I got to do some cool shit this year. I visited two countries I’d long longed to, England and France; went to Texas; saw the Gators win their third football championship; saw them beat Louisiana State in Death Valley; went to a Premier League match; was interviewed on MSNBC; had a few stories featured on Bizarre Florida; had the pleasure of visiting Disneyland Paris; and so on.

But I don’t think I will remember 2009 fondly. After all, it was the year that left us with these enduring images: a seemingly occupied balloon floating over the Colorado desert; the mug shot of the governor of South Carolina, who was thought to be missing in the Appalachian Mountains but was really off bopping some South American broad unbeknownst to his staff (not to mention his family); Tiger Woods’ smashed-up SUV; a Texas military base in chaos; thousands mourning Michael Jackson’s hardly untimely death; protesters around my age dying on the streets of Tehran.

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Note: This isn’t exactly timely, but I’m over the pain enough now to post this. Yeah, that’s right. Fuck off.

I was in a friend’s van on the way back from a spring near DeLand years ago when I first heard The Smiths. After I got home that night I started downloading the band’s more popular numbers. Some time later a friend made me a mix CD of Smiths and Morrissey songs, and we wore it the hell out driving to and fro wherever we went in those days, testing the limits of the shitty factory speakers in my 1993 Chevrolet Cavalier. I’ve believed ever since.

I wouldn’t get to see the man in the flesh until 2007, when I went to two shows in three days. If there was a ranking of the best moments of my life, that second concert would be included in the top five, possibly top three. That night, the band debuted “I’m Throwing My Arms Around Paris” and I got handshakes during two of my favorite Smiths songs, “The Boy With the Thorn in His Side” and “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” a song that was rarely played on that tour.

But, as if to punish me for having too grand an experience, Moz has let me down time after time after time since.

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My favorite scene in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” has to be when the king comes upon peasants toiling in a field. Of course, British hilarity ensues:

King Arthur: I am your king.
Woman: Well I didn’t vote for you.
King: You don’t vote for kings.
Woman: Well how’d you become king then?
King: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king.
Dennis: Listen, strange women lyin’ in ponds distributin’ swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony…

And it goes on in that way.

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On the plane to England we watched “European Vacation.” Now in France, it’s easy to wonder whether the French-speaking waiters, shop clerks and hotel receptionists are saying the same things to us they said to the Griswold clan. That said, we haven’t experienced a lot of the oft-discussed French rudeness. At least that we’re aware of.

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