I share a birthday with Nostradamus

2021 is bound to come. It won't erase or even ease what 2020 put us through. I cannot say that anyone could have predicted the severity of what 2020 became. In smaller ways, I could pick out one or two things. Trump was never going to go quietly. I doubt anyone was surprised about that. I watch a morning news show with my students, so I was aware of what COVID was and could do. Too many at my job were skeptical until it resulted in the teachers being gone for months. (They are still skeptical; 350,000 dead Americans be damned.) Racial justice wasn't going to be achieved overnight. More unarmed Black and brown people were going to be killed by police. There would be protests.

Generalities based on patterns and international previews of what to come, but not specifics. Even with this mélange, I wouldn't forecast the details.

But I expect I can give it a shot now. I'll likely be embarrassed by most of these longshots come next December, but what can you do?

January:

I will get a check for an essay I wrote for a book on mental health, one few people will read outside high school libraries and overdue book reports. This will hearten me.

I will begin making a steady income from my writing. It will not be an income that often reaches the double--to say nothing of the triple--digits each month, but it will be steady.

In the final days, Donald Trump will commit several more actions in trying to illegally overturn the election results that should result in impeachment, formal censure, or felony charges at the state level. The Republicans will brush treason off as unimportant. The Democrats will toothlessly wag their fingers and tweet about how someone should do something. The outrage news cycle will obsess on another scandal and forget all about what Trump did.

He will immediately start running for 2024 and bilk his followers out of as much money as he can. Almost all of this will be laundered back into his pocket. The Trumpers will not care that they are being fleeced.

Superbowl Sunday will bring the expected whining about how it isn't fair that we don't get to eat chicken wings together because it could kill our family members. Sorry, bro. Get the shot. Try it next year.

People will gather and scream, anyway. In two weeks, there will be an uptick in cases. I will possibly manage to go sledding or do other winter activities with Aaron and Amanda, as she has never sledded before.

February:

TV hosts will make jokes about Valentine's Day creating a Second (Third?) Wave because of kissing and sex. It won't be funny.

Amber and I will have a subdued Valentine's Day, possibly another tea party, especially if we can convince someone else to come over and relieve us of some of the treats.

Biden will be blamed for things that Trump did--things that he frankly did not have time yet to do. People will act as though they believe this until they do believe it. Biden will do next to nothing to disabuse people of these notions.

Some members of the public will protest that Biden should prosecute Trump for all he did. Biden will not, saying that unity is more important. Trump's followers--and he will keep these no matter what he blatantly does--will take this as vindication that this racist, rapacious (alleged) rapist is the most innocent angel who has ever been.

We will begin to move on from his presidency, and there will be a few articles from neolibs in right-leaning newspapers starting the softening of Trump's presidency. Was he really that bad? Was he the Second Coming of Reagan? Were we too tough on him during a difficult time in our nation's history? Can't we overlook all his crimes?

No.

A domestic terrorist or two will try to bomb or shoot up a clinic giving free inoculations. Q may be involved, but I hope they are going to try to fade away since almost none of their ludicrous predictions came true and Trump has been thoroughly escorted from the White House.

Trump will have his first campaign rally (ordering people to come unmasked and unvaccinated). He will spend three hours riffing on the theme of his having not lost, that he is really the president, and it isn't fair that the Radical Socialist Democrats (I wish) deposed him. This may inspire his followers to march through cities with guns and possibly commit terrorism on his behalf, though he will officially wash his hands of it while also saying they are very fine people who love their country.

Some Republicans who served as his fervent enablers will back away as quickly as their constituents will allow them once it is clear his power is waning. They will then try to reframe history and gaslight citizens that they didn't really believe in Trump and were working behind the scenes to stop his agenda.

There will be an entire bookshelf of books published from insiders in the Trump White House, all of whom will lie through their teeth that they were noble obstructionists and only let people think that they were slavering minions. The veracity doesn't matter. Each of the books will make millions from liberals who want to have the certainty of their assumptions validated. Orange man bad. (If someone makes that the title of their tell-all, I promise to buy four copies.)

Governor Cuomo will try to forcibly detain someone with COVID who refuses to quarantine, or he will try to level a million-dollar fine against a nurse or doctor who gave an about-to-spoil vaccine to the hospital janitor. Whichever happens, it will not go well. He will be called a fascist. There will be protests and threats. Cuomo will bluster but will ultimately back down while still trying to sound like the dad who just caught us smoking pot behind the shed.

