A Kind of Resolve in the Absence of Certainty

I keep thinking about what actually happened this year—not what we planned, or hoped, or spreadsheeted into existence. What really stuck. What moved. What broke.

Turns out, not much went the way we thought.

This is not a steamroller of a manifesto driving toward massive crescendos of moral panic and outrage (they’re very popular), but a bit of a walkthrough of some of my thinning about the year ahead.

& I know that I am not likely to read any kind of New Year’s Resolution after January 1^st. So I assume no one else will want to either.

There are also some fun songs at the bottom, so you could just scroll down to that.

K

TLDR:
Things didn’t go how I thought they would in 2025, except some did. We moved houses suddenly (very disrupting), then a trip to Florida before the inauguration. We tried to keep it quiet, but that didn’t work out.

I’m still stumbling through French, still circling around my routines, still pulled toward weird & thoughtful connections.

France confuses me. America confuses me more. This project’s sprawling, sure—but it’s how I make sense of things. I want company in the questions.So…

What do you want more of this year? What kept you grounded, or restless, or weirdly entertained?
What pulled you sideways, maybe in a good way?

After the move

At some point in the last few days, I asked my wife: what’s something we planned at the start of the year that actually happened?

The answer was, not much.

We’d heard on December 30th that the owner of our old apartment wanted it back. One of those rare legal exceptions in France—when a landlord can end a three-year lease early to move a family member in. Supposedly it was for their mother.

At first I didn’t buy it.

Still, they offered us a decent payout to leave early, and we didn’t love the place anyway. But the whole mess really shaped the first half of the year—set things wobbling early.

Florida

Then there was the early 2025 trip to Florida. It was great to see my brother and travel around.

Florida, for whatever folks might say about it, may also be one of the weirdest states in the US, independent of politics—there are entire guides to odd towns and strange hidden attractions that feel almost like a shadow version of the country itself.

[Craig Pittman’s book, Oh Florida! is a good weird history of the state.]

Anyway - this, too, is America.

But the politics are weird, for sure.

I made sure to go before Inauguration day. Not because I thought I’d be detained or anything cinematic, but because I expected systems to start breaking and things to become just a bit harder.

Quietly, then less quietly.

I was more right than I’d like to be.

Richer & Poorer

There’s something about watching your country fall apart from a distance.

It’s one facet of the K-shaped economy thing happening now—where the rich get absurdly richer, while most people slide sideways or down. I won’t get all chart-happy, but it’s that double path: asset owners up, everyone else drowning in rising costs. Krugman’s been writing about it in his way (link), but I’ve mostly seen it through friends trying to hold on to gigs, housing, health care.

The gap widens and hardens.

It’s the shape of things now.

Language & Repetition

Even with our planning, it’s hard to know what the year ahead will hold.

I have ideas for 2026, but nothing firm. What’s worked for me—when things get shaky—is sticking to routines. Daily ones. Especially with language, with writing, exercise, and so on. If I wobble too much, it all falls apart on me.

And here’s the thing: I used to teach English, ESL. Now I’m the one fumbling through prepositions in front of a French pharmacist.

It’s humbling.

I keep chipping away at it—reading, listening, speaking badly. And sometimes just reassessing what’s not working. That’s the trick, I think. You need repetition, yes. But you also need friction. You have to notice what keeps slipping through. That’s where the learning is.

Interviews & Other Weirdos in Orbit

This project—these posts—they’ve a part of that routine now. But I do want to do more with them.

Interviews again, for one. I miss the messy, surprising texture of real conversations and it was a privilege to capture some of them.

There are still so many strange and sharp people I want to talk to.

Not because I think this will take off—I don’t expect virality. But if you like it, pass it on. It helps. Not just with numbers. It’s good to hear what people think about something I’ve spent hours digging into, even if it’s just a giant omelette in the middle of nowhere.

What I want is a weird little community orbiting weird stuff. Not to be a lone weirdo shouting into the void. Or if I am, maybe it’s a village.

I want to find strange things, talk about them, and make some kind of sense of the world. Together.

That’s why I loved the interviews—getting to see how people made choices, how they talked themselves into and out of things. You can google facts, sure. But hearing someone walk through their gut logic and quiet contradictions? That’s different.

I don’t know why I care so much about obscure details and odd stories, but I do. France is strange. Every place is, once you start paying attention.

