I could tell you that the night is young and that we are still out on the town celebrating New Year's Eve as I take a quick bathroom break to post this photo. Or I could tell you that we WERE out earlier but that we've been back home for a while now, all cozy in sweats and watching movies. How could you tell which version of the story is true? After all, narrators have the ability to exaggerate, understate, obfuscate. Narrators are so very unreliable.

That's one of the points of the movie that I just watched titled Life Itself. That narrators are unreliable. But the larger point that the movie makes is that LIFE ITSELF is the ultimate unreliable narrator. Because just when we think it's going a certain way, it goes a different way.

I could tell you that my 2018 was all joy. And that that joy was a choice ... hashtag ChooseHappy. (That would be a crock of shit.)

Or I could tell you that there were moments of joy and also moments of deep sorrow. Moments of tears and moments of uncontrollable laughter. Moments of rage. Moments of realizing who are kind and who weaponize kindness. Moments of realizing who I respect and who I dread.

One thing I'm pretty sure about is that the sun will rise tomorrow. And under its raw, unfiltered light will be the resolutions and the daily grind staring us down. Will they make us? Will they break us? Who knows ... because we the narrators and life itself are so unreliable.

And as the movie so exquisitely points out about Bob Dylan's 1997 album titled Time Out of Mind as being an homage to melancholy, it is not so bizarre that in the middle of endless tracks of melancholy we encounter embedded a joyful track ... a cover of "Make You Feel My Love". No, not bizarre. Just beautifully and unreliably and poetically ironic.