Written and Illustrated by Antsy McClain
So it goes
My fickle relationship with New Year’s resolutions, gym memberships and book clubs
I approach New Year’s resolutions in the same way I approach a feral cat or a plate of asparagus: with some curiosity but not a lot of commitment. The cat doubtless feels the same way. The asparagus — it’s anybody’s guess.
Regardless of how you feel about it, it’s that time of year again when the morning talk shows yammer on and on about the big and little promises we make to ourselves at the beginning of each year. We resolve to stop bad habits and start better ones. Our bucket lists come calling again, and we determine to cross off a few more items to improve our quality of life.
But before I begin, can we all agree that time is made up? Clocks and calendars were invented thousands of years ago by micromanagers who couldn’t stand the thought of an unmeasured world. That said, I did just bake cornbread, and it was nice to have a kitchen timer.
But I digress. The last few months turned us into lazy, self-indulgent sloths who grazed on comfort food and binged classic movies until hypertension, high blood sugar and weight gain propelled us, once again, to the solace of self-help books.
Until about March 1, anyway, when jobs, kids, mortgages and bills say, “Yoo-hoo! We’re still here! Did you forget about us?” And we realize that going to the gym isn’t as ‘ exciting as it was five weeks ago; it’s actually hard! And we miss bread. And cookies. Just one cookie. One cookie never killed anybody. We can go back to the gym tomorrow.
While I am a bad “joiner” by nature, I’m not immune to the concept of the new year being a desirable mile marker and using it as a launching pad for annual goals. Here are some that I’ve tried.
Read more. Join a book club.
My one and only book club experience lasted three meetings. It ended after a fellow book clubber named Shirley (not her real name; her real name was Carol), laughed uproariously at my observations surrounding “The Brothers Karamazov.” I expressed surprise that the book was not actually about a family of circus trapeze artists, as the title suggested to me. Shirley (Carol) was quite rude. That day, I vowed never again to share my thoughts about literature with a circle of people sitting in a stranger’s living room.
These days, when I read, I let someone else do it into my ears from an audiobook while I fall asleep … like a normal person.1
Get organized.
My garage is where all my physical clutter goes to die.2 I just throw it out there and shut the door, pretending I’m in a Disney movie where magic happens and fairy godmothers do all the heavy lifting. My car sits outside in the rain while my garage is a graveyard for past wardrobe regrets, stuff I will need to use again but will never be able to find and weird tools I needed one time to stretch carpet or connect a dryer vent.
A mountain of cardboard from my late-night Amazon purchases is piled in my garage, preventing me from properly closing the door. It’s a major trip hazard, and one day this will be the subject of an essay wherein I share details of a hip replacement surgery I needed after falling over the cardboard boxes like a bad late-night infomercial.
For two years now, I’ve had a goal to finish painting the rec room. I’ve walked through the two-toned room (“Tuscan Lace” and a color I call “Greige”) for so long that I have actually grown fond of it. Even the roller marks that stop a foot and half from the crown molding have a certain charm I call “rustic warehouse.” I’m predicting a trend.
I have three closets that haven’t been opened in years. I’m afraid to do so. I can’t even remember what’s in there, but I know what will happen if I pry the doors open: I will be sucked into a black hole of time and space from which I might never return. The process usually goes like this: I pull all the contents from the closet and spread them out on the floor in a circle around me. For the next six hours I spiral so deep down Memory Lane that I begin humming Green Day’s “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” and my inner voice sounds strangely like Katharine Hepburn from “On Golden Pond.”
Soon I am lost in every little nostalgic wave the past can conjure: a refrigerator magnet from Camp Falling Rock Boy Scout Camp, a ninth-grade math paper upon which Dee Dee Christopher drew a big heart with a face on it and gave it googly eyes, a chewed tennis ball from a favorite schnauzer who loved playing catch more than anything else in the world.
Eventually, I notice it getting dark outside (my only notion that time has not actually been standing still, as I had supposed), and the shoebox, along with all the other boxes, goes back in the closet, stacked a bit more neatly than before but otherwise unchanged.
All that exists in the throwaway pile are a pair of ripped work jeans, a couple of odd dress shoes and a mustard yellow afghan made by a favorite aunt. Mom would pull it out of storage and throw it over the back of the sofa whenever she’d visit.
I stand up stiffly and take a long look at the throwaway pile, wondering what kind of sociopath would throw away that afghan. And those work jeans — they’re fine. I’ll use them when I paint the rec room. And those shoes are perfectly good shoes. They have matches somewhere in this house. I’ll find them.
The throwaway pile, in its entirety, goes back into the closet.
Be more outgoing. Make new friends.
I seem to make this resolution every year, but I never make it past February — or two dinner parties, whichever comes first. I’m at the age now where the most casual of get-togethers seems to carry with it the energy of an allnight rave if it were held at Costco on Black Friday but also has a DJ, industrial strobe lights and a conga line with the Mississippi Mass Choir. I might have only interacted with six people, but I return home exhausted from the small talk.3 I sink into my bed under five layers of blankets and whimper like a cold, wet puppy.
Exercise more. Join a gym.
It’s the second week of January, and my local gym is as crowded as a Buc-ee’s after Sunday church. A few months ago, out of curiosity, I stuck my head in (it’s right next door to my cigar bar), and the gym was like a ghost town. Trainers were swiping their thumbs across their cellphones, chomping gum and lounging on the exercise equipment like it was patio furniture. But now, in the wake of New Year’s resolutions, business is good.