Drafts & Disco

I’ve been meaning to finish some half-written pieces (there are so many!)—on how every object casts a shadow, on Holmberg’s mistake, on French heavy metal.

One about France’s odd charm is sometimes also its lack of sophistication. This is a normal place, normal folks live here.

One about modern music that doesn’t suck, and one about the kind of people you meet two hours outside any major city who feel closer to each other than to their capitals.

Bagel Options in Patagonia

I remember being in Patagonia once, in this tiny campsite near Torres del Paine. Ran into two guys from New York arguing about bagels.

They lived in the same neighborhood back home, or close enough, relatively.

We were literally at the bottom of the world, and they were comparing pizza crusts. It was oddly comforting. You can’t spend every moment in awe.

Sometimes, it’s good to talk about unimportant bullshit.

January & September

I always say I don’t do New Year’s resolutions, but I still get the itch. To reassess. Take stock. That’s probably a leftover teacher habit. So is the semi‑obsessive planning, even when I know the plan itself is unlikely to survive contact with reality.

For a long time, September felt like one new year and January like another. France understands this instinct perfectly. La rentrée is the real reset—work, school, routines snapping back into place. January is mostly noise. Parties, promises, hangovers. September is where things actually begin.

Last year, I watched this project bend in a lot of directions. Readership spiked, dropped, maybe came back. It’s hard to tell anymore, honestly. I don’t even know how much people are reading, or how. But I do know this: I still want to chase the weird stuff. Not weird for novelty’s sake, but the kind that makes you stop and ask why anyone bothered to make this at all—and what kind of moment in history made it possible.

That question keeps pulling me forward.

I once read everything Ayn Rand wrote, back when everyone was reading her. Not proud of it. But I did.

She’s smug, reductive, and somehow both self-important and emotionally stunted—like she built a whole worldview to justify being a dick.

But people can look at the same story and see different things. I think they always do.

Times Make People

There’s a scene in Atlas Shrugged—way too long, like the rest of the book—where Dagny Taggart is riding a train, thinking about how many people owe their jobs to one great idea. Classic Rand. It fits the whole lone-genius, superman fantasy she loved.

But what stuck with me wasn’t the brilliance. It was the crowd. The quiet fact that anything worth building takes dozens, hundreds, thousands of people moving in sync.

There are no “self-made men.” Just stories we keep telling to justify how things turned out.

All of our stories are made up, really. The ones we love. The ones we want to bury.

The longer I watch the world, the more I believe it’s the times that make people—not the other way around. Certain conditions allow certain choices. Certain kinds of people only show up when the world leaves space for them.

And history?
History is mostly about the edit.

Strange, Philosophical

That’s probably what I’m doing here—trying to catch the unedited parts. Question what we carry without realizing. What we call “truth” just because no one told us to look closer.

I didn’t mean for this to veer into philosophy, but here we are. There’s a thread. If we want to understand the past, we have to understand ourselves. And if we want to stay even half-sane, we have to stop doom-scrolling and carve out strange, curious little corners of meaning.

France is weird enough to keep me interested. But America—especially Florida—produces a kind of cultural chaos that France just doesn’t have the range for.

Still, there’s something charming about the limitations here. The awkwardness. The earnest efforts.

It’s one of the reasons we stay.

musical accompaniment

a sampling of Philippe Katerine

I had Mon mec? by Philippe Katerine on repeat while drafting this. He’s a purposefully odd guy—absurdist, theatrical, ridiculous. Highly recommended.

Mon Mec Alka Balbir & Philippe Katerine (2017)

Mon mec wasn’t a chart topper like Louxor j’adore, but it’s part of his broad output dating from the 1990s onward, with his own unique style. His weirdness in French settings is almost its own subgenre. I love this guy.

Louxor j’adore (2005)

The video was shot in Beaurepaire, a small village in Vendée (I ran some errands there once), with locals dancing and Katerine loose in the crowd of normal villagers. No hired extras, except maybe his backup dancers. This man is more comfortable in eraser-pink spandex than I think I ever could be.

Philippe Katerine is a French singer‑songwriter, actor, director, and all‑around creative weirdo, born Philippe Blanchard in 1968 in Thouars, Vendée. A constant presence since the early 1990s. Hard to pin down: fantastic, electronic, comic, clever.

Recommend others, if you’ve got any.

And please tell me something weird. Something that stayed with you last year. Something small. Clean-ish. Strange or curious

thanks for reading.

K