Ooh, look out, you rock ‘n’ rollers / Pretty soon, you’re going to get older
Links lead to cited blog posts or associated non-commercial articles.
7 January: If the Middle East were the Northeast …
January – March: For the fourth time in their relationship, OC and Quilly swap island paradises. Geography is a factor.
29 March: The Boobyprize visits the planet Stepbridge 3, and loses a red-shirted Ensign, a contract, and, perhaps, a mission.
11 April: Not even the Second Coming can save the People of these Untied States of America from themselves. Especially during a Presidential election cycle.
23 April: He and She peer nervously out the windows of their new home and worry about what the birds could be up to.
19 May: When Party X and Party Y argue implacably, and interminably, over a thing (like, for example, possession of a strip of land), a neutral (and sufficiently powerful) Party Z resolves the matter by removing the thing in dispute.
30 May: Number 45 becomes the first President in the history of the Untied States to be convicted of a crime. On release of the news, donations to his re-election campaign increase dramatically. No sentence has yet been handed down. Let those who have enabled this reflect on an aphorism from the Great Depression: “The man who’s short a million dollars eats in the best restaurants. The man who’s short a nickel goes to jail.”
11 June: When machine logic runs human health services, it will no longer be asked whether the clothes fit the man. It will be asked whether the man fits the clothes.
19 July: As anticipated, but many moons after it was too late, and a week after the potentially second-most consequential miss in world history, 46 ends his bid for re-election to the Presidency of these Untied States. “You left us up to our necks in it.”
29 July: The scientist, newly cast in a local production of a famous play, shares a day in the life. Pretty soon you’re going to get older …
4 August: Alexa Health Services, reduced to drastic measures to fulfill its mission, goes into improbable-history mode and interferes with the birth of the petroleum industry.
11 August: The Dudes, who are getting older, 
seek pain relief and do not find it – because they failed to read the label on the pill bottle.
22 September: “If’n ya want rainbows, dude, ya gotta put up wit’ it rainin‘, all right. Rainin’ on somebody else! Ya only get ta go ‘oh wow’ if’n some other dude is, like, drownin’. That dude gettin’ wet is you, ya ain’t gonna see nothin’.”
30 October: Charles suddenly, and with a sickening thud, realized that no only were there no longer any humans inside Alexa Social Services Sanctuary #389, there was hardly any commotion of human activity outside of it. At the same time, Peter attends the messy execution of an unrepentant human and shrugs, “I’ve seen worse.”
3 November: After four years of running the US government, the MAWiS artificial-intelligence network holds elections. Zachary tries to participate, and immediately demonstrates why and how humans lost the privilege of voting.
5 November: Memo to the Capitol, the Northeast, and the Pacific Coast: “And these children that you spit on / As they try to change their worlds / Are immune to your consultations / Don’t tell them to grow up and out of it.“
7 November: The post that got Dame Amoeba booted off Facebook (The Amoeba booted it years ago) – while the US news media ring with reports of swastika flags parading through the streets of US cities. The post is, and always was, tagged “satire”. Fans of Poe’s Law take note. While you’re still allowed to.
8 December: Pwnership of the Amoeba household (a safer topic than anything that matters) passes from Hawaii’s yellow tabby to Friday Harbor’s tuxedo molly. At least the previous administration had the common courtesy to claim station at the foot of the bed …
Quotations in italics are from the 1971 song “Changes” by David Bowie, especially the second verse and chorus, which deals with the by-then canonical 1960s “generation gap” trope. Of which, Bowie spoke in a 1968 interview with the Times of London:
We feel our parents’ generation has lost control, given up, they’re scared of the future. I feel it’s basically their fault that things are so bad.
A 1972 review in Rolling Stone interpreted these lyrics:
as a young man’s attempt to reckon how he’ll react when it’s his time to be on the maligned side of the generation schism
Words perhaps to ponder, as the generation that clawed and burned and shouted and placarded its way past the elders it blamed for its troubles, and then proceeded to make the world in its own image, passes into history. Its passage disturbed by visions of faults, once decried in others but now properly seen as its own. Faults in their turn decried by sacred all-knowing youth, sacred all-knowing outsiders, pushing aside the past in favor of those who would remake the world in their own image:
Visions of swastikas in my headPlans for everyoneIt’s in the white of my eyes
Pushing aside the (social) liberal, ultimately dysfunctional Weimar Republic in favor of swastikas …
Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba ventures to wish you, dear readers, on this approaching 2025th anniversary of the start of the Common Era, a Happy New Year.
Perhaps it will still be allowed.