Here we are one full week into 2021 and I don’t feel any different.

But we made it through the holidays and now what? Do we start making plans for the coming year? One thing I’ve learned over the last nine or so months, don’t think just because I’ve made plans that they’re going to work out. Sorta’ like those so-called new year’s resolutions.

Even so, plans are much easier to make than resolutions, because…well, you can always have a change of plans. You can consider all your options when things don’t turn out the way you … planned. All the while keeping in the back of your head the thing John Lennon said about it, “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

For example, when you’re planning on going for a nice pleasant walk and on your way out you stub your toe big-time before reaching the door. Oops. Change of plans. You end up cussin’ and fussin’ all night and favoring that foot for the next couple of days. Such is life, I guess, along with and expectations that things will turn out as planned.

Some people have the high-minded idea that they can plan out their entire year, month-by-month, which isn’t necessarily a bad idea and it’s a little more realistic than predicting where you’ll be five years from now. I mean, those five year plans the Soviet Union had in the 1930s never all quite worked out as expected.

But I digress.

When it comes to making plans I usually follow Mel Brooks’ advice in the movie The Twelve Chairs, “hope for the best, expect the worst.”

All that said, I’m thinking it’s going to be a great year. How can it not be so? I mean, this is Socorro, and Socorro is the town of comfort and sustenance.

That’s about as far as I’ll go in predicting the upcoming 12 months.

I was reading that Nikki, “the Psychic to the Stars,” was asked if 2021 was going to be better than 2020. She said, of course, it will because it’s the Age of Aquarius which is the humanitarian sign. So people are going to help each other.

Well, alrighty then.

On the other hand, for devotees of Nostradamus, it’s Katy bar the door. Those in the know say that Nostradamus foretells a zombie apocalypse, a famine of biblical proportions, solar storms, and a comet desolating Earth in 2021. But only if you interpret him correctly, of course.

I’m already prepared for the zombie apocalypse, thanks to streaming walking dead shows and seeing how the characters always screw things up for themselves by doing something insanely stupid. I’m not so sure about the other calamities, but I’ve got a brand new roll of heavy-duty Reynolds Wrap and instructions on how to use it to maximum protection.

Although the quatrains of Nostradamus are, by nature, vague at best, in more enlightened times there’ve been half-baked predictions from people that should’ve kept their mouths shut. For instance:

Henry Ford’s accountant once told him that cars were just a fad and not to invest in building them.
A brain specialist in 1904 asserted in a debate that the human brain could not function if an automobile was moving over eight miles an hour.
In 1950, the Associated Press ran a reporter’s story that by the year 2000 all women would be six feet tall.
J.P. Morgan’s father predicted that electricity was just a fad and to not invest in Edison.
Speaking of Edison, he predicted that one day that all furniture – from cradles to kitchen tables – would be made of steel, so cleaning the house would be a simple matter of hosing everything down.
In 1966, Time Magazine predicted that remote shopping would never be popular. Jeff Bezos, however, was only two years old at the time and didn’t read that article.

Back to this year, the Old Farmers Almanac, that font of time-honored wisdom and practicality, says we’ll soon we’ll be sitting on toilet seats that monitor blood pressure, work on counter tops that adjust their height automatically based on facial or voice recognition, and there will be a device that gets moisture from the air and turns it into drinkable water.

At this point I’m reminded of Criswell who proclaimed in the movie Plan Nine From Outer Space, “We are all interested in the future, for that is where we will spend the rest of our lives,” so I’m going to step out on a limb here and foretell my future.

I predict that five minutes into the future, I’ll be scrolling around Netflix’s home screen.

Heck, I’ll go you one better: 20 minutes in the future I’ll still be sitting here scrolling around Netflix’s home screen.

I’ve run our of Longmire episodes.

John Larson, El Defensor Chieftain