Lost Journal: New Year’s Resolutions for 1987

By Tim Mollen

Journal entry:  January 1, 1987 (age 17)

It’s my senior year in high school, so this year’s resolutions need to be especially new, annual, and resolute.  Here’s what I’ve come up with:

  • Start smoking.
  • Quit smoking the next day, thereby establishing that I am capable of keeping a New Year’s resolution.
  • Watch last night’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve 1987 on my VCR, then tape over the segments featuring the Jets and the Miami Sound Machine.
  • Continue to base my behavior on the irrefutable fact that I know way more than my parents do.
  • Get a varsity letter in running from the cops after parties down at the river.
  • Break it to Fievel that there is no one out there.
  • File a civil rights lawsuit against people who wear Member’s Only jackets.
  • Lure Geraldo Rivera back into Al Capone’s vault with vague promises of “some real dirt.”
  • Get into a college without a phys ed requirement.
  • For my high school graduation ceremony, arrange for the speaker to be a personal assistant to Australian funnyman Paul “Crocodile Dundee” Hogan.
  • Rework the title of my college application essay, “Mascot Major:  Let Me Be the Anthropomorphic, Frisbee-flinging Face of your University.”
  • Convince an elderly senator from Texas to run for president and choose beloved television icon Robert Guillaume as his running mate, creating an unstoppable Bentsen-Benson ticket.
  • Escalate my long-running feud with media tycoon Ted Turner by co-opting what I believe will be his next successful move – blackandwhitizing films shot in color.
  • Join the cast of Saturday Night Live and angrily refuse to hug anyone during the closing credits.
  • Live more Bon Jovily.
  • Cross that bridge well before I come to it.
  • Visit the refurbished Statue of Liberty and tell her that some of my best friends are the wretched refuse of the teeming shore, and she can’t have them.
  • Petition the Federal Reserve to revert to the gold standard with the important caveat that it be based on copies of the 12-inch dance mix of “Gold,” by Spandau Ballet.
  • Levitate.
  • Marry Miss Walsh, my former English teacher and current yearbook moderator.  (I read Ethan Frome for this woman.)
  • Attend the second birthday party of Stefani Germanotta and refer to her as “Baby Googoo.”
  • Mime louder.
  • Get backstage on the second season of The Oprah Winfrey Show and tip her off to Phil Donohue’s plans to start a televised book club, yell the name of any celebrity he is introducing, and put himself on the cover of every issue of his own magazine, Phil.
  •  Fail with greater dignity.
Tim Mollen
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