I would love to say that this will negatively impact Cuomo's evident presidential aspirations, but it absolutely won't. He got an Emmy for telling people every day to wash their hands and not cough on strangers. Clearly, we are not working in a meritocracy, at least how it ought to be defined.

March:

Ted Cruz will kowtow to Trump on some plainly false point and be seen as even more of a kicked lapdog. Trump will imply that Cruz's children are prostitutes, only to be told that neither is older than thirteen. Trump will say that this doesn't mean they aren't prostitutes because he once was at a party with Jefferey Epstein in a New York City apartment, and [the rest of the joke had been redacted on the advice of the author's counsel].

These insults will not shake Cruz's public adoration of Trump. His wife is ugly, his father killed JFK. Why start defending your family now, Cruz?

As more people are inoculated, and fewer wear masks because of it, there will be small explosions of COVID among pockets of anti-masker anti-vaxxers who only pretended they got the shot. Pundits will cite this as evidence that the vaccine doesn't work, masks don't work, the government is trying to microchip you, vaccines should be mandatory for public life, a card or barcode must always be kept on one's person, and we need to close the country down immediately (depending on the pundits' orientations on the axes).

Trump will have blamed the last three years of COVID entirely on Joe Biden. There will be a flurry of articles and late show hosts pointing out every factual inaccuracy in that statement, which will only make Trump smile that he was successful in owing the libs with his trolling once more.

I may be able to coax one or two of my inoculated, antibody-rich friends over to my apartment for a movie and dinner, still with what social distance is available to us--but I am not optimistic.

There will be an irrationally big snowstorm in the Northeast out of nowhere, possibly leading to a state of emergency. After this, winter will finally relax its grip.

April:

Easter will be treated as a bigger deal than it usually is. There will be headlines playing upon the Resurrection theme. None of them will be that creative.

A few newer movies will tentatively go to theaters instead of streaming. Some people will treat these tickets as though they were the next of "Hamilton." None of the movies will be that great, especially not the potential for death (however dwindling). There will be articles about how streaming is probably better for most films, now that Hollywood has given us a taste for it, especially given the quality of most TVs on the market.

Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese will do several interviews where they will call anyone who would say such a thing philistines. No one will honestly care much what they think.

My mood will be buoyed by the consistently better and sunnier weather, as well as the opportunity to see friends and loved ones again (outside, while socially distancing). I will have semi-regular campfire dates with Aaron, Amanda, Kristina, and Amber, and will treat this as close to the best thing that has ever happened to me.

May:

There will be a lunar eclipse that will last about fifteen minutes. Most people won't notice.

The Large Hadron Collider will be turned back on after renovations. Late show hosts and memes will talk about it bringing us back to a timeline where Trump was never president/COVID never happened. None of these will be funny, but they will still be shared.

June:

At least We Shadows will be republished, though ideally all the backlog. As Amber is, of this writing, still trying to get through the first revised book of my series, I would not place money on this outcome.

There will be a solar eclipse, which will be over North America, so I will care about it. It will not be a sign of the End Times, though reactionaries will claim otherwise. As it will last less than four minutes, the world had better have exploded before the end of this commercial break.

By this point, there should be immunity enough that, coupled with fairer weather, things begin to feel almost normal in some quarters. Some people will still wear masks--I think I will keep one close for months more--but there is the suggestion that we can have social events.

There will be just so much hooking up once the weather is warm enough to lose enough clothes and the infection rate starts to dip. However much of a bacchanal you are imagining, it is going to be a bit more. If you don't see this, it is because you were not invited to the orgy.

For my part, I will begin feeling as though it might be okay to hug my friends once more. (I will not be invited to the orgy either.)

July:

Some band, venue, or company will try for a large, outdoor concert. There will be hand-wringing, discussions if this is safe, but it will go forward anyway because enough people feel invincible and pent-up.

It will go okay. Fewer deaths than people fear but not zero infections. Anti-vaxxers will still insist that the vaccine is a Bill Gates trick in insert Luciferin full of 5G trackers into everyone's blood to alter their DNA. (Don't invite them to that orgy last month. Plague rats are not welcome.)

Comic-Con will try to go on, but they will work much harder to keep everything sanitary. To protect everyone, fewer tickets will be available, meaning that people will scalp them for startling amounts. Given that Con Crud is a known quantity even outside a pandemic, this will result in a noticeable, if isolated, uptick of COVID cases for the next two weeks.

Comic-Con will also involve more live streaming, as celebrities are not universally keen on pressing their luck. This may become closer to the standard going forward.

