Closing Thoughts on 2022

Friends, this has been kind of a strange year. 

Hannah has been away at college for her sophomore year, and Emma has become a senior in high school. Sally’s been back at work full-time. This has left me to do a comparatively out-sized portion of the work managing the household. I feel like I spent most of the year running in place, just trying to sort of keep up. But I told myself when Hannah left that I would try to embrace the challenges of Dad Life while I still had them full-time, and I’ve tried to stick with that, even when the challenges themselves have come fast and furious.

Sally and I celebrated our anniversary at Mount Snow last week.

I went back this morning to review my yearly goals from last New Year’s Day. I’ve been doing that in this space since at least 2014, and -- weirdly -- I discovered that I’d never actually shared my goals for the New Year back at the end of 2021. 

In one sense, that’s fine. My goals aren’t really any of your business. But none of those goals were particularly personal, either, and the decision to not share them perhaps speaks to the overall emphasis I put on them at the time. Which is to say that this has been a full and largely successful year, but I wouldn’t say that my success had much to do with the way I framed the year’s goals back on New Years.

But yeah, there are a couple of things of which I am quite proud here at the end of the year. First and foremost, I feel like we had a really good year over at As For Football, which is a small side-hustle-type company that I run more-or-less however I see fit. We grew our audience this year and delivered a lot of real value to our sponsors despite the fact that the team we cover, the Army Black Knights, got off to what can only be described as a very rough start and, in fact, didn’t beat an FBS team with a winning record until mid-November. 

Now, it helped a lot when the team beat Navy, but even before that, I feel like we’d done an excellent job sort of managing the expectations of our fanbase and keeping people interested in what we ourselves were doing, irrespective of the team itself. It’s a tricky thing trying to suss out the difference between a team’s performance and the way we as writers cover the fan experience for that team’s followers, but I’m really proud of the work we did and the way we did it.

We kept it mostly positive, and that counts for a lot.

It must be said, too, that part of what makes AFF work is the crew of guys who do the work. But I’ll give myself some credit there, too. I brought half those guys on before the season last year, and if it took a little time to find everyone’s strengths and fully shake the crew out, we’re now firing on all cylinders. We now have a lot of good stuff planned, and I’m personally as excited as I’ve been about it since I started running AFF several years ago.

Lastly on the AFF front, I learned this year that any cool ideas we have for the season absolutely MUST be executed long before the season itself starts. Once we’re into games, the grind of just keeping up with weekly content is all-consuming. For example, we talked about doing some hats and/or t-shirts this season, and in fact, I am right now wearing a prototype of the would-be longsleeve t-shirt we wanted to put out. But we didn’t get that pushed through back in, like, May or June, and once we got into mid-July, forget about it. By then, it was WAY too late.

I’m also proud of the way my personal fitness journey has progressed here since the back half of 2022. A lot of that has been documented right here in this space, but briefly, I all but quit drinking back in September, lost almost 10 pounds because of it, and have been on one of the best, most consistent workout runs of my adult life ever since. To be fair, I never fully quit, and I’ve let myself drink a little more over the holidays, but I still both look and feel better than I have in ten years at least, and that has been a source of strictly vain pride.

I’m almost 50, and I actually like the way I look. Go figure.

But yeah. I captured none of this in my goals for 2022.

New Year’s Goals for 2022

1. Do more yoga. This was arguably the only goal that I actually achieved, and even then, it’s probably more partial credit than legit success. I have been in the gym more, and I tend to use a yoga flow as part of my warm-up before I hit the weight room. 

I’ve improved my flexibility and athletic performance, and that’s good. But I wouldn’t say that I’m doing more actual work on the yoga mat for the sake of improving my yoga. That’s not at all what this has been.

2. Write something new. This totally did not happen. It’s a decent goal, but folks just aren’t interested enough in my fiction, or even in my memoir, to make writing more of that stuff feel worthwhile, especially when my writing time is already scarce and precious. Personally, I think that the best thing I wrote this year was a two-part blog post about the experience of all-but-quitting drinking and subsequently refinding myself as an athlete. 

I’d love to take that style and develop something like a liberal version of a Men’s Rights website/podcast, asking the question, “What does it mean to be a man?” Because most of the people trying to answer that question these days are complete assholes. I want to do an anti-Joe Rogan, anti-Andrew Tate type take. There’s definitely space in the public forum for it.

But again, when the Hell would I work on this thing?

Alas, this is just another in a long list of unfinished projects in my digital notebook.

3. Read. Good grief. I can’t even get through Brandon Sanderson’s new book, much less something of substance. Surely at least some of that is Sanderson’s fault, but yo… I have not been reading.

4. Ski 12 times this season. I made it up 10 times last year, and while we’re still running full-time Dad Life, I think that’s about as good as it gets. We’ll see once Emma leaves for college, but I learned last year not to wish the time away.

5. Cook more & better. I’ve cooked much more just out of sheer necessity as Sally has gone back to work. That’s fine. I wouldn’t say I’ve cooked better, but I’ve definitely cooked more.

My Personal Fandom in the Year 2023

Army Football should be set up for a really good year. They’ve got a lot of guys returning on offense, including nearly the entire offensive line, and they’ve got a good young core that they developed this year on defense. Plus, they’re bringing in an exciting new Offensive Coordinator to help develop the quarterback that they’ve already christened “The Quarterback of the Future.” 

College football season is just now ending, but I’m already super-excited for next year. What a world! But that is a major improvement from previous seasons.

AEW is also set up for a resurgence in 2023. So much so that I almost did a full As For Dynamite post just to talk pro-wrestling. The company definitely lost momentum in 2022, partly because they spread their focus in so many different directions that they often seemed to lose focus on the core product, and partly because the fallout from the Brawl Out between CM Punk and the Elite further eroded the focus to the point where the whole show just felt a little random and, yes, even boring through the back half of the year.

Folks just weren’t watching. Hell, even I quit watching.

But the product has been back on point over the past few weeks, and if the ratings haven’t yet caught back up, they will eventually. AEW just needs to keep the focus on their stars, quit worrying so damned much about Ring of Honor (ROH), and keep the cross-promotional stuff with NJPW and AAA/CMLL down to an occasional one-off. It’s not a coincidence that the company lost focus around the build to the Forbidden Door PPV with New Japan Pro Wrestling (NJPW), nor is it coincidence that they’ve refound their focus now that the ROH stuff has largely been banished off of AEW TV.

I’m interested to see what Tony Khan does with ROH, and in fact, I might even give the old Honor Club a try if the product is getting decent reviews once it rolls out. However, Khan’s decision to buy ROH wholesale looks like it might not pay off after all. Warner-Discovery doesn’t seem too keen to put that content library on HBO Max the way we all thought they probably would be.

Stupid decision by Warner-Discovery, but that’s a whole separate rant.

Last thought: No one wants to go to the movies anymore. This started during the pandemic, but I think we’ve all realized that the at-home experience is better, if slightly less immersive, than the in-theater experience ever can be. Sorry, but this is the world in which we actually live. As they say, play the game that you’re in with the rules that you have, not the game that you want with the rules you wish you had. House of the Dragon is the future, not Black Adam.

Take the new Avatar movie. It looks amazing and has stellar reviews. I would love to see it. But friends, who the Hell has four hours to spend sitting in a freaking movie theater at Christmas in the year 2022?

That is just not going to occur. 

I mean, I am sure that I would enjoy the new Avatar, but with four hours I can drive all the way to Vermont and get a couple of runs at Mount Snow. At the end of the day, deciding how to spend my time is not as difficult as some folks might think.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, everyone! 

Casa Cabeza wishes you and yours all the best.