We’ve all spent weeks overeating, watching football and napping on the couch, and I’m seeing more handlebars than a bicycle shop. But I think I’ll wait to renew my exercise goals till March, when 85% of The Resolutionists have gone back home to their sofas to drink beer and binge the new season of Ted Lasso. By March 15, I’ll bet you can practically hear a pin drop.
Artwork © 2025 by Antsy McClain. All Rights Reserved. unhitched.com
Like Nashville’s Lower Broadway on a Saturday in June, you can spot the tourists from the locals. The gym tourists are decked out meticulously in bright yellow and blue moisturewicking fabrics. They have brand new, bright white running shoes. Some gym bags still display sale tags, reminding me of Minnie Pearl’s hat if it had a Nike swoosh and she was trying to figure out the treadmill. I once noticed a man whose orange UT cap had a piece of scotch tape clinging to a fragment of Christmas wrapping paper.
The well-chiseled gym local who’s been coming here for years is adorned in a pair of scissored-off sweatpants and a Reba McEntire T-shirt from her ‘94 Read My Mind tour. On his feet are a pair of pale blue Crocs over once-white, now-gray socks — one just covering his ankle, the other still clinging valiantly at boot height.
January gym attendees are wide-eyed and determined, their insulated stainless steel water bottles are without dents or scratches, proudly exhibiting stickers that say, “I don’t sweat. I sparkle.” and “Workout mode!” while the Croc-wearing regular’s water bottle looks like it’s survived a dozen grenade launches.
But you know what? Who cares? Get on with your bad self. Work out in those shiny new clothes until you become that gym regular with the scissored-off sweatpants and Reba shirt. I know you can do it. I’m proud of you. I’ll see you in March.
So it goes.
And so it goes, to quote the author Kurt Vonnegut, who knew a thing or two about indulgences and vice — but also time travel — and who lived through changes I can only imagine.
I’ve been reading — er, listening to, rather — an audiobook of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five.” Vonnegut uses the phrase, “So it goes,” so often that it becomes a mantra, of sorts.
Many of his readers express annoyance at his frequent use of the phrase. But as a survivor of World War II’s Battle of the Bulge — where nearly 20,000 American troops were killed — and as a subsequent prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany (which was bombed by Allied forces while he was imprisoned there), Vonnegut believed that we ultimately lack free will in life and death, that we are virtually in control of nothing. By repeating, “So it goes,” to himself in his life and in his writing, he said it helped him “make sense of the senseless.” As one who admires Vonnegut not just for his writing but for his service, I appreciate the thoughtful way he worked through life’s difficulties with those three small words.
And when things do make sense — like when I look into the eyes of someone I love and see infinity or when I take a walk just before sunrise and feel the stillness of the world before birds have awakened, before the hum of cars fan off in every direction — I sometimes take a deep breath and thankfully say, “So it goes.” And I can find sense in the senseless, but I can also find the magic and mystery in life. And I have a sweet little mantra to lead the way.
No matter the darkness we live through, no matter the questions we all have, if we can realize that the clock keeps ticking and the Earth continues to dance around the sun and that we are here to see it all happen, that alone can be a beautiful start to bigger understanding — or it can just be enough. It’s a big, mysterious world, and that alone — knowing we’re alive — could be all I need to know right now.
Another year. Another sunrise. Another tick of the clock.
Another day at the gym.
So it goes.
Listen to Antsy’s “Another Happy Song,” here:
Antsy McClain is a Nashville-adjacent singersongwriter, author and graphic artist who hates small talk. Go to unhitched.com for his books, music and events. Use this QR code to download “Another Happy Song” FREE to readers of The Tennessee Magazine. It was inspired by the writing of Kurt Vonnegut.
Footnotes for your hungry, malnourished soul
1 The audiobook is one of the 21st century’s greatest inventions. We no longer have to rake our eyes over letters and symbols to understand what someone is trying to say, like you’re doing here. Imagine if the audiobook had come before the printed word, and cavemen were somehow equipped with devices that told them stories anytime they wanted. The need for written language would be as obsolete as the raisin peeler. Never heard of a raisin peeler? Right. See what I mean?
2 My emotional clutter, unfortunately, remains crammed in my brain, never to be thrown away or forgotten. I pull it out indiscriminately on sleepless nights like the flat, wooden drawers of a 17th century typesetter. It’s all in there, every little lowercase letter, every ampersand and exclamation point. None of it, however, can be used to solve a problem or come to any helpful conclusion. It falls out in a jumble, each block evoking feelings of unrequited love, missed opportunities and stupid things I said to a girl in seventh grade. And like the shoeboxes in my cluttered closet, it all gets put back, unchanged. It’s just the past on rewind, and I haven’t learned a thing in its uncovering.
3 Small talk is my kryptonite. It weakens me, removes all the vitality from deep within the marrow of my bones. There is a photo somewhere of me at a party. My friend thought it was hilarious: me, trapped against the wall between two small-talkers. I’m clutching a double bourbon with both hands and looking like I’m about to have a panic attack. In that photo, I bear a strong resemblance to Patty Hearst in the early days of her kidnapping. I cannot overstate this. Ten minutes of small talk, and I start to feel like I’ve been abducted. I nod and smile at my captors, but I can feel the encroaching effects of Stockholm syndrome. As the conversation turns from weather to milk prices, I imagine being led to a heavily bolted door, down some rickety stairs to a bare, striped mattress in the basement. They snap a chained harness around my neck, and I will sit in darkness until the sun pokes through the cardboard on the tiny windows. But this is preferable to an evening of small talk. Given a preference, I will choose the basement without a fight.
