassment. Not even shame. It was brilliant.

But that’s not the theme of the year, is it.