Maybe This Year Will Be Better Than the Last

Things the Crows will forgive in 2025

How long do crows hold a grudge? Dr. Marzluff believes he has now answered the question: around 17 years. --If You Think You Can Hold a Grudge, Consider the Crow, New York Times, 10/28/24

While crows still regret the shiny things they invested with Bernie Madoff, we will grudgingly admit that we should have recognized at the time that promised returns were unrealistic and they bear some responsibility for their own financial impropriety.

Crows had heard the Grand Theft Auto IV video game referred to as a “murder simulator,” so several of us pooled together $59.99 to purchase the game on PlayStation.  (We also had to steal a PlayStation and figure out how to assemble ourselves in a way that we could poke many buttons on the controller to make the game work.)  Turns out, it had nothing to do with the social communion of crows but instead was concerned with cartoons dispatching each other at a distance. That, and sexual violence.  Total rip-off, but we’re over it.

The crows have come to accept that the movie Iron Man, which kicked off the Marvel Cinematic Universe and led to the oversaturation of superhero franchises at the expense of adult-oriented comedies, can at least be viewed as a credibility-reset for Robert Downey Jr., who was pretty good in Oppenheimer.

While we crows are not a monolith, many of us felt that candidate Obama had not sufficiently paid his political dues and that all his hopey-changey stuff stole the spotlight from Hiliary Clinton in a way that ultimately influenced the 2016 election.  But, I mean, a lot has gone on since then – how naïve we were then!!!

My fellow crows and I did not appreciate that Paul Krugman received 2008’s Nobel Prize in Economics. Crow Fourth-Branch from the Top on That Weird Tree on the Southwest Corner of Yosemite had done excellent work that year in demonstrating beneficial resource sharing with wolves, but its work was entirely overlooked by the Nobel Committee in favor of Krugman’s BS about determinants of trade or whatever.  But you know what? That isn’t Krugman’s fault.  He's alright.  Good manners, nice beard.  Sometimes we crows get to feeling like success is a zero sum game, y'know? Krugman's success does not mean we failed.  And anyway, we've been pointing our resentment in the wrong direction -- it's the Nobel Committee who have done us dirty, right?  Right?

Cameron Crowe has been separated from his wife, Nancy Wilson of the band Heart, for nearly 17 years now, and he can now admit that maybe he bears most of the blame there.  Maybe.

Russell Crowe is nearly ready to return to the Melbourne combined KFC-Taco Bell that he once claimed he’d never return to, following extreme gastric distress in February 2008.

And you? Consider that your transgression today, however small, won't be forgiven by the crows until this date in 2042.  By that time, we crows will have come to terms with so many other things -- the final season of Game of Thrones, the time they were passed over for a promotion, even Joe Biden's refusal to remove himself from consideration for re-election until far too late in 2024.  But when that day comes -- this very day some seventeen years hence -- we will settle on the power lines visible from your back window and our inscrutable dark monocular eyes will settle on you (one side or the other, as we do). Given time, and perhaps a soft wind in the right direction, we will caw out to you in a spirit of charity, reconciliation, and grace.  See you then.