Annual Report: 2023/2024.
April 2023-Staff assembled in the conference room to mark the occasion of the 28th year of Freethinkers Anonymous and to try and answer the question, What are we doing here? There are a lot of excellent blogs out there on a wide variety of topics that, thankfully, are still going while others, sadly, have dropped off. If anything makes Freethinkers Anonymous distinctive it’s longevity. What started as a random assortment of jokes emailed to a distribution list has grown into something resembling an internet landfill. It predated and survived the dot-com boom and, like those early internet companies, has never had a plan, purpose, or profit. On this note everyone cheered and went back to work.
May 2023-Staff assembled in the conference room to mark the occasion of the 28th year of Freethinkers Anonymous before realizing we just did that, but since no one had gotten any work done in the last month everyone cheered and went back to work.
June 2023-Everyone remembered that every year there’s a vague plan to sample as many local milkshakes as possible to try and determine the best one. And every year an argument breaks out over what defines “local”. Or whether it should be limited to ice cream places since a lot of restaurants serve milkshakes. There was also a side discussion of how some years the plan is to sample every gyro to determine the best one in the area which would be a lot easier, and another side discussion of how to define “best” and a further side discussion of what the definition of “ersatz” is but no one could remember how that came up in the first place.
July 2023-Work was put on hold for the 4th of July. Also July 1st, since it’s Canada Day, and also the 2nd through 3rd of July, and everyone just called in sick from the 5th through 13th. Then everyone took off for Bastille Day, and planned to get back by July 20th, but that’s National Moon Walk Day, and the 21st is National Creme Brulee Day and of course everyone had to celebrate that, as well as the 26th which is National Coffee Milkshake Day, and finally everyone made a solemn vow to get back to work at the start of the next month.
August 2023-Toată lumea și-a amintit brusc că acum vreo douăzeci de ani ne-am propus să învățăm limba Romanian. Nimeni nu-și putea aminti de ce și, în loc să se întoarcă prin arhive, toată lumea a decis să se întoarcă la muncă.
September 2023-Side effects include swelling, brusing, pain or tenderness, itching, dizziness, fainting, blisters, lumps, hives, bee hives, drowsiness, headache, insomnia, autodidacticism, nocturnal cake baking, dehydration, foaming of the ears, hair growth on furniture, and spontaneous decomposition. Seek medical help immediately if you become ersatz.
October 2023-The staff Halloween party was such a great success it lasted the entire month. This year the theme was “Aposematism” and resulted in several people being hospitalized.
November 2023-Staff assembled in the conference room to discuss whether “No Shave November” should be celebrated. Everyone agreed that it should but that staff would only grow sideburns. This led to a discussion of why they’re called “sideburns” since no one wants burns on their face, not even on the sides. Large sideburns are also called “muttonchops” but this was considered problematic for vegans and causing potential copyright warnings from the estate of Shari Lewis. Staff finally unanimously agreed that from now on sideburns should be called “earbrows”.
December 2023-The preponderance of holidays in the month of December meant no one got any work done.
January 2024-Recovering from the preponderance of holidays in the month of December meant no one got any work done.
February 2024-Staff assembled in the conference room to begin the disassembly of a jigsaw puzzle everyone had been working on for over a year. This proved surprisingly challenging as no one could decide whether we should start from the center or go out or from a corner and work inward, and if we did go in from a corner which one should be start with? Finally everyone decided the best solution was to just flip the table over.
March 2024-Staff assembled in the conference room as Freethinkers Anonymous prepared to start its 29th year. The team leader reminded everyone he’d read something once about how the average life of a blog is three years and the realization that we’d almost but not quite gone ten times that put everyone in a somber mood. All things must come to an end, even things without a plan or purpose. And yet it was decided unanimously that Freethinkers Anonymous would go on for another year. On that note everyone cheered and went back to work.
So I’m marking another elliptical spin around the sun, another year in the rearview mirror. This isn’t a milestone year so it’ll be a quiet affair: dinner, maybe a few drinks, a quick jaunt to Sri Lanka and back. When we’re young every birthday is a major event. Turning one is worthy of celebration, even if most of us don’t remember it, at two we’ve doubled our age, at three we’ve tripled it. At four, five, and six we really start to explore the world on our own, make friends, try on and discard personas. Ten marks the beginning of the double digits but the next big step isn’t until thirteen, considered in many cultures to be the age of adulthood, although its onset usually starts earlier. At sixteen, in the US, you can drive a car, at eighteen you can vote, and at twenty-one you can legally drink. Then the way stations only come once every ten years: thirty is when you say you’ve got the whole adulting thing figured out, even though you haven’t and never will, and at forty you’re “over the hill”. The 
Almost nine years ago, on September 23rd, 2014, to be precise–well, I can’t be really precise but I think it was about 12:13PM that it was finally over–I finished chemotherapy. This is the date I mark as the end of my fight with cancer. The doctors will say it wasn’t really over until the following December when I had a major surgery. There were no signs of cancer at that point but the doctors said, “To be safe we’re gonna nuke it from orbit.” And there were still no signs the following spring, but I had a small surgery anyway to be completely safe.
There was an unexpected passenger in the car. I know a thing or two about spiders and even I was surprised to see the large orb web spun over the passenger seat, not to mention the large Aranea cavatica in the middle of the web, and if you know anything about spiders you know that’s the same species that was the hero of a famous children’s book. Some people think the pig is the hero of the book but let’s be clear: there’s a reason it’s called Charlotte’s Web and not Wilbur’s Mudhole.