The rescheduled Summer Olympics will widely be considered not totally valid. The precautions and athletes who cannot attend will create an environment too different from previous Olympics to be judged on the same metrics. But most people outside the arenas will not care because why should we?

Politicians will give supposedly stirring speeches on how this is indeed our Independence Day. The opposing party will point out that this is tone-deaf and ignores the day's true meaning: explosions and barbecue.

None of the politicians will sound even a little like Bill Pullman.

By this point, more of the Night's Dream series will be out, as Amber has more time to work on covers and formatting. She will be working nearly full-time to pick up the slack for her three pregnant coworkers, though, so it is also possible that she will want nothing to do with book design.

September:

To Save Her World will be published.

The Pine Bush UFO Fair will go on. People will joke about space viruses. It won't be funny.

The fall semester will begin, and my facility will tell us that we don't need to wear masks anymore. The guards won't. The kids won't unless they think that they are rebellious by doing so--at which point, the bureaucrats in Albany will ban them, possibly as gang-related paraphernalia. I will especially wear a mask still, even if I do not outside the facility. My students are viral loads in the best of circumstances.

Traditional schools will open and act as though everything is supposed to be normal. However, there will be many students who are scholastically and socially two years behind where they should be and three to four years behind their privileged peers who had supportive parents at home, good meals, tutoring, and all the needed technology. This divide will mark millions of more kids deficient than they otherwise would be and will follow them for years, if not the rest of their lives. In twenty years--I acknowledge, well outside the scope of what I am meant to predict--this will be referenced as to why some people are perpetually unsuccessful. They will be called the COVID Generation. They will not appreciate the label.

October:

No Such Convention will tentatively announce that they might possibly consider theoretically planning a con in February. Maybe. If that's okay with everyone?

Halloween is going to be ridiculous. Other holidays will have been heightened, but Halloween will be an all-weekend, if not all-week affair to make up for the Saturday, full moon Halloween we missed in 2020.

There will be COVID costumes. Not even one will be clever or funny, but you will see more of them than you will the Joker. Hunter Biden will do something embarrassing. The Republicans will treat this as exponentially worse than everything Trump did in his entire life combined. In speaking about this, Joe Biden will make some verbal gaffe. The Republicans will want him impeached for this and threaten to invoke the 25th Amendment because of the president's apparent senility. #PresidentHarris will trend, and no one will be certain whether this is a liberal or conservative hashtag.

November:

Public schools will not be so obsessively noting how strange the COVID year was. Superintendents will begin acting as though teachers are slacking because they do not reach the benchmarks established before COVID. They will be threatened with firing. Unions will punch back and somehow be painted as the bad guys. Standardized tests will be pushed hard in classes because the only education an administrator knows is that which can be measured by a Regents exam.

I will have my annual Black Turkey Day and will not feel horrible guilt about offering my home and food to my friends.

I will go to the typical Thanksgiving buffet with my family, but it will feel peculiar.

There will still be calls for Trump to be prosecuted for his many crimes. By this point, it will have become a meme and lost all meaning.

The seasonal flu will begin. Right-wing pundits will put on whiny voices and ask why the libs don't want to close the country down again, how the flu is any different from a pandemic.

The power grid could run for weeks on the eye rolls they receive.

December:

You thought Halloween was intense? Let me tell you about Christmas. It will be one of the greatest shopping seasons in capitalist history. Everyone you know will be having parties. We will go so far beyond holly-jolliness that it will be genuinely embarrassing.

I might consider having a birthday party.

Masks will still be worn by people when they have a cold, as they are in other countries. The flu season will be milder because of this. Masks may just become something that we accept as not unusual when one can spread illness.

There will be another solar eclipse, and people will treat it as a portent of doom again, but it will be over Antarctica, so let the penguins deal with that apocalypse.

This is all a rosy picture. It assumes that none of my loved ones will be infected (or more seriously infected) before they can get the vaccine. Even with the mentions of domestic terrorisms, it assumes that there will be the establishment of something like order. A bit over a year, and then America, if not the world, can start to dust itself off.

I cannot predict when, for instance, I will be willing or permitted to go to the grocery store without a mask. Will businesses unfasten the Plexiglas from in front of their cashiers? When, if ever, will constant sanitation start to grow lax?

There will never again be the normal we knew before. It feels like 9/11 in that way. The world before 9/11 was irrevocably different than the world after. I sometimes tell my students how vastly different their lives are because of that one day, but none of them were born before it, and they cannot fathom what I am talking about. The world may begin a recovery from COVID in 2021, but we will always be a little stranger for it.

last watched: The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina
reading: Piercing the Darkness